Desiree (00:24.319)
Welcome everyone to the NoNormalShow brought to you by BPD. This is where we leave all things status quo, traditional, old school, and boring in the dust. And celebrate the new, the powerful, the innovative, the bold, while delivering the future to healthcare’s leading brands. I’m Desiree Duncan, Vice President of Health Equity and Inclusion. And I’m joined by Stephanie Weirwool, Senior Vice President. Actually that is old. I’ll start over. I’m Desiree Duncan, Vice President of Health Equity and Inclusion. And I’m joined by Stephanie Weirwool.
EVP of engagement and Emily Baker, AVP of engagement strategy. Hi, we got the, I don’t know, third of the engagement team on here.
Stephanie Wierwille (01:02.994)
That’s right. That means it’s going to be a fun chat. And I have to say, Des, I have to say to you, good morrow.
Emily Baker (01:04.43)
Bye!
Desiree (01:10.753)
Yes, good morrow Stephanie. Thank you for that. Wow.
Stephanie Wierwille (01:15.345)
Throwback, throwback to No Normal Show 2021 maybe.
Desiree (01:20.501)
Yes, whenever Chris says hello, that’s my greeting. Don’t know where it started from, but I’m glad the tradition carries on. And it throws you off just like I expected. But we had a wild weekend of AI things, or a wild week, but before that, the weekend gave us the Grammy. So happy.
Grammy to Beyonce for getting the first, finally, album of the year for all those who celebrate. But did you watch? Did you catch all the things, all the performances? I think Stephanie, you did.
Stephanie Wierwille (01:58.363)
I did, I was glued to it. I felt like the Grammys were back. I felt like it was a really, really good Grammy show for the first time in several years. And there was a lot of highlights. Yes, Beyonce, Chappell Rhone, Dochi, that was amazing. But for me, I think the big highlight was Mother Monster is back from 2010. So Lady Gaga released her new music video. It like it was sponsored by MasterCard perhaps, but anyway, Abracadabra.
And I felt like I was transported back 14 years ago to the good times. So glad she’s here to save us from ourselves in 2025. That was my takeaway. Emily, what about you?
Emily Baker (02:39.054)
I was most excited by Dochi. I love Dochi. I just think she’s so creative and cool and just like, I know she didn’t win Best New Artist, but I feel like she could have won that one too. her, like when she got up and cried and I was just like, you deserve everything and more Dochi. I love her.
Desiree (02:58.784)
Yeah, a big win for all the women in music these days. And, you know, of course we’d be remiss not to recognize the fact that Lauryn Hill was the last Black woman artist to win album of the year for Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which she is still holding onto, has not put out a new album in 20 plus years. But…
Emily Baker (03:24.014)
Well, when it’s perfection, know, just stop while you’re ahead.
Desiree (03:28.061)
Yes, we’re waiting. waiting. I did not watch the Grammys because I for some reason music is where I start to feel like an old person. I’m not keeping up with the pop stars. I of course, like I got a text from a friend that was like, my God, Beyonce won. And I was like, wait, the Grammys tonight? I’m like, wow, it’s happening. But I am in deep mode of preparing myself for the Oscars. That’s where all of my attention is going.
Stephanie Wierwille (03:41.296)
I feel you.
Stephanie Wierwille (03:58.582)
Yes. Who are you hoping wins Best Picture?
Desiree (04:01.863)
Listen, I just saw The Brutalist and no notes, perfection, hands down best movie I think I’ve ever seen on the screen in my entire life. So that’s I’m rooting for. What about you all?
Emily Baker (04:14.366)
all three hours of it does.
Desiree (04:17.012)
Yes, they give you an intermission. They give you a 15 minute intermission and it was amazing. I’m like, wow, why couldn’t all the, like you set the standard. Now all the other films seem to do the same.
Stephanie Wierwille (04:28.248)
An intermission? I love that. So you can get up and get snacks. That’s what we need.
Desiree (04:32.654)
Yes. Yes, we were in one of the first rows. I, of course, I’m always like paying attention. So I was like the first one out of my seat to avoid the line. But yes, 15 minute intermission was a brilliant touch to that film.
Who all are you rooting for?
Stephanie Wierwille (04:52.132)
I think you all know mine. Well, Complete Unknown, but Wicked, yes, absolutely, but Complete Unknown, just, I mean, either one, either one was phenomenal. I’m a Bob Dylan stan. But I also hope that Wicked sweeps across many categories.
