YouSaid · the spoken record

Cameron Dallas

lines on the record: 64
first: 2023-03-30
most recent: 2023-03-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, it's kind of mind bending. We talked about the sliding spectrums. It's like human to computer generated, but then it's also, what is the sliding scale between listening to everything someone says to religion? On that note, sometimes I come away from podcasts with, oh, I know more about this subject. And I do feel like I know more about this subject, but I also was like, oh gosh, my brain is spinning. Like, I don't know where any of this is going. But yeah. Trevor, Isaac, thank you so much for going through all this with us, for being early movers in this space and setting the tone, setting boundaries, experimenting. And yeah, thanks for spending this time with me.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say problematic part of the pod potentially, but our first employee was a woman named Savannah Pecani. And I remember we were talking and she was like, he keeps saying scalable celebrity. But what does that look like? And I was like Like that's what it looks like to me, you know, like these narratives that have like, you know, shaped our reality because this figure has been able to touch people all over the world and shaped the way they behave. Some would argue that there are people in our current lives, Kardashians, whomever, that have near, like demigod power. And I had to imagine that at some point you'll have something that matches some of those traditionals.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe an interesting question that I didn't have planned, but since we went down this rabbit hole, do you guys think that at some point we will have a virtual influencer that a religion is built around?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We kind of thought about scalability and kind of what makes that experience exciting is creating some type of scarcity important for making that thing valuable is like to be defined. I think the variable rewards component of social, that kind of like brain hack of a slot machine brain hack is what makes a lot of social experiences sticky. And so the idea that you could just message Emma Chamberlain and she responds right away or pop up on your screen might devalue.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First person I heard say, like trying to make this celebrity scalable, all this like from Trevor originally. I think we ran into problems with Michaela just because we were so early, right? Like the expensive cost of creating animated content this time was like that wasn't really scalable, but I think we're getting to a point pretty quick where it is.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, something that's coming to mind you mentioned synchronicity, but like the reason that celebrities can't interface with every one of their fans today is because like they are in meat space. Like they only have so much time. They need to sleep. They can only engage with so many of their fans. But actually technology can change that, right? And that could be for the human celebrity who now just like has leverage through technology, but it also especially can be used for these virtual influencers. The idea of being parasocial maybe doesn't exist at some point because actually you're not just listening to people talk. You can actually like after a podcast go have this virtual conversation with the podcast host. I don't know if I'm like extrapolating too far, but that just like dawned on me where I'm like, oh, actually, the limitation existed before because we didn't have technology.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think to me there's three elements that I'm really excited about, and these are all amounts that are of the metaverse. To me, what the metaverse really is, and it's persistence, right? So a character, a digital character, which to me is a brand, it's a living story, it's persistent. It doesn't exist in one single world anymore, right? So you don't have Drake from Last of Us existing just in a video game that people are after in that one situation, and then that's it. Like it starts to be able to go in any other medium instantly, right? So this persistence that that character actually has a history story of life, and that's there. It's synchronous, meaning you can actually interact with it. So that's kind of something you just mentioned there where maybe you can go and talk to Nathan Drake. That's a simple thing. But I think there's a lot more interesting implementations of that. And find these interoperable. And that means like these kind of like persistence, these walls that create barriers between different mediums of different things, they kind of go away. Like technology is an enabler and like a democratizing force. And I think what it's going to allow is for really compelling characters and brands.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“repatriate to your community i think that's really compelling you know for generations of people that watch elbis walk off the or the rolling stones or whatever else like Sort of on the TikTok dances in emotes. I would love to see technology enable stuff like that. So there's all kinds of stuff I could riff about, but things like that to me are kind of exciting maybe on the frontier.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why culture is not viewed as intellectual property. And you could almost see influencers as kind of like these rent-seeking middlemen that have the aesthetics that allow them to do a dance that was popularized by some six-year-old girl in the hood and capture a lot of the value that should have flowed back to that person, right? So I think the really challenging part with like culture and why it's not intellectual property and why it's often caught in the crosshairs that's being either like cultural appropriation or like unlicensable is that attribution is really hard and like remitting payments to the people that you identified as being a part of a culture or being owed for using that representation. And I think digital payments like blockchains, right? And I think tools that allow you to like quickly identify someone where they exist culturally. And so to me, the idea that as a black person, you could identify a community and say like, look, all of this rad shit happening here has created value that we can like.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I could do this for years, but we could just riff. But I mean, obviously the decentralized one is something that we're very excited about and we're trying to build a Dapper. You know, one thing I think about a lot is”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might these influencers actually be able to engage with their audiences more, like use AI to actually be the one responding, you like train an AI model based on this character and they actually become like not a sentient being, but someone that's actually able to engage. That's one example. You could also imagine a decentralized influencer where basically not only is their worth distributed amongst a bunch of people, but actually like what they do, their narrative might be influenced by the people who have some sort of ownership over them. So Trevor, why don't we start with you and just like any ideas on how technology actually advances, empowers our ability to create these characters?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think right now what I'm thinking is that look, the idea that you're going to reject this and then it's just going to stop in this tracks is just the most wishful thinking I can ever imagine, right? So the thing to do is try to like identify the parts of it that you don't agree with and try to figure out how can we make that better, right? So if it's rights to artists images that they created the artwork and they should get fractional compensation or you should be able to like out of being having images, these are all very valid things. So again, I'm not like, you know, dismissing any of them. It's just that there's a lot of people who are going to react so negatively. It's like, no, no to AI, like cancel all this stuff. And it's like, that's not going to happen. Even if that was the right move, if you were right about that, it's not a realistic option. So what's the positive thing we can do here to try to make this better?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I've been doing that for years. I've been in VFX, right? So CG Movies, and people always ask me. And I can always tell because the first thing you're actually doing is, is there any reason for them to use CGI? So the first test that I could do that nobody else can do is like, of course, that's not CGI. And that would cost like $8 million extra dollars and there's no reason to do it. So there's no chance that it's CGI, right? But then there's a lot of other little tricks like once you get really familiar with the technology that you can see that maybe isn't. So one of the things that's actually hard for me is to try and step out of that and understand like what is the regular person seeing here? Like what are what is scaring them because it looks this way or what feels off? That's kind of hard to step in and out of. I think the same thing for AI now. I think artists especially have a really strong distorted reaction to it. There's a whole art community 3D art community that's really anti-AI because they have this fearful reaction that's happened every time any new technologies ever happen. That doesn't mean that I'm like dismissing any of their concerns. It's this fearful reaction that my job's going to be taken away or this other thing.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like once you look at an image and you're trying to find what's fake, you think everything's fake, right? And how many times the things that people called out were actually a photographic element? Like they were real and people were convinced like, oh, this is the thing. And then the things that were CG, they were totally fine with. And I would say it was like 50-50. Like half the time, like the things they complain about were an actual element that was from a photograph.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much the same way for us early on. They'd be like, wait a minute, this shadow's not real. Oftentimes it was like and totally real and we matched it entirely. But also one thing we had to do early on was add additional shadow to things or things like do things make people believe what they were seeing was real because the reality of the image wasn't real enough, as bizarre as that sound. Do you have to kind of like? Embellish”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I think the idea that digital goods have value, right? I can totally understand why it seems silly. The right click, say, as thing makes a ton of sense until you think about, okay, if I have a wallet that's following me wherever I go on the internet and effectively becomes the way I play status games, it may be really important for me to have a digital asset that shows that I was there or I'm a part of this thing because it leads to IRL love or jobs or wealth or whatever it is. And so I think it's probably going to be quite silly that we thought for a moment that like digital goods wouldn't have value, much the same way I'm sure it was really silly to see like luxury watches sold. We're like, what do you mean? I think it's the same thing my watch does. Why would you ever pay a markup for it? It's like, well, because I get a handshake at the country club that I wouldn't get otherwise. Beyond that, I think with the AI stuff, people try to dunk on like the fingers thing or the eyes or like the hair looking wonky. And I don't think they recognize how quickly those things will get resolved.