What is Creativity and Learning in the Age of AI?

Summary

ASU+GSV Summit Session: "What is Creativity and Learning in the Age of AI?"

Date: May 6, 2026
Panelists:

• Dan Kwai (Learning Commons, moderator)
• Will (Heygen, Head of Customer Success)
• Brian Johnger (Adobe, Director of Education)
• Gabrielle Roizman (TikTok, Head of Industry for Education)

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Episode Overview

This live session from the ASU+GSV Summit 2026 explores how creativity is defined, nurtured, and transformed in an era where artificial intelligence is increasingly present in educational and creative contexts. The diverse panel discusses how AI can enhance creative processes, support personalized education, and foster inclusive learning communities—while probing the challenges and philosophical questions around what remains uniquely human as machines play a growing role in “creative” work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Creativity

• Dan Kwai began with a reflection on his own traditional, rigid schooling and contrasted it with his daughters' current, project-based, participatory education. He lamented the stifling of creativity in his youth and celebrated its centrality in more modern classrooms.
  • "It took me many years after I had finished my high school to kind of unlearn the very bad habits that I think it instilled for me. In particular, it was very sort of anti-creative." (01:32)
• Will emphasized authentic self-expression, regardless of the medium or output.
  • "Creativity that I've seen is really the ability to express your thoughts in a way that is authentic to yourself." (03:36)
• Brian broke creativity into three domains: classic artistic output, innovation/novelty, and the internal process/joy of making new things.
  • "The last is the sort of cognitive and affective pieces of creativity...the joy of creativity, the thrill of creating something new, getting into flow, creative confidence." (04:36)
• Gabrielle described creativity as emerging in the collision of curiosity, expression, and utility.
  • "It's where curiosity, where expression and utility collide." (05:50)

2. AI's Role in the Creative Process

• Brian critiqued the idea of frictionless AI creation, advocating for AI tools that inject productive struggle and reflection into creativity—as games do.
  • "This challenge of, well, let's create creative AI that has friction and frustrates you and challenges you, it just sort of breaks how we've been thinking about the product experience..." (07:21)
• Gabrielle positioned AI as a force multiplier, allowing creators to act as curators or moderators, scaling their impact and creative capacity.
  • "Your role becomes more of a curator and moderator and AI becomes more of the enablement piece..." (08:31)
• Will likened AI to the "bicycle for the mind" (evoking Steve Jobs), democratizing high-quality creative outputs for those without traditional skills or resources.
  • "We're actually seeing now that this essentially levels the playing field where folks that are very thoughtful, have really good ideas, are now able to use AI to help enhance the creation process..." (09:19)

3. AI Leveling the Educational Playing Field

• Will outlined the rise of personalized and multimodal learning made possible by AI, allowing educators to tailor content to individual student progression and learning styles.
  • "A force multiplier for educators to be able to reach out in ways that they otherwise wouldn't be able to." (11:23)
• Gabrielle observed how AI and platforms like TikTok facilitate learning even before students enter classrooms, by helping tell stories, inform, and guide educational choices.
  • "It's where we really do a really good job of helping advertisers push that forward." (12:54)
• Brian described AI as lowering barriers to educators' dream projects, making creative assignments feasible and boosting students' confidence by allowing "professional" results in less time.
  • "It's just a lot of those barriers, the structural ones like time, but also just the confidence barriers have sort of been removed." (13:56)

4. Building Learning Communities with AI

• Gabrielle linked AI-enabled customization to the broader workforce trend of "one person companies," stressing the importance of building AI skills for both consumption and creation.
  • "An economy that's built on potentially one person organizations. Right. Where you have more builders of AI rather than consumers of AI." (15:55)
• Brian emphasized teaching real collaboration—facilitated by AI—including feedback and diverse roles, rather than defaulting to traditional group work where students stick to familiar tasks.
  • "I think the ways in which AI can help facilitate that and build confidence...is pretty exciting because that's the actual community of learning where they walk away saying, yes, I could create this company entirely on my own, and I know it's going to be better if I work with other people." (17:35)
• Will highlighted AI’s power to reach underserved learners, supporting multilingual, individualized learning experiences at scale—bridging resource gaps in underserved communities.
  • "There's a great potential here for AI...help bring folks like that into opportunities and kind of help them develop to get closer to the mean in ways that really we're not currently set up to deliver in any other way." (19:11)

5. What Remains Human? Judgment, Curiosity, Distinctiveness

• Will asserted that judgment and discernment will remain fundamentally human, as AI models are "trained to optimize for giving you good feelings" rather than challenge or develop depth of understanding.
  • "These AI models...is really trained to optimize for giving you good feelings. But as a human being, you need to really be the person that understands when what you're seeing is actually reflective of reality..." (21:44)
• Gabrielle argued for human curiosity, curation, and the timeless appeal of story.
  • "At the heart of it we're all just people sitting around the fire telling good stories." (23:38)
• Brian turned to art history, arguing society has always prized human-made creative works—valuing the personal backstory, process, and distinctiveness beyond what machines can deliver.
  • "What gives me hope...is I think creative outputs are the only thing that as a society we've agreed for hundreds of years we do value more from humans than from machines." (24:07)

6. Evolving Education: From Standardized Outputs to Individual, Purpose-Driven Creativity

• