[MUSIC PLAYING] I didn't prepare anything, so I'm going to talk with my heart, OK?

So-- and just very honestly address this topic, because it's a very important topic.

AI for the creative crowd, it's a very important topic.

And so first of all, so I'm Fred.

I'm one of the two founders of Fred and Farid.

It's a creative independent agency based in Paris.

I come from Paris.

I'm French.

And then Shanghai, and New York, and Los Angeles.

Now I live in Los Angeles.

I used to live in Shanghai.

I've been exposed to technology in Shanghai.

And the very beginning of OpenAI was a nightmare for me.

When OpenAI came up-- so I was in California-- my first prompt was to ask OpenAI a dialogue in between an old Porsche and a young Tesla.

And it was so good.

So I hated it, because it was so good.

And so I was devastated.

I was like, game over.

And so my whole life just literally collapsed.

And then I texted my friend Tony Kay, the director of American History X.

And I talked about the AI possibilities.

And he's like, I'm never going to be an AI artist.

Hate that.

I need the material.

I need to touch the painting and all this.

And then I sent a text to Tony.

And I asked-- that was my second and third prompt.

I asked GPT a dialogue in between him and his wife.

And his wife was angry against him, because he was spending too much time on his art.

And the third prompt was the argument that he had with-- like, recreating the argument he had with the studio on the edit of American History X.

And so-- and I was so good.

And then he called me, like, what is that?

And I'm like, well, we're done.

It's over.

Creative, we're dead.

And so-- and then I was, like, depressed.

I was angry.

I was sad.

I was-- I even became cynical about all this, you know?

And like, just the world is over.

You know, machine is going to take over.

It's done.

And then I went to-- a few months later, I went to Shanghai.

And my partner there had organized a big exhibition with 100 AI artists.

And he had called that exhibition AI Imagination.

And I love the name.

Like, it's so central, because when you prompt on mid-journey, you do slash imagine.

So it's a super central name.

And it's not a smaller topic than that.

It's really about reinventing imagination.

And so-- and so I loved it, because it was so central.

You know, it happened in my career to lose pitches against the agency.

We are social, because they had social as their name.

And we were doing better social.

But we lost, because they had social.

And I was like, OK, this is such a central name, AI Imagination.

I'm going to take that.

And so we registered this name.

And then we started working.

And the first thing is, you know, I could see so many guru of AI all around LinkedIn, et cetera, like super expert, like born experts of AI, et cetera.

And everyone was talking about AI.

But my first feeling was that everyone talks about it, but no one's doing it, really.

So I made a spin-off inside my group.

And unsurprisingly, the Pacific jumped into it.

So Shanghai and Los Angeles, like, jumped into AI, whereas Paris and New York resisted, especially Paris, super conservative, like resisted to it.

And so we worked with the Pacific team.

And we generated, like, humbly.

Like, we didn't talk about it.

We didn't post anything.

We didn't do anything.

We just generated, generated, generated, like, literally hundreds of thousands of images.

You have counters.

You know, on the journey, I know that you have counters.

So you can know, like, hundreds of thousands of images, trying every platform, every possible AI, just like naive, like kids, you know, starting to play with it.

And I'm just going to start by showing you just a few-- just a few videos we've done.

They are full AI.

So the first one is-- it's a spec, so it's not a real ad, OK?

We just took Nike, like, why not?

And of course, Nike will never replace human by AI, a creative character for sure, right?

But it's just for us to train.

We needed to take a brand.

So we took Nike, and we've done a spot.

So I'm going to share that with you and share also a work that our Shanghai team has done, a landing on the moon.

The Shanghai team has done that.

And then people just hugging cactus.

So I'm just going to show you that.

And then I'm going to talk to you about the process and how we came up to from really hating it and wanting to kill AI to now we're loving it.

And we kind of tamed the monster a little bit, you know?

So hopefully, for a few years maybe.

And so here is the first execution.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - Too loud? - Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING] - I don't want to be just another LeBron dunking like it's nothing.

Don't just want to serve like Serena, though that'd be kind of cool.

Scoring goals like Mbappe?

Sure, it's flashy.

Running like Kipchoge?

Setting superhumans records?

No, that's not me.

Sprinting like Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price, queen of the track in her own stride?

But no, I don't want to be Fraser-Price.

Mastering the half pipe like Sky Brown?

Fearless?

Not really.

I don't want to be gliding on the ice like Nathan Chen, the artist on skates.

I don't want to be vaulting like Jordan Childs, throwing spirals like Russell Wilson, swinging like Tiger Woods, surfing like Carissa Moore.

No, I just want to be better.

