[00:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 475 entitled human creativity still matters in the age of AI. I hope you knew that already. It was released on Thursday, the 9th of July, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined by Tess Needham in a short while, so that we can get into that subject. And boy do we cover a lot of ground.
But before that, a few bits of housekeeping, if you like what we do, head to wpbuilds.com/subscribe to keep updated on all of the social platforms, and various places we share our content.
If you would like to get your product or service out in front of our pretty large WordPress specific audience, head to wpbuilds.com/advertise, or send me an email [email protected] to find out more. And we can certainly help you get in front of that WordPress specific audience.
The other thing to mention is that we do a couple of shows. You're listening to the podcast that comes out on a Thursday. But also if you are into doing live shows, we do This Week in WordPress every Monday, 2:00 PM UK time. As always, you can find that at wpbuilds.com/live.
Okay, that's all of the housekeeping for you this week. Let's get into the meat and the bones of what we're talking about today.
So today I'm talking with Tess Needham. Tess works for Automattic, she's on the wordpress.com side of things, and I met her in a restaurant at WordCamp Asia this year. And she is such an interesting character. She's very much on the artistic side of things, but also trying to dabble in AI. And whilst we were chatting, I thought she was such an interesting character, I had to get her on the podcast.
So today we cover a lot of ground. We get introduced to Tess, and then we talk about blogging and the zine culture, if you dunno what a zine is, hold on, you're gonna find out. We really do get into a lot of ephemeral things like the artistic process. We also talk about creative inspiration and aspirations. The philosophical perspective of creativity. Defining art and value judgement. Who owns work and what it means to be creative. Democratising and accelerating creativity through AI. Human-centric values in a technological age.
You can see it's pretty broad and pretty deep, not like a usual WP Builds episode. We're really not concentrating on the code or anything like that, but in this increasingly AI dominated world, I thought it was very interesting to get Tess's perspective.
I'm sure that you'll enjoy them as well, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Tess Needham. Hello Tess.
[00:03:08] Tess Needham: Hello.
[00:03:09] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us. Tess. And I had a delicious, I think Chinese meal.
I think it was Chinese, I can't remember, in a
[00:03:16] Tess Needham: Chinese.
[00:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: Was it Chinese? Was it? I can't remember. It was probably an Indian meal given that we were in
[00:03:21] Tess Needham: Probably Indian 'cause it was in India.
[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: I don't where that came from. but we spent a thoroughly nice evening in a hotel in Mumbai at Word Camp Asia.
And just as Tess and I were parting ways, Tess gave me a little booklet, which I'm currently holding in my hands. And, it's called Human Creativity in the Age of ai. And I took it back to my room that night and I read it and then put it to one side. And then when I got back to the UK it came out of my luggage and I read it again and it actually hit me pretty hard.
you may not have intended it to hit anybody pretty hard, but it got me because it aligns a lot with what I think. And so I contacted Tess and said, should we do a podcast? And she said No. And then I offered her, that's not true. She said yes right away. I dunno where that was going.
but she said yes. And, here we are gonna talk about it today. Tess, do you wanna just introduce yourself? 'cause I've rambled enough already.
[00:04:24] Tess Needham: Yes, sure. I'm always happy to be on a podcast. Love being on a podcast. So you asked the right gal. yeah, so I work for wordpress.com, which is a, company that, or a brand that's part of the automatic ecosystem. we have a lot of companies as part of automatic, but I work in marketing. but my background is actually in the performing arts and performing arts, research and practise.
So I have a PhD in performing arts. but I was specifically with my research, I was interested in what makes performance capable of changing people's behaviours and attitudes. And it turns out that now that I think about it all these years later, these are actually things that really become relevant in marketing.
so the right kind of confrontation, a deliberately unresolved ending. These are things that I discussed in my research that now are coming into my marketing, world, which I'm thrilled by because whoever knew that a PhD in performing arts would get me anywhere. but I'm a creative all rounder and I love to make, films.
I love to draw. I love to paint. I do sketching. I do voiceover acting. I still, when I can do like community theatre and things like that, I'm just happiest when I'm creating stuff. And there's just a lot of stuff that I create. and I bounce around. I actually made this cardigan that I'm wearing. I just realised that
[00:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: a winner.
[00:05:58] Tess Needham: and I made
[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: real winner. It's flowery. and I'm holding the little booklet that you made and I've been to your website. I'll drop the link in the show notes, by the way. But it's, pretty obvious. It's tess needham.com. and it's lovely. It's it's what a blog was meant to be. It's like a, offloaded your brain out into the, out into, the, the, internet and it's absolutely marvellous.
Definitely worth a little
[00:06:23] Tess Needham: Look, I do love blogging and I, have a lot, I can, we can talk about blogging as well, because I think it's amazing for creatives specifically, like for everyone, but for creatives specifically. And it's really, since I really made a commitment to blog regularly, it's really been life-changing
[00:06:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.
[00:06:43] Tess Needham: the way, the booklet, it's fine to call it a booklet, but it's also known as a zine,
[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:06:52] Tess Needham: ZINE if you're not familiar with them. So they're like a mini magazine and they come from a whole, there's a long background along cultural background of zines. and it's really this kind of DIY punk kind of aesthetic.
it's what I really love about them is it's almost like a physical blog article. It's like the, yeah, it's like I can put, I can encapsulate my thoughts. It's very, it's very low barrier to entry. I make them, I love putting a lot of time into them because I'm just that kind of person. this particular one that you're talking about, I did these illustrations of robots and I did them with a dip pen, an ink, and it was actually my first time using a dip pen and ink.
But I, I make comic books and I'm like obsessed with comic, illustrators, comic artists who, the old school sort of version of that is, is like using a dip pen. I love like Quentin Blake's illustrations
[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:07:55] Tess Needham: yeah, so I, I had this dip pen. I had a pot of ink because every good creative, I hoard art supplies.