Emily Baker (04:54.688)
Is it wicked? no, no. A complete unknown.
Desiree (05:13.155)
I don’t think I knew that about you being at Bob Dylan’s stand.
Stephanie Wierwille (05:16.333)
Yeah.
Desiree (05:17.855)
All the love. All right. And I guess Emily, you’re rooting for Wicked, I imagine.
Emily Baker (05:25.196)
Yeah, I still need to see a lot of the contenders. I’ve been like a little bit delinquent in staying up with it. So the only one I’ve seen is Wicked, so by default I’m rooting for Wicked. But I want to see Complete Unknown. I want to see The Brutalist, although I don’t know if I can handle that three hour plus in theaters. I want to see Conclave. Is that one up for? Okay, yeah. I haven’t seen like any of these. I need to.
Desiree (05:46.236)
yes.
Yes, concave was great. Conclave was great. Concave is something very different. Conclave was great. Wicked was delightful. And I do need to see a complete unknown. So, but.
Stephanie Wierwille (06:00.727)
Yes. But if if we learned anything from the last award show, it might be Amelia Perez because that one really, really swept. So who knows?
Desiree (06:12.53)
You know, I don’t even want to get into that one. Very, very controversial takes on that film. But with that, a lot of controversial takes on AI as well this past week. So let’s jump into that. OpenAI just released their operator. It’s debuted that the AI agents are among us.
Stephanie Wierwille (06:15.959)
haha
Stephanie Wierwille (06:20.833)
Yeah.
Desiree (06:36.318)
This allows AI agents to browse the web and take actions for us, such as buying groceries, booking concerts, tickets, booking a restaurant. There was of course a video that came out that walked through how this all takes place. But I know right now it’s only offered to those that are in the, think $200 a month subscription, but will be made available to the rest of us soon.
Operator takes over your mouse, your computer, and you can watch it, browse the web, click and take actions, all of those good things. But of course, they won’t make any final decisions and make any final purchases without your approval, as well as making sure that the logins are still coming from you so that it doesn’t just take off. But, you know, who knows? But then the very next day, Perplexity announced their AI agents, which can run on Android devices.
However, this announcement gained far less press and feels a little, hey, us too, in the mix. So poor timing for them, but obviously Stephanie, want to hear your takeaways on that.
Stephanie Wierwille (07:44.982)
Sure, I was really excited by this. think, you we’ve been talking about the future of AI as agentic and we’ve been talking about that on the show and we’ve been talking about AI agents forever and kind of imagining what they might be. so seeing it in real life was really, really, really cool. It felt like a really big moment to me. Now, obviously it’s not gonna change the world overnight, but it gave me visions of what the world could look like. And I think I got really excited about.
AI agents being able to do anything and everything, whether it’s as simple as a, make this PowerPoint deck for me, wouldn’t that be great? Pixel push around so I don’t have to do my expense reports for me. But more importantly, keep me up to date with my doctor’s appointments. Manage my investment portfolio, please, on a regular basis, thank you very much. And really anything that we can do on the web, which is everything, right?
that the agents could do for us. So I was really, really excited by this and cannot wait to see it develop further.
Desiree (08:48.251)
Yeah. So you mentioned the doctor’s appointments. That’s exactly what I needed to fork. forks. do not have my life together and I, like, once the appointments are made, like I keep them, but me actually taking the step to do it, not going to happen. But Emily, what are your thoughts?
Stephanie Wierwille (09:02.4)
Yeah.
Emily Baker (09:04.878)
Yeah, I’m super fascinated about this and could talk about it forever. So like cut me off when you’ve heard enough, but I’m so interested because when I put like my futurist hat on I see this as only the beginning like if we assume that agent use becomes ubiquitous and I think that that’s a fair assumption to make given that generative AI use has become ubiquitous and like
all previous iterations of the internet, like what start out as kind of niche, ultimately become the way everyone does everything. So pushing that forward with using AI agents, and you start to envision a world where the internet is actually optimized for the agent and not the human. And that’s a completely different internet than we’re used to. That’s something that’s optimized for machine readability instead of human readability. So it’s just like ones and zeros everywhere.