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parodies. And so a lot of those things feel quite passe now. There are interesting conversations that I think are happening around AI, NFTs that feel very familiar to what we did, where it's like, this is new and scary, and I don't like it, so I'm going to be upset about it, even though I'm like uninformed about it. And so I think that's going to be persistent forever as the Overton window shifts. But a lot of things that we did feel quite passe right now where it was like a blue check mark next year. So you're like, yeah, that's fine. That's totally okay.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yeah, so many. That was part of the premise, though, is that we were going to be first to the door and catch all the arrows. We were going to make all the mistakes quite publicly. But I think the really lovely part about that is that we get to kind of like set the tone for how these things are understood going forward. It was pretty clear that people were going to leverage generative media, you know, virtual influencer, virtual characters to shape our reality. It's too tempting not to. And so how do we go in and kind of like set some boundaries and some ways of behaving so that people follow our path and kind of make things that are maybe more noble and righteous and other things that could have been done? That said, some really obvious things. I think people were really concerned about virtual characters and people having accounts, right? Like it seems quite silly now where they're like, wait a minute, how can this like fake person have a verified account? At some point, you had to kind of send that into like, wait a minute, what is Coca-Cola, if not a fiction? And why do they have a blue check mark? And so there were interesting things in like startup land, like what was it like Startup L. Jackson or all these Twitter accounts that were like,”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 100%. I think we talked about this earlier as a brud of like nobody's going to see a movie of Mickey Mouse or the early days and be like, oh, this isn't real. How dare you guys try to present this as real, right? It's just too clear. And when those lines start to get blurred, at least for those of us who are used to something different, we have a lot of hangups or reactions to things or like misunderstandings of what they are. And to me, it all comes back to storytelling is one of the most important things that we have as humans and the way we connect with others and the way that we evolve emotionally and all these other things. I think it's just one of the most unique things about us as animals that differentiates from anything else, right? And I think that enhancing our ability to tell those stories, especially with the world that I see coming, right, this more virtual world, there's more inclusive, this three-dimensional spatial computing metaverse, whatever you call it. I view having digital humans be able to be able to tell those stories as an essential piece of that, right? And I want to help make that look a certain way and feel a certain way and allow people to tell stories in this new.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and actually, these virtual influencers, I think, are biggest in Korea and parts of Asia, which is interesting. It's maybe a cultural thing. Maybe it's an age thing. So yeah, I like that you use the word deception because we're all being deceived in ways in terms of what's being put in front of us. But like we do fall back on these easy mechanics of like, is it real or is it not?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's no deception there. And I think that young people resonate with that. I think it's harder for adults who've been kind of primed on these ways of understanding contemporary art. And I think as technology evolves and ways of kind of. Changing those rules evolve, they feel very uncomfortable and fall back on the kind of like frameworks they understand.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they walk in front of this photo real landscape painting and they're like, now that's something I would pay for because they associate the ability to kind of like take an image from someone's eye and translate it onto a page with like craft and skill. And I think people are constantly doing the same. There aren't really good ways of understanding what is good and what is bad. It's so subjective that people are looking for concrete measures. And authenticity is one that's been tossed around quite a bit. And I think people look for things that resonate as authentic and often associate them with like, they're playing an instrument. They have a craft. And I think the reality is some of the most authentic things in the world to me are like K-pop, where it's entirely scripted and fictional, but it's presented in a super authentic way. It's saying like, hey, this is going to be so entertaining. We've plucked the most beautiful kids from Korean middle schools, give them the best choreographers and the best songs, and I've taught them to speak like Justin Timberlake. Like, you're going to love it.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a question that's happening that's been posed for a very long time. I think even since the emergence of contemporary art, right? You have this constant dialogue where it's like mom and dad walk into the museum and they're like, what are these scribbles? A three-year-old could do that.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think that maybe sometimes people misunderstand or misalign substance with what we just talked about, like reality? Because I could see how people over time will be like, okay, my response to this, everything feels fake. I want things that are truly in like meat space. And that's what they look for. But to your point, just because it's in meat space doesn't mean it's real and has substance, right? And so it can be just as manufactured and less creative than actually something that is technically virtual but has this like dimension to it, has this depth, this creativity to it.