[00:08:02] Nathan Wrigley: I can only imagine what your house is like. I go, I bet. I know what your house is like.
[00:08:08] Tess Needham: so many art supplies. yeah, and I just, what I loved about this is this like juxtaposition of the really handmade, illustrations that are like obviously handmade and then talking about ai, and I'm talking about AI and crea creativity. And I, use AI a lot, which we can get into. but I always feel like I need to go, as the young people say, touch grass after I've been, working with AI for a while, I really do feel this need to just use my hands, get out into nature, get ink all over my fingers, do something that's really tangible, messy and like me.
So I liked that idea of creating or drawing these, robots with ink. and just making them messy and imperfect. And then sharing my thoughts around that, the humanity that I feel like as creatives, we need to keep a grip, keep grips on like what those things are that make us really creatively human.
[00:09:18] Nathan Wrigley: I have no idea the, of the direction of this conversation, but I think it's gonna be interesting. But I have two comments. The first thing is never unfold a zine. That's the first thing. 'cause you'll never put that back together, or at least
[00:09:31] Tess Needham: I have instructions on my blog for, I have instructions on my blog for how to fold them. So '
[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: cause I unfolded it yesterday 'cause I noticed that it was made of one piece of paper.
So it's a booklet. It's about, I don't know, it's about 10 centimetres high by about five centimetres across. And it's basically got four sets of pages. So eight pages in total. And then I
[00:09:52] Tess Needham: yeah. So it's an A four piece of
[00:09:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, it's April. Yeah, but cut cleverly. And then, so I thought, oh, I'm gonna see how this works. And then I unfolded it and I've done it again.
I've just done it just now look, this is what I've got and now I can't.
[00:10:06] Tess Needham: Oh, I should have put page numbers on it. Sometimes I put page
[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: But it's remarkable. So there's the first thing, never unfold a zine 'cause you're not putting that back together quickly. But the second one is, and I know that working for wordpress.com is obviously the apex of anybody's working life.
You couldn't, you can, you couldn't exceed that. But Tess, if you could go back to your 10-year-old self and you could be anything, what would you do? What would you be now.
[00:10:35] Tess Needham: I think when I was 10 I wanted to be an orthodontist because I was, getting braces.
[00:10:40] Nathan Wrigley: wasn't expecting that.
[00:10:42] Tess Needham: You know how kids are, just whatever's happening in their life, like that's what they wanna be.
[00:10:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:10:47] Tess Needham: Yeah, exactly. An astronaut, whatever they see happening. Yeah. So I think I
[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: I, scrape the 10-year-old comment. Go for
[00:10:54] Tess Needham: yeah,
[00:10:54] Nathan Wrigley: go for the 18-year-old Tess instead. Yeah.
[00:10:56] Tess Needham: maybe the 15-year-old.
Yeah. really, I always wanted to be an actor. I, think like through high school, that's what I can remember. I loved drama. but I always did lots of art. Like I did creative art. I, did photography. I, but drama was something that I was really drawn to. And I did a lot of performing in high school.
a lot of Shakespeare, like monologues, plays, yeah, just lots of different stuff. Like me and my friends would make little homemade movies, so I was just always making stuff. I played music as well. I played saxophone in the school, a couple of school bands. I played bass guitar in a rock band with my friends.
so I was always just like creating stuff. so I always, I think I always just thought that's where my life would go, is into something creative. yeah, performing arts was where it went, but I've always been like a jack of all trades when it comes to creativity. So yeah, I think from a pretty early age, I was already hooked on the creativity.
But I did have, my, my high school art teacher, like my final year of high school, when, in art you make a big, major work, a big project. And I was, this was 1998. I was like pushing technology. I was using Photoshop and all these kinds of things. My dad is a graphic designer, so I always had this, introduction to this stuff at home.
He worked from home, so I always had like early education in Photoshop and stuff. And my, I used photography. I was, I was inspired by a Beatles song. The Beatles have always been my favourite band. and I, my art teacher just really was very discouraging, unfortunately, and
[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: A way
[00:12:53] Tess Needham: me that my work was, yeah, I know.
Just
[00:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: You had one job.
[00:13:00] Tess Needham: what a crappy art teacher to squash someone's artistic enthusiasm. but yeah, really, like I got quite defeated by that and just thought, I'm not an artist, like I can't really draw. I'm not really an artist. I'll go, do theatre for a while.
And, I really didn't like do visual art for a long time, but I've always been obsessed with visual art and I, go to art galleries all the time. I like have a pretty good knowledge of art history and those sorts of things. I've always been into it and I just feel really upset for that. 17-year-old Tess who really was told that her art wouldn't amount to anything because I wish I could go back and encourage her to keep going.
But luckily I picked it up again later in life.
[00:13:48] Nathan Wrigley: I have a couple of questions for you, And these are gonna get dead weird really quickly. So hopefully you'll go with me. So the first thing is, okay, I've got two on, I dunno which order to ask them in. I'll go with this one first. Where is the seat of creativity? Like in, do you think that it comes out of you?
is there some mechanism going on in your brain? Perhaps we'd call it consciousness or something like that. it, is it you that do that, does the art or do you think there's some other, I don't know, bigger thing? I'm not particularly a religious person, so I, don't have that. I think it magically conjuress itself in the moment and I don't really have an explanation for that.
But Where do, what's the seat of art for you?
[00:14:35] Tess Needham: Yeah, that's a really, amazing question. I am also not religious and also don't believe in any, like of the other, like of, mystical kind of things. I'm quite practical and quite logical, and I, my definition of creativity is that it's about, taking in inputs. I think the inputs are really important.
