AI lowers the floor, but humans still raise the ceiling

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 18:51

   In a world of AI, agentic AI, I have this capacity to prompt as a human and say, I want to make something that looks like, feels like, and does X. And this magical technology takes off and does it. and I end up with a product. Sometimes the product is great. Sometimes the product sucks. But it's improving the ability for these tools to do that. Historically, I would have needed a product manager, a designer, a bunch of engineers to do the actual building of the product, whether it's a software product or a hardware product.

2. 19:36

   Increasingly, though, it seems like AI is doing more and more of those tools. can you just give me your view on the future of human creativity in this era this future era that we're waltzing into the singularity we're falling into where does human creativity play a role and where do the gaps still need to be filled for taking human creativity to the realization moment it's the case i think that uh we're lowering the floor with ai making it so that all of the production whether it's code or it's uh motion video design whatever you name it uh if it's digital you're lowering the floor to make it happen um everyone can be part of that and it's more democratized ironically and i i used to believe uh even a few years ago i said it our annual user conference config i said the ceiling will be raised by ai you'll be able

3. 20:42

   to do greater things before that was wrong uh the ceiling has stayed the same ai is not raising the ceiling humans are raising the ceiling though uh the creatives the designers out there when they choose to focus invest their time and to be bold and try to do something no one else has ever done before that's when we see the ceiling raised and at that point uh it's a question of do you care about being in the center distribution do you care about like a mean or average result uh is that sufficient for your task or do you need something that shows that you care that you took the time to actually like go make this thing?

4. 21:25

   Do you need to go and be beyond what is the minimum bar? And in the world of software design and product, I mean, we're seeing exponentially more software than ever before. It's exactly what you'd predict. The exponential continues. You look at App Store numbers. The App Store numbers are exactly that same exponential. and we're seeing that the usage and utilization of apps flat so people are using just the same amount of apps but the amount of apps that you can get it's like bigger than ever and growing and i think it just speaks to okay there's a need to differentiate yourself if you're building any kind of software well how do you do that it's not code because anyone can create code now that's not the hard part anymore so my view is design is the new code it's the layer above you have to make it

5. 22:23

   so that your design is differentiated and you have to have a point of view and a good brand and marketing and the point of view i think is the part that is probably missed the most that's the human part it's not just the human part it's also the part that humans are uncomfortable having uh i think that folks are scared to say something that's not consensus it's so true i mean this is what the greatest artists the greatest business leaders the greatest politicians have always demonstrated is the willingness to to be brave to say and do the things that no one else would say or do and that's what changes the world and i would also add comedians to the mix too comedians comedians are underappreciated i had tony hinchcliffe at our thing last year because he's like one of the few guys that is willing to say and do things nowadays in the cancel culture era

6. 23:09

   but comedians often like speak truth in a way that people otherwise couldn't hear willing to say things and uh it's not about political correctness it's about do you have a message that can rise above the noise and do so in a sustained way because look at social media right now like every unique point of view everything interesting it gets diffused into like the ether of social media instantly and so unless you've got uh something that allows you to kind of keep generating content and a message that is really evergreen because it's so outside of the Overton window, you're not going to be able to actually break through and have any attention. And the attention economy is ruthless. Is this also what human creativity is? If you're not doing something that's never Never been done before. You're not creating something. You're mimicking something. You're copying something. You're Xeroxing something. But to do something new is to create. And newness requires doing things that have never been done before.

7. 24:14

   Yeah, by definition. And therefore, you are operating outside of this distribution of training. It's not even about operating outside the mean of the distribution, which is where you start if you're just prompting without any kind of advanced scaffolding around it. But you're actually doing something that is breaking through, and it's unique. And I do think that will be rewarded by the market. Everyone's going to see it.

8. 24:41

   I think it's even rewarded by the attention market of organizations. i'm already hearing from so many like oh i got another deck made by ai today totally and i don't even know if the person who made it i like don't know if they read it do they even know what's in their deck and at figma we actually made it so that uh it was just a simple thing but we said hey if you are uh using ai in your writing of any kind just put at the top written with ai very simple very easy to follow uh and you know people made jokes about internally but people do it and it makes it so that we can all trust that when we see something we know that it's been cared for enough that it's like worth your time to process and i uh i think that we're going to see some bifurcation here around trust uh and one way to get trust is to do something with your

9. 25:37

   hands the other point that's important is if you have a vision or if you have a point of view in your head of how something should be designed or look aesthetically or from an experiential standpoint you're i think it's great to start with building with ai it gives you something to get past like the blank page blank canvas problem you can then react to it and say here are all the things i don't like i'm gonna i'm gonna go fix these things i'm gonna change them up because it's really helpful to have a back and forth.

10. 26:09

    But if you don't, if you have your own vision and you're trusting AI to implement it, you're doing it through the lens of AI. And like AI has kind of like its own distribution. The model fit by it, yeah. Yeah, and so you're not going to get exactly what you want. Now, if you're able to do both, and that's what we're trying to enable in Figma, make code of material on the canvas, make it so that you can go start by building.

11. 26:33

    you can build to think if you like uh but also when you want to think and work with your hands you can do that too right and go back and forth rapidly right i remember the early days of photoshop just having been a user avid user from the early days people freaked out when layers