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rapid ascent things feel better on the surface. People are looking for substance. That's what will kind of separate the kind of two Michelin star chefs from these kind of like very average. And that's when I think the really folks are going to rise to the top that can augment this technology with unique skill sets.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good at making music, good at making visual art, good at creating content. It's going to be really hard to be excellent. And because models effectively are backwards looking and data kind of gets more data, I think you're going to have some like nasty feedback loops, not entirely dissimilar from like what happened to Netflix where they kind of woke up and one day everyone realized that every show was a chef's table for a different industry. And they were like, wait, I like this format. And clearly the algorithm said it worked, but I don't feel like I've gained any nutrients from this. I've just kind of been satiated. And I'm looking for nutrients. And so I think we're going to have this thing where we have this kind of like.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we could argue about real and reality adventure, right? I looked at my Instagram feed and it's a lot of scripted pranks or things that are led to make people believe that are real. It's people that have been highly altered its situation and context that the presented is real like sitting on a private jet when you don't actually own that jet. And so I think the sliding scale of reality will probably continue to move in the direction it's been heading in. But beyond that, the thing that I'm most excited about is there's kind of race to the bottom and a lot of media, like that bottom's going to hit far quicker because of AI. It's going to be really easy to be good at things.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also can't be canceled, right? Like there's these dynamics to, again, like this clean slate. Do you guys see that being the case where with enough time that is the reality where most things that we see online are not quote unquote real? And then also how does that change our relationship with the things that we see online?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are scalable, like digital humans and digital people that can actually connect with fans in a real way and have that be the way that ushers them through this kind of more virtual world and create more of a human connective layer. That's what I think would be really, really cool because I think a lot of times, you know, if you look at what's going on now with a lot of the virtual world stuff, it just feels very impersonal. So I don't think that this is not including some of the generative AI tools. The Generative AI tools and the stuff you see image space right now is very two-dimensional and I don't think that's actually going to be the solution. I think what it's going to be is when those tools are able to really generate and include into like a three-dimensional world, which is something that we will be focused on.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a reimmersive world. When you create 3D avatars or 3D things and 3D worlds, they are fully immersive and they're able to now be interoperable within a more virtual world. And that's what I think is coming, not necessarily the metaverse in terms of what we might think of it now, but just this world that's going to come more and more out of gaming where things are getting more three-dimensional. And working in 3D for like a decade, you start to understand how much we underestimate what another dimension means when you're adding it to something, like especially technological. We don't think exponentially, we think additively. So we're like, oh yeah, you add that third dimension. And it's like, yeah, just another layer. And it's not, it's completely a whole order of magnitude shift. I also really like what Trevor said earlier about rather than building this metaverse world and focusing on that, but like focusing on the character and the narrative and having them be that connective tissue, I really view that as one of the ways that really some of this stuff can start to land, which is if we can create like.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think right now, I think that there's understandably a lot of excitement about mid journey and really tools that I call pixel pushing at the end of the day. If you're doing 2D morphing of images, then I feel like if in a more immersive world, so to use the dirty M word metaverse or spatial competing.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of no easy way to say this, but And where you have an edge. So for us, it was music, right? Maybe 10,000 people are releasing music on Spotify this Friday. Can we be in the top 100? Yeah, I think knowing where you're really gifted and where you can out compete others because it's hyper competitive for sure.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love that you said that, you know, the technology is a democratizing force, but I can also see how people will look to Lil Michaela and be like, oh, I couldn't do this six years ago, but I can do it today. And so on that topic, are there any, I guess any wisdom from your like six years of doing this and building this and seeing what works, what doesn't work, how much harder it really is to get traction, to get people to care about something that you would almost like tell those people, not so much to drive them away from this idea, but to understand what it really takes.