You can't expect to just be creative like in a vacuum. you really need to be, reading. You need to be looking at art, you need to be watching films like, just having, like taking in a lot and then processing those inputs like through your own skills, experience, taste, like all of those things that make you, and then sharing that output back with the world. And I think that's like a, I guess a cycle of creativity. So in terms of where it lives, yeah, it's in, me. but it's also in like everybody who creates, and it's like a, it's like an ecosystem, of everyone who creates, like none of us could do it on our own.
and there's,
[00:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: sorry. Sorry I,
[00:15:47] Tess Needham: the, just, the whole thing about, great artists steal, I think we're all just borrowing from each other, learning from each other. which, does open the door to the AI conversation about stealing and about
[00:16:04] Nathan Wrigley: going.
[00:16:05] Tess Needham: derivative. But if you had a different question next, then we can come back to the
[00:16:10] Nathan Wrigley: about that is that the analogy to that then feels like it's a sort of hybrid of stuff out there in the world, which somehow gets into your head and then you do some magic mixing bowl. we put the ingredients in the bowl, we mix 'em all up, and then some cake appears, which is much better than all the ingredients.
And the mixing bowl is some kind of magic that makes the cake appear kind of thing. So it's going on in your head somehow, but it, without context, it wouldn't work without the wider world. And so the next thing is what, for you qualifies as creative or art then? Do you have a definition where you can point to something in the world and say, no, that's not art.
But that is because I've never really, I, I'm not a particular big fan of modern art, particularly, I'm just castrated myself in the, in the, world of modern artists. I'm sorry about that if you're a modern artist.
[00:17:07] Tess Needham: You're thinking about the like duct taping a banana to the
[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: but also I went to this Canadian art gallery once and there was this giant picture, and it was really big.
It was about 12 metres across, so really big and about six metres high. And in the middle of it was a red line. And it was really, it was literally a red line. It was perfectly straight, absolutely horizontal. And it went from end to end and the rest of it was white. And I thought to myself, okay, that for me doesn't seem to qualify because what I want artists to do, I think is to struggle and to, have, a process whereby they, do something extraordinary.
And when I looked at that, I thought I could do that. Of course, the bit that's missing there is I didn't do that, did I? so they, certainly qualified and they were in a big art gallery. But do you know what I mean? For me, it appears that the definition is some version of struggle and messy and failure and repetition and a slow evolution of, a skill over time.
So nobody picks up a guitar and goes, oh yeah, I'm really good at this. It's like this whole months and years of, oh, I'm really bad at this. That hurts. I'm gonna keep going. And then, mix it all up, this mixing bowl analogy again with all the stuff going on in life and out pops the art on the other end.
So there's this sort of struggling bit, this, very messy human bit in the mix. So I dunno if that speaks to you. Anyway, the question was, what qualifies as art? And then I muddied the waters tremendously by talking.
[00:18:39] Tess Needham: that's okay. You told me your answer first, which is fine. No, it was fine. I guess my, my provocation back to you would be like, how do you know that artist didn't struggle? The one who, painted the, or did the red
[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And you are right to point that out. And I don't, and, it was ignorant of me and I'm, I was, the 20-year-old me and it wasn't the approach to an art
gallery. Was it?
[00:19:04] Tess Needham: I'm not trying to make you, I'm not trying to make you feel bad, I'm just having it is just, an interesting conversation. but yeah, I mean there's, definitely, one of the things about art is that there's so much of it in the world, right? And it's not all of it's gonna appeal to everyone.
you're gonna have your own tastes and preferences and things like that. I do love modern art. I also love classical art. I agree with you that there, that the sort of level of struggle or humanity that's in art, it's something that like you as the viewer then connecting with through that. and I think, we're all connecting with each other's struggle and yeah, I think that is a big part of it.
But, and then maybe like some people will see the struggle behind that red line and some people won't. And that's totally fine. it's, doesn't have to be for everyone. And then, the banana duct tape to the wall, is also very interesting. is it art? it's, this is the whole thing about Duchamp and the urinal and all this sort of stuff.
is it art? And it's almost like in, in some cases it's just a, it's a provocation to even ask that question. And that is the art, creating the conversation. So I think I do, I have an opinion about this specifically. I don't know that I am qualified to decide what is art and what is not art.
And I also don't think that it really matters that much. I think that, everybody can have their own version of what moves them, what they relate to, what they connect with. And that's actually something, if I can throw back to your podcast with Jamie, where you had this sort of AI debate is, this is Jamie Marsland.
I dunno if we've mentioned Jamie yet.
[00:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: it in the show notes. yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:55] Tess Needham: but he said something that I like, unlocked something for me in my brain, which was about how, the sort of proliferation of content with ai. And he made an analogy to like going to a library and how there's just so many books in the library, you could never read all of them.
so it doesn't really matter how much content there is in the world and it's about what you notice, what you connect with. And it's similar with art. I don't know if it even matters to say to call it art or call it not art, but it's just like what you connect with. And maybe that's something that's very, basic.
Maybe that's something that's very complicated. but I'm, that's not for me to judge. that's for each person to judge themselves. I dunno, was that a cop out?
[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: no, I think it's, I think it's like you, I think that's a completely justifiable position. I could see how that would be at the basis of what you're actually thinking. it's a hard thing to grapple with, right? Because I'm asking you for some kind of binary answer to some
ephemeral problem that really doesn't have a binary answer.
So I, I think that's fine. However, this is a follow up question, which occurred to me whilst you were talking. Do you, so I'm holding your little booklet and it's got a picture of a robot on the front, and it's really like you said, it's a little line drawing. did you do that? Is, did you create that?
[00:22:19] Tess Needham: Did I draw the robot?