And I actually find that to be very exciting because when I continue to play that tape forward, what I envision is that the internet of today, which is, you know, trying to catch your attention in 1000 bajillion ways goes away. And that’s scary. But I also think it has a lot of opportunity because I don’t know that any of us feel like our fractured attention spans across the internet are like serving us. So it isn’t to say that.
content creators or brands or organizations can’t continue to articulate their value online, but the way that it gets to the consumer would be different. And I think that’s really exciting because I think it provides an opportunity to show your value through an agentic intermediary versus trying to have to catch everyone’s attention in the first two seconds or fill in the blank.
Stephanie Wierwille (10:54.728)
Emily, I love that. I’m obsessed. And I love, I I definitely want to dig into the implications for marketers there, but also just for a second. So let’s say you’re driving down the road and, you know, I like to leverage my 15 minute commute to work to get as much done as possible. And right now that looks like audio books and making phone calls. But imagine it’s like you talk to your car and you’re like,
I am traveling to Italy in three months and I need to research my trip to Italy and you talk to it, right? And you give it this whole just word vomit. And you’re like, just make an itinerary for me and go, you know, figure out what flights you’re gonna book, basically be my travel agent. And by the time you arrive to work, you have this whole beautiful thing ready to go and you can just hit approve.
Like that’s the kind of world that I think we’re headed towards and you can apply that to anything. You could apply that to finance, you could apply that to healthcare, you could apply that anywhere to your work. And I get super, super excited about that.
Desiree (11:51.182)
It is definitely exciting. mean, essentially just having that personal assistant with you that’s like just knocking out all of the different tasks and helping you navigate and figure out life and the things you want to achieve. But that idea of it becoming ubiquitous and that it essentially is. for some reason, I go back to the idea of when we had our Blackberries, right? And you could access the internet on them, but it was not that great.
But then of course, when the iPhone came out and all of that just really blew out of the water, it’s like now this is our present, like what is the future? Could I have ever imagined this back when there was an iPod? Absolutely not. So with this, it’s like the world is wide open and that’s very, very exciting.
Emily Baker (12:36.782)
I just think too, you think about something like making a dinner reservation or a doctor’s appointment. It’s like there was a day, and I remember, you would call the restaurant to make your dinner reservation. I haven’t called a restaurant in God knows how long because there’s apps for that now. The transition from the app-based world or the digital UX being built for humans, transitioning to the digital world being built for AI.
Stephanie Wierwille (12:37.256)
It is.
Emily Baker (13:07.146)
eradicating all of that digital work that you have to do to make your dinner reservation, your doctor’s appointment, your finances, whatever, is really exciting. Yeah.
Stephanie Wierwille (13:19.078)
It is, and so let’s talk about that for a second. So from the marketer’s standpoint, I’m loving what right now is, I think a lot of people are terming AEO, artificial intelligence engine optimization, but it’s as you’re saying, Emily, how do we start to create websites and web content that is not just for search, but also for AI and for agents? And so I don’t know who it was. I heard someone somewhere kind of tell a story about how they did a little test case and they created on their landing page,
some metadata that was built for the AI, so sort of for generative AI, not an agent, but gen AI, and then kind of ran that same search in gen AI tools and actually found it was pulling that metadata out. So that was like a very early nascent example of kind of putting something in there that humans wouldn’t see, but the AI would. So don’t take that literally, and know, I’m not saying we should go make our websites that way, but I am saying it’s a completely new mindset to your point, and we need to say, okay.
Do we need all this content we’re creating? And if so, what does it look like? And how would an agent navigate a health system website and review physician profiles in order to book a doctor’s appointment? Because maybe that’s exactly the same as a human. Right now it is in the way that OpenAI has built this, but I don’t know that it will be moving forward.
Emily Baker (14:33.154)
No, I don’t think so. And I also think that it isn’t necessarily a question of do we need all of this content that we’re creating, but it’s more about what are the use cases that individuals will be using content. Because like I think your example of driving in your car and you want to, you know, maybe you’re listening to a summary of a meeting that happened that you put through notebook LM and you’re, you know, the world becomes more.
dynamic in terms of audio, video content. this is different from, you know, the transition to video as it exists today, where I think the internet is still very like trying to hook your eyes and your thumbs to get you to watch something and then take an action here. I think the content is all about what are the places in your day to day where you have the opportunity to consume content and no longer do your
Eyes really have to be a part of it because you can automate and verbalize so much content. So maybe there is a physician profile that’s optimized for AI agents because maybe I’m a consumer who prefers bullet points and I want to type it in and have Gemini explain to me who the doctors are and what they value. Maybe there’s another set of optimized profiles that are optimized for audio and they’re meant to be.
listen to because maybe Stephanie, you prefer to process information auditorily. And that’s exciting, I think, as a content marketer because it’s not less important. It’s more important that you understand the context in which your audiences are absorbing your content.