[END PLAYBACK] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - So that's one.

Hold on, bear with me.

The landing on the moon by our Shanghai team.

[END PLAYBACK] I love the fact that with just a laptop, you can bring so much production value.

You can just like, yeah, let's do a rocket taking off and landing on the moon almost with your iPhone now.

So that's pretty crazy.

I've been in the business for 25 years.

It was something else before.

So now we can pretty much do anything we have in mind.

So there is no limitation to our creativity.

Actually, the only limit we have is our own imagination.

It's like when we face the laptop, it's like-- because we can do everything, everything is pretty close to nothing.

So it can really block you.

So this is the landing on the moon.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Today is a new day in space exploration. - Most powerful-- - This mission is different from anything humanity has ever-- - --provided single broadcast television history. - The world is waiting, curious, wandering, aware, like a sleeper waking up in the night.

This generation stands ready, ready to return humanity to the moon and then to take us farther than ever before.

This is one small step for a woman, one giant leap for mankind. - So it's our Shanghai team.

So and I'm going to show you just people rubbing cactus, because why not?

It's about love.

It's a love story.

Please don't judge.

[END PLAYBACK] So yeah, just-- so you can see on our website what we have done is so we have generated literally hundreds of thousands of images.

And we have finalized 500 series and about 50 video.

And then we killed 300 series and 30 video to only keep 200 series and 20 video, which is 4,000 assets.

And then we uploaded those assets on our website.

And so yeah, so we didn't talk about it.

We just produced, produced, and produced to try to tame the monster.

And as a creative, it was a fantastic process, a fantastic journey.

This is our website.

So if you go-- it's like imagination, but with an A before AIimagination.com.

And so I mean, the crazy thing for me was that I was so scared at the beginning of AI, because I thought it would completely kill us.

And what I realized by working with prompters all day long is that the AI revealed the personality of the different prompters.

And instead of like annihilating all differences, it was really almost exacerbating-- can you say exacerbating?

Like exacerbating the personalities and the different sensitivities of all the prompters.

And so-- and we really entered like a creative process.

That was, for instance, I'm going to show you one series that we've done.

Just to show you how unconventional you can be in your prompt, for instance, that series was created-- you know, Adage took it when we launched the company.

Adage took that series.

And they selected out of 400 images, they selected one of these images.

And the reason is that there is a face of an ancient Chinese princess hidden in all those faces.

So we're not prompting in a very conventional way.

We're trying to really break it and find a new original way to approach creatively the process.

So we have generated first a face of a princess.

And then we have put that face behind all those faces here.

And so it's hidden.

You know, you don't really-- no one knows it, but we know it.

And that's why those faces are so captivating, because we know what we put behind that.

I'm going to show you the face you see.

That face is hidden behind.

So you can really enter like a kind of-- you don't need to be conventional.

You can really enter a whole creative process, like completely artistic process.

And the reason why-- so we have stood out as a studio pretty fast.

And we just signed a big contract with IPG, Interpublic, for two years to be their main AI studio.

I think the reason why we've done that so fast is because in real, we don't respect technology.

We disrespect technology.

And we believe that the electric guitar took off when Jimi Hendrix started to play with his teeth and burn the guitar.

That's the moment when electric guitar really took off.

Because that's the moment when he was submitting the machine to his artistic vision and really not being impressed.

And so I think that's the reason why our studio stood up so fast and we signed this contract, is because our approach is completely artistic.

We take the tools, but we don't care to use the 5.2 of Mid Journey instead of the V6 of Mid Journey.

If we think 5.2 is better artistically, fine.

We take 5.2.

So we're not impressed by any new technology.

We just take it to misdirect it.

And in a way, we try to misdirect any kind of technology that comes up.

We try to use it, play with it, disrespect it.

And it could be a good tagline, disrespect technology.

Or for a brand like a tech brand, please disrespect us, because we're only tools.

So that would be a fantastic tagline, please disrespect us.

And so that's the approach we have.

It's a completely artistic approach.

And because we are convinced that there's a big, big, big thing happening right now, is there's a big fight between human and machine.

And we would be crazy not to see that.

It's happening.

So many people now are losing jobs because of machine.

And so you have the bright side of AI and the dark side of AI.

And in the valley, they're pretty cynical.

And so what we try to do at Imagination-- so we wrote-- if you go on our website, you can see in studio.

We have written a kind of manifesto that the fact that we're human-driven, we're human-powered, we're human-conscious, we're human-dreamt.

What we want is to put artificial intelligence at the service of human intelligence.

And everything we do is in this direction.

So in a way, I think all of us in our little scale-- this is just a small studio.