[00:22:20] Nathan Wrigley: the owner of that picture?
[00:22:24] Tess Needham: yeah, I created it. I drew it, I based it on a picture that I found of, like vintage toy robots. so I was using a reference image, which is very common in art. I don't feel bad about that.
[00:22:42] Nathan Wrigley: No.
[00:22:43] Tess Needham: I wasn't drawing this robot from my imagination, but one of the great things about drawing is that you can change things.
Like I left out details, I made things a little bit different. I would've changed the proportions of things, but I was inspired by this image of, of vintage robots that I found just, so doing a Google search and that there's other robot drawings in the zine that are all from that same picture.
So I just picked out little bits and pieces and drew it, but would I own it? yeah, I, mean I, in terms of the sort of intellectual property, I would say that I did because it's, like this creativity thing that we're talking about where you have the input, I have the, input of the robots, but also the input of Quentin Blake and of Jason Chatfield, this other, cartoonist I like, and every other artist cartoonist who draws with the, with a dip pen, who has this kind of style and does like a wash and ink wash, is the shading.
And all of this is has influenced my, my idea when it came to sitting down and creating this drawing that I was, it was all this whole melting pot, this mishmash of all of these ideas, this reference image. and then there's a level of kind of, serendipity as well. Like I drew it and then I was like, oh wow, he looks kind of full lawn.
I didn't set out to draw him for lawn.
[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: it, yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:15] Tess Needham: but so there is that level of like accident that happens too, which is pretty cool. and yeah, then I just drew a whole bunch of robots and then scanned them in and chose my favourite ones. It's not deep.
[00:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: now that I know that you did, and I knew that you did that anyway 'cause you handed it to me, I, feel something about that because you did it.
and if I, really am gonna struggle to get the words out for this, but there is something that I wouldn't feel like if I found out that drawing that I'm now pointing at, that I know that you did, if you had said to me just then, no, I didn't do that and AI did that.
Some part of my soul dies. There's a little bit of me which goes, oh, that's, so that's a sort of simulation. And when I, so I went onto your website earlier and your most recent post was, a challenge. We're back to Jamie Maslin again, who seems to occupy a significant amount of my life. I dunno what's going on there dear Jamie.
but the, he challenged you to make, make some AI videos around a particular subject and you can go and watch them and they're really good.
[00:25:27] Tess Needham: Yeah.
[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: Who owns that? who is the creative person? because you, prompted it, but you didn't do it. So I don't, I'm in this sort of wilderness where I don't know, is that Tess?
Is that a computer? what was the sort of creative bit? And so I, there's, I'm not really, like I said, I was gonna struggle to get this out. The fact that I know you did that, I like that. And the, and if I'd have found out that you didn't do that, there's a bit of me which says I don't really wanna be associated with that.
And I think I am in a bit of a minority with that. I think most people don't seem to mind in the year 2026 what the creative agent of a thing was.
[00:26:10] Tess Needham: I think you are, it's, really hitting on a big topic, that I could probably go on and on about. But yeah, so going back a couple of years, I started talking about AI and creativity and I, I was giving a presentation actually at Word Camp Sydney, and I wanted to, I wanted to make a piece of, I don't wanna call it art.
I wanted to make an illustration, an image, and I had, as, happens with me, and it's probably happens with other artists too, is that I had a very clear idea of what I wanted this image to look like. and I actually thought, wouldn't it be interesting to try and create this with AI as a sort of illustration of what I'm talking about, to see what happens.
I couldn't get the AI to deliver an output that matched the vision that I had in my mind. So I created it and I actually have another zine with that image on it. I'm gonna show it to you, even though we're on
[00:27:16] Nathan Wrigley: see it and it's, yeah. Oh,
[00:27:18] Tess Needham: but a, robot painting a self portrait of
itself,
[00:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: neat. Oh, that's a great, it's like that hand that paints itself that I've seen
in the past. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
[00:27:28] Tess Needham: so I created this myself. I did create it on an iPad in the procreate app. So there was a level of technology there, which, I'm fine with 'cause it's a tool, but I talk about this, I'm talk, I'm talking about this example because I think it's interesting that I couldn't get it to do what was in my mind.
Like the, thing that I was conceiving in my mind, the idea that I had AI wasn't delivering it, even though I wanted it to, even though I hate AI generated art, I just, I wanted as an exercise to do it. And I think that's a story in itself. However, what I learned with this challenge from Jamie is that the models are improving so much that it's really, you can actually get really close to what you want now.
And then for me, this raises up a whole lot of questions because back when I couldn't get the model to do what I wanted, it's very easy to then just dismiss AI and just say, AI is shit like, it, it's never gonna replace a person. It's not creative. It can't make what I want. and then you have this sense of relief of thank God I can still make my own art, then so yes, Jamie challenged me. I know. So we had this thing at Automatic, a couple of months ago where, Matt, Mullenweg, the CEO of Automatic said to everybody, let's drop everything you're doing and for the next month we'll have something called Radical Speed Month. And I want you to pair up with somebody and work on a project that's important to you.
And so people all across the company, a lot of people stayed working on like mission critical stuff, but a lot of people across the company, like more than half of the company, I think it was, did this. And so I reached out to Jamie and I just said even though Jamie and I are on the same team, we don't like, our projects don't tend to overlap, but we're friends, and, I'd, so I said to him like, I really wanna do something together.
I don't know what it's gonna be. Let's have a chat. And so Jamie had this idea that he was gonna be like, like task master, give me a series of tasks, that I had to complete. And he really, 'cause as Jamie's really a fan of ai. He does a lot of stuff with ai. And he and I had conversations about it before and I was like, I get that AI can do a lot, but I don't really, I'm not having ideas of things that I can actually do with ai.