Desiree (16:10.765)
Yes, exactly. I mean, you’re seeing a number of like AI, essentially AI podcasts that are popping up. But like how can a health system use that as a way to get that information if your person’s not going to just scroll through all the text. So also on the flip side of that, I know in our line of work, we’re constantly thinking about behavior change. You how do we get, you know, the consumer, these patients to come to us to choose us? But what if the health system was able to use this technology to create?
their own system for how they’re able to schedule these health screenings for folks and get people in. This is especially important around like annual screening. So, and especially for folks that are already in your system. How can you help really get folks, since they’re not necessarily moving on that behavioral change thing, how do we help push that along in order to improve health for all?
Stephanie Wierwille (17:05.541)
Yeah, I mean, I just I’m really excited to see, you know, hey, you know, charge to all of our health system friends who’s going to be the first. And yes, I know there’s going to be questions about HIPAA compliance and, you know, fears and all these issues. And those are real. And we should absolutely dig into those. on the other side, I would say because this is built to navigate the Internet like a human and it’s sort of using the mouse literally that that, you know, it’s it’s really using websites as.
as they’re already created. Now, it does open all kinds of cans of worms, but let’s go, let’s figure it out, right? Like I think this is a really exciting opportunity that maybe doesn’t require the huge digital front door overhaul that it stands in front of a lot of folks today.
Desiree (17:47.083)
Yes, yes, yes. All right, so the next big headline is that DeepSeq has disrupted the world. So essentially, there’s an article about how DeepSeq is bad for Silicon Valley, but it might be great for us. So this is a Chinese AI company. They have disrupted the industry by releasing its own open source model, which is DeepSeq R1. This model offers advanced reasoning capabilities at a fraction of the cost of competitors like OpenAI.
Google, especially along the subscription model. But unlike these major players who charge the subscription fee, DeepSeek provides a more affordable alternative that’s free for the public to use. And it’s also a model that’s being pulled into some of the other platforms, like Perplexity, for you to be able to use as well. This development has significantly impacted major tech companies, stocks, and we’ve seen some of them plummet over this past week. And this is kind of an ebb and flow.
And that challenges, this can challenges the conventional belief that building advanced AI requires billions of dollars. DeepSeek’s approach is based on a relatively low cost yet powerful open weight.
DeepSeek’s approach is based on a relatively low cost yet powerful open weight model and it hits in an AI future that is more accessible and possibly more innovative. But this advancement also raises concerns regarding data privacy as you had mentioned Stephanie and potential surveillance and echoing past issues with other Chinese tech companies that we have, we just went through. But Stephanie, what’s your take of all of this?
Stephanie Wierwille (19:24.776)
Well, this has been like the hot thing for the last week, right? Like everyone’s like, what about DeepSeek? DeepSeek, it’s kind of hard to say, isn’t it? All AI, I think, has naming problems. But anyway, that’s another dive for another day. I think we don’t know yet, right? Like we don’t know. Is it really cheaper? Is it really better? I’ve seen a lot of people kind of pressure testing DeepSeek versus OpenAI versus Claude and versus Gemini and sort of saying like, yeah, it’s really good at some things and really bad at other things.
But I think what’s interesting to me, first of all, the fact that this kind of headline could essentially tank the tech sector overnight is wild, but also not too surprising. The stock market is a roller coaster. But I think it just shows where we are in the AI game. Secondly, my rose-colored glasses take is that competition is good.
If we truly can train models for more affordable costs, that’s actually showing a lot of progress. And even if R1 isn’t cheaper and isn’t better, it at least puts it out there in the universe, which is, hey, do we need $500 billion infrastructure investment? Do we need to be pouring all this money in or is there another way? And I think that’s just the way that tech goes is as you mature,
you find cheaper ways to produce, which then creates more democratization for everyone. So if we’re, I don’t think we’re there yet, we’re probably not. I think I’m willing to say we’re not there yet, but at least that conversation is good and it’s important. And then, hey, it’ll supercharge the global competition as well. So that’s my take. I don’t know if either of you all have a less rose-colored glasses take on this.