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's just so complex and so hard. And even today, I think one of the things we're going to run into a lot is this idea of like, oh, anybody can do this now with AI tools and everything else. And for me, it feels a little bit like suggesting that because Ableton is like $5 now, anybody can go be a superstar musician because they have this technology. And like technically speaking, and like having the skill set to do it is not true. And then definitely narrative and culturally and having the ability to connect with fans that way, it's definitely not true. you know, the technology piece is going to be so enabling and my hope is that it will really help people that have that ability and that desire to connect and tell these stories. I really like, I resonate so strongly with Trevor's kind of vision of storytelling being transformative. And I think that that's so true today more than ever. I think if we were five years later with Michaela, we would have been able to do things that would have been much bigger and even broader because I think a lot of the bottlenecks are going to be removed very soon.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything crashes. This is why you have big studio models to get these high end budgets that just go crazy expensive because at the end of the day, you have to get pixel perfect to fit into this film, to fit into this universe exactly, right? And it's just the only way to do that is through time and money and people at the problem. And what we were trying to do is like do that the lowest scale possible. And I think it was kind of like, we're doing this on social media. We can get to 90% quality, right? And people are not going to care if this one flyaway of her hair is slightly not quite right, right? So we're like, how can we just eliminate 90% of the cost and the time and get 90% of the quality, right? Because it's kind of that power law inverse.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's so many things. I think one of the things that anytime we're outside of a technology, we have this idea that computers, you do one plus one equals two and computers are always going to do that thing and there's nothing farther from the truth when you get into this stuff. Everything breaks.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To create stuff more efficiently. So it's like little things like that feet are hard, they often are floating. Let's not show feet. You know what I mean? Like hair is crazy difficult. So Waco is bald. You know, Michaela's hair is pretty much fixed for a couple stupid things that move. Like let's really limit things that could cause us a lot of problems and try to figure it out from there.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking back on it now, the things we kind of got backwards was I was like, okay, billions flowing into VR and autonomous vehicles and we're going to have this huge shift that's going to allow generative media to come really quickly. And then once we can do that really quickly, a lot of value is going to shift to this spiritual computing world and be able to build digital economies. And I think COVID accelerated digital economies before we actually had these tools to do generative media at the pace we'd like. And so we had to make decisions about where we could be efficient and how we could build models that could port really well. Anyone can kind of do a digital human that looks good in a one-stool image, but like speaking, you know, building really compelling facial rigs that can be driven effectively, super tough. Isaac's really good at it. It's insane. But Blaco was like, what if we just cover his mouth all the time? It's like simple things like that where he's always wearing a mask. He's always covering his face. It adds a little bit of mystery, adds some narrative, adds a constraint to creative people.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it seemed like all of the people that were building for the metaverse were building kind of universes and expecting people just to show up if you believe they will come. And I always thought that like a character would pull you into emergent platforms. So like, you know, Pikachu is the reason you get Pokemon Go. You don't want to just walk around your yard scanning stuff. You want to follow Pikachu somewhere. And so like if we kind of build the connective tissue between Web 2 and this emergent spatial computing thing, we'd be way out in front. And I think”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny. I'm thinking back to kind of like original pitch stuff. And I think initially it wasn't clear to investors how this could be a venture-sized bet. But the bet to me was always, okay, there's a coming computing shift. I called it spatial computing, which I guess is probably best now like the metaverse or whatever else.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anytime we had those kind of opportunities, we had to weigh the opportunity cost of diverting our whole team towards doing that thing and like dropping Michaela's internal narrative. And I think that was kind of one of those big learnings for like, okay, in order to see all this thing, we really would have to have a big, big investment to like get over this bottleneck at this point in time.