And I have all these ideas about, creativity and how AI can't be creative and all these things. So he said, okay, here's your challenge is to, use AI, only AI and create a film. And that was task one. I did three tasks. So that was task one was to create a film. He gave me a brief for the film. so I had to, I was forced to by Jamie, delve into these, AI video and image making tools that I'd been successfully avoiding because I'd been really poo-pooing them and just saying oh, these are, crap.
These can't do anything. and when you see AI generated videos online, I always feel let down. I love looking at cat videos, I'm just a, I'm a normal person who loves cat videos on Instagram, and I feel so cheated when I come across some video that's like a fricking AI
[00:30:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. The AI being like, yeah, the AI cat playing with a tiger that's not eating it, or something like that.
[00:31:03] Tess Needham: not what I want. I want real Cats are funny enough. I'm, coming from a, an antagonistic position, but also I've always been like very up for anything. I'm just like someone who loves experiences and loves to try things and I'm never gonna, say no to trying something.
So I was like, all right, I'll do it. and I really dove into it and I kept a, like a video diary every day, of my experiences. 'cause I, one thing I think is really interesting is no one, not many people are actually talking about this kind of tension between creativity and ai. I think there's people who are like very, just like blanket against ai.
Then there's people who are creating a lot of stuff with ai. Really, the situation is more nuanced and there's not a lot of people who are exploring it. And, I think it's there, there are creatives, there are artists who are making art with AI and really like delving into that. but what I'm finding is that we hear a lot from our [email protected].
Every time we release a feature that's like powered by ai, we get a backlash. they're really, AI sentiment is, it's pretty negative. amongst people who are not in the tech industry. I feel like we're all a bit like, rose coloured glasses in the tech industry at the moment and very excited about it.
But yeah, I think like normal people outside of the tech industry, there are normal people inside the tech industry too. I think that they are like very sceptical about it, rightly and it's just I was very sceptical about it. I am very sceptical about it. But what was interesting getting this challenge from Jamie is that I had to, use it, I had to force myself to use these tools and I had to hold my nose and do it.
And with the first iteration of this film, I wasn't very happy with it. I felt like I just wasn't, there was so many things that I got frustrated with. I was using Mid Journey to generate images and every image generation was like slightly different. I had this human cha humanoid character and every time I generated a new shot with her in it, her face looks slightly different.
She was in a kitchen, the kitchen layout kept changing. And I was like, this is just not gonna read as a film, And my, quality bar is really high, for something like this. I've made actual films before and I know what goes into it and I know, I just have a sensibility for this kind of thing.
And so I really, I really struggled with that. I, got it to a place that I, was okay sharing it internally. I was like, I would never show this externally anywhere, except as like in the context of this experiment. But there was just too many things wrong with it. There was also a lot of stuff that I needed to composite in afterwards.
I used like this ticket tape thing and I had to do all this animating stuff and type it on. And I was just I was like, this just doesn't look good. Like it doesn't look realistic. Anyway, I wrapped it up and I like shared it with Jamie and we had a whole chat about it. And then during that chat, he was like, oh, by the way, like OpenAI has just released a new image model.
And it was literally, it was released like as I was making this film, with Midjourney. And he's maybe go check it out. Like apparently it's quite good at, rendering text and things like that. So I was like, all right. And I went and got all the same prompts that I had used in Mid Journey and I put them into chat GPT, and I was like, my jaw was on the floor.
Like everything that I had struggled with was suddenly fixed. Like all of this typing stuff was fixed. This character thing was fixed. And I was like, oh my God. it really is just a matter of next week there is a new model that will do that, will do what you need it to do. So I then regenerated the whole film using those images.
It came out much better. I can still see a few issues with it, but it came out much better. And then since then, actually, you haven't seen these yet, but I have created, been creating more, since then I've been like really inspired to, continue making films. I, did make another one, like an ad for wordpress.com that used humans in it.
But I had learned from my experience and you get still, AI still doesn't do the facial like animation stuff in a realistic way. And we're so tuned in to human faces that you, yeah, you just get this uncanny valley. I don't know, it's gonna take a lot for us to actually get past that. so I, had learned now from experience, I worked around a little bit.
I used silhouettes, I used hands, I had this whole thing. it's okay, I'm still not a hundred percent good with it, but then I went into animation, what? It's been pretty fun and it feels a lot lower stakes than synthetic humans, 'cause you're not trying to find the humanity
[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: It's always been a simulation, hasn't it?
[00:36:36] Tess Needham: Okay.
[00:36:36] Nathan Wrigley: the best animation is always a simulation, so it doesn't try to replicate the real world. Yeah.
[00:36:41] Tess Needham: Exactly. And, that has also, again, changed my thinking about using these tools. so what I did, and I'm hoping that these are gonna make it out into the public, is WaPo, who is our, our WordPress mascot. I have a couple
[00:36:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think, yeah,
[00:36:59] Tess Needham: up here.
[00:36:59] Nathan Wrigley: I have one
there.
[00:37:01] Tess Needham: wonderful, yeah, our wonderful little WordPress mascot WaPo, is that I've made some, short animations featuring WaPo, and I'm really excited about them.
and I've had such fun making them, and I've really been exploring all of these ai, ai, AI tools to do it. And yeah, what I like the normal animation process, it's already done on computers, right? with, when we're talking about like 3D sort of modern animation as opposed to Disney animation, from the past, which is also wonderful and I love, but yes, it was like, like modern 3D animation, is done on computers anyway.
They probably do motion capture, but not always with humans. it, there definitely are human artists who are making it, but they're using computer tools to do it. So I feel like the jump to using AI in these situations is, less, it's less than using a synthetic actor, in your film. I still do, I am always negotiating with myself of does this cross the boundary for me into ickiness?
am I, turned off by this as a creative? Am I still finding this process creative or not? And I've been journaling my process through this and I hope to also publish those thoughts, sometimes soon. But just this thinking of what does it feel like to be creative? What's important about that to me?