Emily Baker (21:10.862)
I agree with your take. do think competition is largely good. I guess mine is a little bit more of a skeptical take in that I am skeptical that it was as cheap to develop as they’re saying, because my understanding is the information that they released is at the end of the development process. So we don’t have a sense of what it took to ramp up to what they released last week or two weeks ago. So there’s that. I am skeptical that it was as cheap as it is
indicated to be. Second, and I guess this isn’t skeptical and this is more aligned with what you were saying, does it give echoes of sort of like the dot com bubble of right now a lot of AI startups are really overinflated, overinvested? Do they all need that much money? And is it a bad thing if some of them are cold as the winter sort of rise to the top?
But then my third and final point, which I think is a little bit more skeptical, is related to sort of the geopolitical concerns around deep-seek. You’re right. It is hard to say. And I am in no way a geopolitical expert. But I know that there are a lot of questions around the Chinese technology and what it is learning or taking from use cases around the world.
And I think that’s just another element to be mindful of.
Desiree (22:39.284)
Yeah, that’s a great question around like what is actually being kind of harvested to create this. But then I’m also reminded that whenever I go to other countries, it feels so much more technologically advanced. Just the infrastructure of the cities alone. I mean, not that I’m saying any of this is like propaganda that, know, the United States are always the first and foremost. We do have the most open system of being able to create.
Stephanie Wierwille (22:53.015)
Yes!
Desiree (23:08.417)
compared to other countries. however, I’d be remiss in thinking that other countries did not come up with more technical technological advances, than us, but let the arms race continue.
Stephanie Wierwille (23:22.374)
Yes, I gotta double down on that because I think, mean, it’s obvious. mean, since the early 2010s, China has been far ahead of the US in terms of just the adoption of tech and the way of even social media use. Like I always look at WeChat as 10 years ago, WeChat was embedded in everything in China from payment methods to shopping and beyond. And here in the US, our social media companies like Metta have just been trying to replicate that and struggling.
And I have to reference, there’s a book from 2018 that I read back then, that was six years ago, goodness, called AI Superpowers, China Silicon Valley and the New World Order by Dr. Kai Fuli. And every time I mentioned him, I have to give a shout out, he went to my high school. So I have a little bit of extra love for Dr. Kai Fuli. But he said in that book that the US would lead breakthroughs, but that China would be better and faster in engineering. And it was a whole thesis.
on how you should look to China when you think about the AI race. And here we are six years later. Again, I’m not saying DeepSeek is the be-all end-all forever, but it is an important moment in this story.
Desiree (24:30.225)
It is, and I guess I keep thinking about like how, like we were saying earlier about not knowing exactly the beginning, some of the documentation started to come out later. But how much are we able to just kind of continue to keep an eye on this information that’s coming out so that we are just abreast of what the globe is doing? And I think that’s something that’ll be more of a personal charge. But all of this brings us to our spotlight discussion, and that is essentially
where we are, the AI era, and that this essentially is the golden age of healthcare marketing. We recently just put out a blog that’s kind of going all in on this, and that essentially how AI obviously has changed the game, but this is only the beginning. Curious. Some of these items, we’re looking at the AI-driven marketing. This is, as we said, a ubiquitous, it’s essential, it’s embedded in all the things, all of our devices. I just got
Couple months ago, we got the new iPhone, it’s built into that. My new MacBook, it’s built into that. It’s just gonna become part of our everyday life. But curious, Emily, your thoughts on all of this?
Emily Baker (25:43.374)
Yeah, I think it’s really exciting. mean, there’s sort of two ways that I am thinking about the golden age of healthcare marketing. And I guess I think the golden age of marketing, but why I think it’s so relevant to healthcare marketers and healthcare audiences is healthcare is such a personal topic, right? So.