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different ones. I think there's a huge, I would say, order of magnitude difference between the still images on Instagram and doing actual long-form animated content, right? That's stuff that's typically reserved for really high budget films and AAA games for like a hyper realistic digital human to be doing that stuff. So that was really challenging. I mean, I think we broke a lot of ground there and the technology was coming along. So we were able to do it somewhat. But like we're now in a phase where it's starting to become, I think even referring to the stuff that it's starting to become more and more realistic for smaller studios to be able to do that. But it was still a blocker. You know, I think what we were really hoping to do was somewhat blocked by the ability to like create really extensive long-form content of animated digital humans that are that's really expensive. So we want to make more characters and create more content and do all these things. You know, you get stuck in a certain platform when you build out this technology piece. It's really hard. You can't just like go to HVO and Euphoria and be like, yeah, sure, here's Michaela, put her in your film. It's not easy like that. It's expensive and time consuming.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then maybe you go from there. But this is almost like let's introduce this character super early at the lowest form possible and see what resonates and what it's and kind of build the story out of the fan engagement, which is just like kind of this radical idea. At least it wasn't me at the time. I had never really seen that. So using that then to inform the longer form content and kind of like having this pretty good idea that, okay, this is going to work now so now we can go and try to create, you know, a five minute music video out of a real-time character, which is its own hold challenge”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, early days, we were really small and it was crazy fun. We're trying to do things that were just like way beyond what a team of that size and experience level this should be trying to do. But I do think Trevor's earlier point, this really quick feedback loop, when you're starting off, you have the ability to do this quick thing and get that reaction immediately. And like you said, steer that character in her narrative to the fans that are engaging, right? Which then informs what you're going to do when you start to do more medium and long-form stuff. And I thought that was a really cool thing that I learned from Brud. It's kind of this reverse pyramid that Trevor talks about. It's like if you start with a movie, you're kind of like, here's a script. We're going to take a shot and see if it lands right. And if everything hits.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the dream was to actually expand upon that television info. One of the reasons I love the Kardashians and their narrative universe is that it's infinitely deep because they're human beings. You can work through all of Kim's father Robert Kardashians OJ case into like his family tree, into Armenian conflict. You can go as far back as you'd like. By integrating Michaela into our world, by having her work for bread or fire bread or have these like real world boyfriends and other things, like fans could go super deep and then they could start to speculate and they can rift and they can actually connect dots that we wouldn't see all the times. And so the other part of that was we really tried to build a technology organization just guides as a media organization. So we had like data science teams every week bringing back what worked and what didn't, building taxonomies on images and videos.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is funny, like thinking about a lot of these concepts, but like one of the things we had talked about a lot was inverting the traditional media pyramid, where traditionally kind of started with this like longer form asset, like a Star Wars, and then you kind of iterate in like a Star Wars video game comic book, all the way up to like a lightsaber, you could buy a target. And so you have this pyramid that moves from like big, expensive long-form asset into this smaller thing. We want to invert that and start with just like a character, a still image, and then work up that stack into like longer form television and film.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's all extremely hard, but I think narrative is unthinkably hard, right? There's all kinds of books you can read about why you shouldn't build narrative-driven media businesses because it's like building a fashion business. Like you have to keep things interesting forever. Like you can only keep lost interesting for so long. Like the Sopranos runs out of steam. Or maybe not. That shows kind of perfect. But I think one of the ways we tried to solve for it, or I thought about it was like integrating Michaela into the real world.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was one of the brilliant insights Trev had early on. It's like recognizable instantly. Because if we change it too much, right, you lose that kind of like instant recognizability. So Michaela, just like sticking with the space buns, you know, having the freckles, like these just really recognizable features. So I think that was really brilliant, honestly.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like rehashing the trauma of those moments where we're just like working around the clock trying to do things that take 100 person teams years and just a few weeks or months is totally mental. I remember a couple Halloween where there were all these fans dressed as Michaela. And one of the things we talked a lot about when we were designing the character was maintaining this Halloween costume, right? Like if you were going to be Michaela for Halloween, are there identifiers people would know who you were space buns, the freckles, like certain things like that where things that we turn out to deviate from too much?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, yeah, the Coachella moment was huge for me because it was like a technological thing. And I was like, well, this is really real. Like, we're not just doing still images in magazines and stuff. We're going to go in real time and try to interview musicians for Coachella. That was around the same time as the Calvin Klein ad.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source