And then how do I make sure that I hold onto that even when I'm using these really cutting edge, tools. And that's been a really interesting process for me.
[00:38:49] Nathan Wrigley: I, I've got a couple of things that have popped into my head whilst you've been
[00:38:53] Tess Needham: Sorry that was really a long rant.
[00:38:55] Nathan Wrigley: I enjoyed
[00:38:56] Tess Needham: please interrupt me.
[00:38:57] Nathan Wrigley: I was hanging on every word. That was brilliant. So I have a few things that occurred to me as you were talking, and that is the first one. I don't wanna do 'em in this order, but I'll forget them 'cause I've only written one of them down, so I'll do them in the wrong order so I don't forget.
and I've now forgotten it as I was saying, that sentence, that thought came out of my head. So I'll go to the one that I've written down, and hopefully it'll occur to me. Ai, it'll only get better.
there's this, it's never, ever, well as assuming the state of the environment maintains and we can actually put electricity into silicon circuits.
It's only gonna get better, which is interesting. So the idea like the, if we go back 10 years, everything that we're talking about now is Star Trek. It's like Hollywood nonsense. It's what do you mean you're gonna talk to a computer and it's gonna spit out a film for you? so there's that.
Firstly, how did we just accommodate all of that? oh yeah, this is totally normal now. Oh, you mean it can do films? Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Moving on. Tell me something else that's exciting, because that's really passe now. But the other thing is the, like the goal, maybe the goal has changed.
So when I was reading your little booklet, I agreed with a lot of it, and, it kept making, the point that I made earlier about the creative process is the bit that I think is the most important. So the struggle and the, the fact that you've given up years of your life to hone this skill and all of that kind of stuff.
Maybe we have to review that. Maybe that's not it. Maybe, we're happy for our art to just be the output.
and that's all we care about. for example, when we're, I, used this analogy not that long ago in a different podcast episode. When we're in a supermarket and we're pushing the trolley around and we hear the m Zach, don't care who made it.
We just care. in many ways we don't even care that it's there. But the thing is, we're never gonna spend even one jewel of energy thinking, oh, I wonder who made that? That's curious. I wonder what they were thinking when they made that. No, it's just there. It's in the background. Maybe that's the calculus that AI brings into the art debate.
We don't care about the process anymore. All we care about is the output. because your film, I looked at the two versions, the one and then the other one that, that you is better. they are to my eye as a non, I'm not that critical about film. I don't watch it for the fine detail and all of that.
They were brilliant, like perfect. And, if I'd have watched it, I would never have known that it was an ai. And maybe that's a shift that I need to have is just all we care about is the output. We're not gonna care that Robert De Niro is half of him in that film is him. And the bit where he jumps out the aeroplane, that's actually not him.
It's not even a stunt doble, it's just a computer that did that. But the plot's still good and we enjoyed all of that. So who cares? I wonder if that's where we're, heading, where we have to reimagine what art is and what we'll accept.
[00:42:19] Tess Needham: Maybe, and it goes back to what we were saying earlier about what even is art. I think that you do have to think about what is important to the audience. I make art, but I also am a marketer who has to be creative at work, or gets to be creative at work, which is awesome.
But when you're a marketer, you are always thinking about the audience, for what you're doing as an artist. You might be thinking about the audience, but you are also creating it for yourself a little bit, or a lot. So I think it's about what, what matters to the audience. And so when I'm creating something with AI or without ai, I'm thinking like, does it matter to the audience that this is AI created?
So I think that like for these new WaPo animations I'm doing, I don't think it does matter to the audience that I'm using AI tools for the imagery, but the ideas are mine. the, and, I think that's one thing that AI is bringing us is like the idea to execution is massively compressed. Like it compresses that gap.
I, I've been making these animations in less than a day now. They're like a 15 second animation, between, from my dear to execution. And it's the time also the budget though, like we would've never made these, we just wouldn't have made them, we wouldn't have had the budget.
[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: little, what is it, 42nd, 52nd film. What would that have cost you? 50 grand. A hundred
[00:43:57] Tess Needham: Yeah. it's also a period piece, so
[00:44:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Beautiful lighting, like cameras on different angles. machine like bespoke machinery that moves backwards and forwards and spits out a ticket that it's thousands, tens of hundreds of thousands.
And what does it
[00:44:14] Tess Needham: Yeah, and also just the number of, I know, I did actually calculate the cost of it. I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was under a hundred dollars anyway. and the number of people that have to be involved in something like that. But as a creative, I also am like very conscious of, am I robbing work from these people?
Am I robbing their, their chance to be involved in something like this for these things that I've created? I never would've made them if it wasn't for ai. so I think that's that resource gap would've been a deal breaker before, we would've never had the budget, the people, the time.
and, especially like animation's, very time consuming. I would've had the hardest time trying to sell to my boss. I'm gonna make these animated videos that are just cute and have WaPo in them for our brand. And just, can you give me like, 50 grand to make that? there's no way.
but now that the tools can get us there, then we are like, why not? Why not just try it? And we can then, get from like these ideas, all these ideas that are coming to me, I can get them out into the world, see, if people like them, and then new ideas can come. and I think that, the, second and third tasks that I did with Jamie, were vibe coding.
And that really, I had all of these feelings about the film, about like how icky it was, how icky it felt to be like using this synthetic human. When I'm an actor, I wanna be in the film, But then when I switched over to Vibe Coding, it felt really magical to me and it felt like, oh my God, this is unlocking so much for me.