Yes, personalized marketing has been, you know, the buzzword for who knows how long, but it’s a very different understanding of personalized when you think about like selling sneakers versus like your healthcare marketing. So I think on the one hand, AI provides you the ability to do more faster, which is exciting when you think about versioning and personalization in terms of what’s possible to reach
so many segments of your audiences exactly where they are, circling back to what I was saying earlier, do you have audiences that would prefer to read the information? Do you have audiences that would prefer to listen or watch? Do you have audiences that would prefer you offer that they come to your facility and speak with them directly, which you might have time for if AI allows us to maximize and make our days more efficient, right? Then on the other side, I think is the big sort of nebulous
creativity discussion, which is that AI can really help you be more creative and brilliant in the work that you’re creating. And there are a lot of different ways I think it can help you do that. But I’m interested in Stephanie, your thoughts before we dive in there.
Stephanie Wierwille (27:16.716)
Well, I kind of want to dive in there actually, because that’s what I think that’s what is left out of a lot of the conversations. And yes, I love the idea of AI as a task assistant. You all know that I’m preaching that every single day of how do we leverage generative AI tools to do the mundane tasks for us. That is the number one conversation happening right now in marketing. The conversation not happening is actually what you just set up, Emily, and what I think this blog post goes into a little bit, which is.
How can we use it to be more creatively brilliant? How can we use it to do things that have never been done before? So here’s a really stupid example. Let’s say we wanted to shoot a TV spot on the moon. We can’t. Well, with AI, you could do that, right? Stupid example. And I think the point there is, so far all we’ve seen in the video realm is like the Coca-Cola commercial, which has its pros and its cons and created a lot of controversy.
And it’s basically recreating something that they could have created anyway, but doing it faster and maybe more efficiently. The question I pose is, what are the amazing ideas that have never actually even been thought of that either generative AI could help us get to because it helps us get there faster or because it can curate and collate data in a much bigger way than we’ve ever been able to do before?
or because it can help us produce something. Maybe it’s an experience, maybe it’s not video. And I don’t know what those are. And I think that’s what’s exciting. And that’s the conversation that I think we should be having more often as marketers because it doesn’t erase humans from the mix, it elevates humans.
Desiree (28:54.15)
Yeah, it reminds me of what it it puts more of these tools in our hands, right? You know, 10, 20 years ago, even shooting a video, you had to have like an insane camera that you had to operate and then drag that footage onto an edit bay and edit all this stuff. Then the cell phone, excuse me, the smartphone allowed us to be able to just do that right from our fingertips. So it’s.
really gonna be leaps and bounds what we’re able to do from this standpoint and match it up. I know a lot of creatives feel like it takes away from the craft of art and creativity, whereas another camp, folks like us, feel like it boosts creativity. But I guess the question is, of course, depending on what you’re inputting into it, are you gonna get the CS sameness or are you gonna get creativity? And it’s all gonna be about how much information you give it.
how you’re able to prompt it to take you to that next level of creation. But yeah, it’s exciting to see what’s possible in our hands and we can do it ourselves.
Stephanie Wierwille (30:01.408)
Yeah, and I wanna add to that because I think, I know we have several episodes in the pipeline, one of them, which Chris had mentioned last time that we wanna do, which is a debate on whether AI will take jobs or not. I’ll throw in there, we should also have a debate about this topic and have creative folks take sides. I think that’d be really interesting. But one note is back to that Coca-Cola holiday commercial.
Emily Baker (30:01.486)
you
Stephanie Wierwille (30:26.814)
It took a huge team of people, really brilliant, incredible, smart, creative people to pull that off. The point is, yes, it allows us to do things faster, but right now, I’m gonna say right now, it’s not pushing the creatives out of the mix. It’s actually bringing them in and just using the skills differently. Emily, I know you have a really hot take about this, so I wanna hear your take.
Emily Baker (30:52.528)
Yeah, I honestly don’t know which hot take you’re referring to, but I do have one hot take. Well, one of my hot takes is that I completely agree with you in that, you know, these tools aren’t yet capable of running so low. So you are still your output is as creative as you are. And so that is one of my hot takes, which is
Stephanie Wierwille (30:55.731)
All of them, all of them.