And some people play in much bigger scales than we play, for sure.

But this is what is at stake.

This is the debate at the moment.

This is the real topic, is how can we build a society?

Because we have to build it with AI.

No way we can do it without AI now.

It has to happen with AI in all the different facets of our life.

And so the big game now is to try to embrace fully AI, to not deny it, to not deny reality, to fully embrace AI.

But still putting human at the center.

And so that's what we're trying to do in this studio.

And that's where-- and a lot of brands are on that.

I was surprised we have talked with Kering, with LVMH, Pernod Ricard, Longchamp, a lot of French brands.

And so they are very touched by that, because everyone is looking, what's the best way to approach AI?

And everyone is scared of this notion of, let's wipe out every job.

Every time I hear automation, it just scares me.

It doesn't please me.

I hear you're putting some criteria, and then you have a bad ad coming.

It doesn't touch me.

I think we have to digest that and not be impressed anymore, and still keep human at the core and creative at the core.

And I can really see the difference when it's completely automated and when it's like there is this human touch, this human factor.

And so it's a real fight.

I mean, I'm not kidding.

It's our sense of purpose to really try to nail down a society where we fully use AI, like we use the full potential, because we love it, because from our laptop, we can do a landing on the moon.

That's fantastic.

But we don't want to give up.

We want to be resistant.

We want to be on the bright side of it.

And I think a lot of companies are starting to do that.

And I was positively surprised to see that brands will have a responsibility for sure.

Like when you're LVMH or when you're caring, et cetera, you have to really think about what's your philosophy for what AI.

How do you want to use that?

And so it feels to me that all copyright problems will just go away.

It's not even a topic.

Now when they do an image, the platform are using millions of sources to do one image.

So the paternity of the maternity of an image, it's not even a question anymore.

Very soon, it's not going to be a question anymore.

The real question would be ethic.

That's still very, very, very accurate.

Ethic, it's like should you do AI or not?

It's not can you do it in AI.

It's like should you do it in AI or not?

That's the real topic.

And so you would be surprised how the brands are already thinking about that, of that quintessential topic.

I come back from France.

I was in Cognac.

And we had three days about AI with LVMH.

And the last day was only philosophers.

Seriously, like philosophers, writers, talking about AI and consequences of AI.

And so I mean, it's the main topic of our generation.

You know, it's how do we want to build a society for our children where we fully embrace it.

And we don't deny it.

We fully embrace it.

But in a way that is, I like to say, conscious.

And so what we try to do at AI Imagination is we try to use AI to magnify human qualities.

So like imagination, human creativity.

But I would say also emotion, imperfection.

I think there's a beauty in imperfection.

Our films are not perfect.

There's a lot of imperfections.

But we love that.

And also maybe conscious, maybe also a little bit of spirituality.

I think all that, I mean, it's raising the main topic, which is, is there anything we still do better than machine?

And so it's raising that question, right?

And so to engage into those differences and try to develop those differences.

So because we're in competition, in a way.

So it started already.

The race has started.

And so it's a very small studio.

But it's in Paris, Shanghai, New York, and Los Angeles.

And you'll see all the different exploration we've done.

For instance, I hate that.

Because this is completely why I didn't want to go into AI.

Because it looks AI.

It's just horrible.

It's just really like-- and we've done it at the end.

Our website was ready.

And I said to the team, we don't have any horrible stuff like what we see on the internet about AI.

So let's do a few.

And so we've done a few stupid series like that to show that we could do it.

But in real, I'm so much more impressed by that.

This is so much more interesting and hard to do.

And it really looks real.

It's artistic.

It has a meaning.

It has a concept.

It's just so much more interesting.

And so you will see on our website, we've explored every possible style.

And there were some mystical moments.

I love that series, for instance.

Istanbul Fishing Club.

I don't know if you guys have been to Istanbul in Turkey.

But that's exactly it.

That's exactly it.

That could be like-- so we have a cycle of the prompt.

We put the camera, the film, and everything, our pure cycle.

We spent some-- and so that's so much more interesting because it doesn't look AI.

This looks like canon.

We worked on a series where, for instance-- maybe I don't have time.

Well, it's 15 seconds.

So you can explore.

You can see all that.

So to end up, I would just say-- I would just say-- I would just say nothing because I don't-- I would just say, yeah, this is a dream that I've done in Paris.

And I really wanted to do it.

And I struggled so hard.

And I finally managed to do this, like the buildings of Paris lifting up like bubbles.

I thought it would be a good champagne film for Mouet or something.

So I'm going to end up with that.

OK?

Bye.

[LAUGHS] [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)

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