This is so incredible. And I did, I gave a little bit of thought to the engineer, the poor engineer, but also it, really felt like I was never, this was something I was never gonna be able to do before, films. I've made films before. I've never coded a plugin before. and that really gave me it, first of all, it like made it all feel magical for me and made, this whole world un unravelling and everything.
And oh my God, I can do everything. But it also gave me a lot of empathy for people who are using AI to make images or music or video or whatever who, don't have those skills already or haven't learned them or don't feel like they're good at drawing or whatever it is. And then they've, they get AI to generate that, that drawing for them.
it gave me a lot of empathy for those people because they're just people like me, but they have a different skillset and then they probably, the task that's at hand is something that is, less achievable for them or more achievable for them.
[00:47:16] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna, I'm gonna run with that a little bit and something that's just occurred to me. Okay, so the first thing is, you mentioned that you would never have got the $50,000 to make the WaPo video, but you did do it with the a hundred dollars that, were available. it's, loose change in a sense.
I wonder if we will paint ourselves into a future where it'll be death by a thousand paper cutts, where no, we would never have done that. So let's just do it. And, we are not robbing Peter to pay Paul, if because we would never have done that anyway. But slowly over the next decade, all of those tasks, somehow they, I'm really struggling to get this out, but they will start to become more normal.
And so the people who would have done that will no longer have a place to do that. That was difficult for me to say, and I don't know if I got that out there correctly. But here's a different thing, and that is, I wonder if the world is better off with less entertainment. Hold on. What I mean by that is, is the lack of proficiency.
What makes it interesting that the lack of abundance of proficiency, how many incredible guitarists can humanity conjure up at any one time? And the answer's, I don't know, a couple of thousand maybe people who you'd actually go and see play in the guitar. The same for the harp, the same for painting.
But we seem to be in a world where these skills are gonna be available to everybody. And in the most profound thing I'm gonna say today, I'm gonna steal a quote from the Pixar film, the Incredibles. and there's a character in the Incredibles who said, when everybody's a superhero, no one is. And let that sink in for a minute.
If we can all do these incredible things, where's the space for the creativity? Where's the space for the awe? Where's the space for the individual who can be above the rest of us? Because they're just so sublimely talented. I wonder if that's something we need to worry about. Do you know what I mean by that?
Like the, fact that something is rare, makes it desirable. Gold is not abundant, so we treasure it. it's shiny and quite nice, but apart from that, but if there's AI films everywhere and AI music everywhere, and it, really is dialled in to just squeeze out the last possible bit of endorphin in your brain, what do we do?
is that a desirable thing? Discuss.
[00:50:03] Tess Needham: Yeah, you've raised a really good point. I don't know that I've thought about it from that perspective before, so
[00:50:11] Nathan Wrigley: No, I hadn't until just now as well, so yeah.
[00:50:13] Tess Needham: Okay. I don't have preformed ideas about this. however, I do think one thing that I'm finding with my, AI explorations is that it, it's still really important that the ideas are coming from me.
And so I, do think that it's like the idea is more important even maybe, than the execution. And the execution is a way of communicating the idea. but it's really about the idea. And the idea is something that's so human. AI can certainly have idea, it can certainly spit out ideas, but it doesn't actually know if the ideas are any good.
it needs the human kind of judgement for that at least. Now, all of these things you have to say like for right now,
[00:51:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:51:05] Tess Needham: but also that humanity at the core of something is like how we connect with each other. And I don't know that's ever gonna go away, like the way that we connect to another human.
Maybe it's through some AI thing that they have produced, but it's the, idea at the heart of it is theirs. I hear what you're saying about proficiency. I'm not sure. Like I've never been someone who is highly proficient at one thing. I'm a very much a generalist and have always throughout my life been like, I am good enough at this, so I'm gonna move on to the next thing.
'cause I just, there's so much to learn. but if you are like really at the top of your game and like the best guitar player ever, I think,
[00:51:50] Nathan Wrigley: Is interesting, isn't it?
[00:51:52] Tess Needham: there's like
[00:51:52] Nathan Wrigley: go to see an AI simulation of a great guitarist? I don't know that I'd ever would. I think there's a
[00:52:01] Tess Needham: I wouldn't, there's actually a, there's a quote that I've got somewhere, I've put it somewhere, which is, from, Margaret Boden, I think it was, who said robots could be programmed to play a perfect game of tennis, but nobody would
[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: That's true.
[00:52:21] Tess Needham: so it's true like we like imperfection, it's one of those things that makes us human.
Could a robot be programmed to be imperfect? Sure. But we would always know that it's a robot. And so it's been programmed, it's not, there's not that like anticipation of them maybe stumbling, or hitting the ball in slight the wrong way or whatever it is. I want to believe that we will always value that.
I really hope that we do always value that.
[00:52:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:52:52] Tess Needham: but, one other thing that's really interesting with AI and with all of this, like democratisation of all of these skills now that's happening is that we are all able to share our ideas, like in a much, we're able to get to certain outputs that we never thought we could before in a more like straightforward way.
So there's this framework that I, really, that I came across that I really love, which is, like the loom the slide rule in the crane. And so it's talking about the tools. Yeah, I've talked about it a little bit, but it's so just for your listeners who may not be aware, but the loom is, referring to a tool that replaces a human as the loom replaced a human weaver.
The slide rule is something that assists us. So it's like a tool that assists us, to do something faster or better or more accurately or whatever. And then the crane is something that helps us do a tool that helps us do something that was never possible for us to do before. And so I've been like, I think it's a really useful framework to think about AI tools.
So for instance, like having chat GPT generate an illustrated, like having chat GPT putting in a prompt that says draw a robot that was, looked like it was drawn in a dip pen and et cetera. That is a loom like that is replacing something that I can do. And not only that I can do, but that I find really enjoyable.