Emily Baker (31:16.214)
Y’all, we put out bad creative now. I mean, not us, not BPD, but the world of marketers at large. Like, are you telling me that everything a human created is brilliant? Absolutely not. So what is different about the fact that I’m using an AI tool versus
Desiree (31:19.377)
haha
Emily Baker (31:32.706)
does your point of like, now we have smartphones that change the way we shoot video. Like it’s only elevating the brilliance that you have and the insights that you’re developing and coaching it and prompting it to help you build something great. And if you’re not willing to do that, then yeah, maybe the work isn’t gonna be that creative, but like, would it have been in the first place? And then my other hot take, this one I think is a little less hot, a little less spicy.
is just that, you know, one of, it’s less about will AI make us more or less creative or what does AI, what impact will AI have on creativity, but it’s more about how might AI change creativity or allow us to be more creative. And for me, one of the things that I think is so interesting, and I’ve talked about this a lot, is the way that because AI,
tools, generative AI are basically like aliens from outer space and have no context about the world that we live in. You have to explain everything to them. And as marketers, I think we so often live in such a context heavy world that we, you know, cut ideas off at the past before we even consciously allow ourselves to consider them because we know that this individual isn’t going to like that or this type of style just isn’t ever going to fly. So we, we,
we close ourselves off and we don’t even know that we’re doing it. But because we have to explain the work that we’re doing or the organization that we’re marketing on behalf of at such a granular and elementary to an alien level, it just sort of to me unlocks a lot of really interesting things. And I think that’s what human creatives do really well is that they’re able to see, take a like,
a chessboard and see it for its individual atoms and its cohesive whole. And they’re able to know, like, if I amp up this element or that element, I can create something really new and brilliant. And I think AI just allows us to come at that in a different way, not a better or a worse way, just different.
Desiree (33:43.44)
You know, that context you mentioned, I don’t know, I don’t want to cut you off Stephanie, if you had something add to that. So that context that you mentioned about having to give more of that to our AI alien, right? So going back to the film I mentioned earlier that I’m obsessed with after watching The Brutalist. If you remember during the Golden Globes, the director, Brady Corbett, when he was accepting his award, talked so much about the auteur.
Stephanie Wierwille (33:48.948)
go for it.
Desiree (34:11.536)
of creating a film and that all of the design, all of the design choices, the filming choices, the fact that they shot on film, that these every element of that film was intentional and was getting back into that idea of like dreaming up a world, but like creating it with even using the old school tools because using film to produce this. And so this was a $10 million budget film.
to watch it, you would never believe it, because it is incredibly beautiful. But they did use AI. What did they use AI for? It was for the adjusting the Hungarian accent that Adrian Brody had in the film. They used this tool called Respeacher. And essentially to give it that actual authentic feel, because of course, it’s one of the hardest language to really, especially if you’re coming from an Anglo-Saxon background, it’s one of the harder.
dialects to really capture authentically. So they took his voice through and just fix a few things when he was speaking Hungarian, not English, to adjust the accent. And then, yes, at the end, there was a little bit of generative AI. They used mid-journey for the final sequence of the film when they were essentially they created a couple of renderings of different types of architecture and the buildings that the architect in the film future would have done.
But there is something that I’m really loving about the idea of marrying the two worlds where you’ve got the true art form of film, but then you’re also just making sure that you are providing the most authentic piece of it through just adjustments as he did for the accent. But curious anyone’s thoughts on that.
Stephanie Wierwille (35:56.815)
I love that. think that’s such a great example of, you know, back to the right now, the billion dollar question is, are humans best at that humans can lean into and where can we leverage AI and all the tech in the places to make us even better? I think that’s the key question that we’re all trying to answer. And if I’ll just add to that, I mean, I think that the most interesting work I’m seeing that’s
coming out with AI to your point, Des, like the film you just shared, I’m seeing it in my LinkedIn feeds from the most brilliant creative directors that are already amazing creative directors, right? They’re the ones that are putting out the really interesting short films I’m seeing digitally. If I try right now with the current state of the tools, it is just, it’s not, it’s not working.
Now, will it in the future? I think what’s exciting is it can democratize creativity. And the iPhone did that to your point, Emily. And I think that AI will be able to democratize creativity, but it will also allow the most brilliant minds to level up even more. So just one quick example, I’ve always wanted to be a songwriter and it’s just never been my thing. I use my robot friend to, I’ve been using my robot friend to write songs for.
some time now and only recently did I actually land on one that was actually good because I think the tech has increased and it was an amazing feeling. Like it was a really awesome feeling to be like me who is not a songwriter was able to create something that I was really proud of and it was really emotional because it democratized that creativity. It doesn’t mean that the greatest songwriters out there are not as valuable at all in the same way that the iPhone didn’t mean that the greatest videographers were not as valuable. So.
I guess that’s the way that I would sort of justify both sides.
Desiree (37:45.518)
Well, now I’m kind of curious, like, what was your process? Like, I know you’re a pianist. Did you use it primarily for the lyrics or other? Okay.
Stephanie Wierwille (37:52.766)
Yeah, for the lyrics. I did the music myself, but the lyrics is what I’ve never been able to nail. And, you know, I went through the process of let’s start with, you know, here’s my general direction and here’s the meter that I want. And, you know, here’s kind of the topic and let’s brainstorm topics. And I did it on a plane. So the whole thing took maybe less than 30 minutes.
and we landed in a really beautiful place. And no, I’m not gonna play that for anybody, but for me, it gave me a sense of joy that I’ve been trying to reach my whole life. And I’m not a songwriter. I wanna put that out there. And I’m not, this doesn’t make me one. It just gave me a sense of my own little private creative joy.
Desiree (38:21.186)
Boo.
Desiree (38:34.744)
What if it does? So I, going back to the seventies when the synthesizer first came on to the, to the, to the theme and a lot of musicians and artists were like, like I remember queen, my favorite band in the world. They had put out an album. it was the, my God, it was the day at the symphony album. And they had, they always put a liner notes about like no synthesizers within the eighties came.
And those albums were all synthesizers, right? And then you get to the early rap scene and the reason why the Dr. Dre’s of the world are major players in the game of music. And it’s because they were able to harness technology to create and generate and even twist some of the existing music to create more. And then you get into electronic dance music where, you know, you’re not using instruments anymore. You’re generating sound.
you know, through these systems. So it’s a piece of this. It’s just, this is a part of our evolution and every factor of our lives and creativity. And people, course, when it always first comes out, like you saw the queen, people are gonna say, no, you can’t do that. That’s cheating. And just like with this film, there was all of this conversation around, can this film actually be up for an Academy Award because they use pieces of AI? And I’m like, honey, we’re in Hollywood. Everything is edited and created at a thin air. So why can’t this be a part of it?
Stephanie Wierwille (39:59.365)
Yes.
Desiree (40:01.281)
But yeah, it’s a very, very exciting time.
Emily Baker (40:04.622)
I totally agree. And I think it’s so exciting because to your point, Stephanie, like the creation of the iPhone didn’t make skilled videographers less important, but it created a new skill that the best videographers needed to adopt. And I think it’s natural that when new technology comes out, think scarcity mindset, which I love that premise,
Stephanie Wierwille (40:22.918)
Yes.
Emily Baker (40:34.122)
around is what I do at risk. And I have spent X amount of years and X amount of hours developing expertise in this area. And is that at risk? But I think with that abundance mindset, it absolutely doesn’t. It just gives you more. And I think what you see in like music or film, it’s never
Or rarely is it the person who jumps out of the gate with the new technology who goes on to create something truly brilliant. It’s the people who bring with them the context of what came before and how things used to be made and what you wanted to do or didn’t want to do because of those factors and then layers on top new technologies to build something really, really beautiful. Like you talk about Queen does. And it made me think of like David Byrne of the Talking Heads, I think is another great example who
has so much musical knowledge, but continues to stay modern and continues to create with what’s new and available to him. And I think that’s very inspiring.
Stephanie Wierwille (41:37.231)
Mike, drop Emily and look at you. You’re channeling Jason Brown, BPD CEO with that abundance mindset. I love that. Shout out.
Desiree (41:37.366)
Yeah.
Emily Baker (41:44.578)
Me too.
Desiree (41:45.312)
Ha
All right. So, mean, since these feels like the key takeaway here is, you know, keep exploring, keep dreaming, keep creating and, you know, chase your wildest dreams of becoming a songwriter. and I, my God, I feel like a history with rest. I’m always like bringing up this old stuff to like give context for the new. with all of that, for all of you listening, we be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.
The No Normal Rewind, which goes even deeper into our discussions you’ve heard just like today on The NoNormal Show as we want to hear from you. So shoot us an email at no normal at bpdhealthcare.com so that your question may be featured in our next episode. And make sure you share the show with friends and colleagues and give us a review and rating on iTunes and Spotify. All of that would be greatly appreciated. And until next time, don’t ever be satisfied with the normal, push that No Normal y’all and we’ll talk to you next week.