I find it really like important for me to do that. And then a crane is something like what I experienced when I was vibe coding, where I was like, this is something that I could never have done before. yeah, I could have gone and learned coding for several years, but I didn't have time to do that.
there was no real reality in which I was doing that. so the, but then what I was, considering and what I mentioned earlier is For, an engineer who has spent their whole life learning to code, like maybe vibe coding is a loom. Like maybe it's something that replaces something that they really enjoy doing and that the crane for them, the thing that was out of reach is generating an illustration with AI and who am I
[00:55:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's like an interchangeable set of skills. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. So
[00:55:17] Tess Needham: it's different for
[00:55:18] Nathan Wrigley: the, horizon of all possibilities for each person. Oh, that's fas. Okay. I hadn't really thought that one through. So you become,
[00:55:26] Tess Needham: think just depending on your relationship to the task that you're getting AI to do for you, I think it really changes the way that you feel about using AI for that task. and whether it feels,
[00:55:38] Nathan Wrigley: if it's it's a bit like not on my land kind of thing, if it encroaches on the thing that you've spent a couple of decades getting really good at, that feels bad and invasive. But if it enables you to get, a picture out there in a way that your hands simply couldn't do with a crayon or a pen or whatever, I just use the word crayon.
I don't know if that's is that like a, do
artists use
[00:56:02] Tess Needham: I've got crayons. I've got crayons in my art supplies.
[00:56:05] Nathan Wrigley: but if it allows me to do that good, all happy and maybe that's where we're headed, then maybe there's this version of just self-improvement, but at the same time a recognition that those moats that we've put around ourselves, this thing that we are really good at, those moats are gonna become a little bit shallower and a little bit easier to traverse because everybody's gonna have a small boat now to get across it.
I really extended the moat analogy there probably a
[00:56:34] Tess Needham: did. You did.
[00:56:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
Yeah.
[00:56:36] Tess Needham: but one thing that I was thinking about a lot with my movie making, movie generation is, how important it is that I've had, what is it now, 30 years of experience making performance and telling stories. And that's like all of that, back to my 15-year-old self making videos with my friends or being in my rock band with my friends or whatever.
Like all of that is part of the, rich tapestry of Tess, that, that means that I can make a better quality output with ai. I have that quality bar. I notice the small things. I know how to make a story. I know how to do like beats, all of this stuff that I don't mean like beatboxing, I mean like beats of a story.
I dunno how to beatbox. but the, like, all of those things are, it's important or it's the output is better because of my experience doing the actual thing. when I was vibe coding, I was like, whoa, I'm like really out of my depth here and this is super cool that I can suddenly, fix something on my website that I couldn't fix before.
But also I have no idea if what I'm creating is actually good code. it's still a black box to me. And there's still, if I was gonna be like making a SaaS product or something, I'd still want an actual engineer to work on the code. so there's still a room for that expertise. But I do worry about, and I have kids and I worry about what's happening with education and like what are, what world are they coming into and how are they going to learn those foundational skills that will make them better?
[00:58:30] Nathan Wrigley: just gonna slightly segue a
[00:58:31] Tess Needham: I just opened another can of
[00:58:32] Nathan Wrigley: in the press recently, I think it was Finland, it might have been Sweden. Anyway, it was a Scandinavian country. in the very recent news, they've got rid of all technology in their schools. They've decided that the sort of learning via iPad and computers was a bit for them at least.
That was a, road that they went down just like everybody else. And they've decided that they're gonna go back to paper-based books and learning and teachers and, whiteboards and all of that because they've figured out, actually, you know what, that was a blind alley. We, it all looked very good on paper, but it didn't actually give us the results that we want.
So that's interesting. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna end it 'cause we're heading to the, hour mark here. but the, hi, so I'm, my background is history and what history shows is that it is entirely possible for humans to make dreadful mistakes on a really grand scale and you don't see them coming.
But historians have great fun picking apart. How did that, how did the Roman Empire go from that to just rubble? How did that happen in such a short space of time? And so the pessimistic and curmudgeonly side of me, there's, gonna be a bit of me forever, I think, which will worry about this.
and, I don't see it as an impossibility that some of the stuff that we are portraying as grey and brilliant and interesting, perhaps not, perhaps there's a version of the future. Maybe it's a one in a thousand futures, maybe it's 10 in a thousand, maybe it's 999 in a thousand where AI turns out to be, not the thing that we hoped it would be.
and as if nature was in some way listening to my words, it just started to heavily rain outside. it's, I'm getting some backup from the,
[01:00:29] Tess Needham: neither of us are religious, but
[01:00:32] Nathan Wrigley: so Tess, I don't know if we've solved it. I've certainly enjoyed batting it around with you and, can you not hear that? That's so loud.
[01:00:40] Tess Needham: I can hear it a little bit. A little bit. Yeah.
[01:00:42] Nathan Wrigley: maybe that was a perfect way to, to bring it to a close. Tess Needham, thank you for batting that around with me. I hope that none of it was too uncomfortable and I appreciate you chatting to me.
Thank you so much.
[01:00:52] Tess Needham: I loved the chat. Thank you so much, Nathan.
[01:00:54] Nathan Wrigley: It's so loud.
Okay, that's all we've got for you today. I am sure that you enjoyed that episode. Wasn't that a little bit different? Very nice to chat to Tess Needham today.
If you did enjoy it, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 475 and leave as a comment there. Why not leave as a comment there even if you didn't enjoy it. That would be nice as well.
Okay, we'll be back next week, 2:00 PM UK time on a Monday for This Week in WordPress. That's at wpbuilds.com/live. But we'll also be back for a podcast episode next Thursday. Don't forget, search for WP Builds in your podcast player of choice. And we'll be back next week.
You stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
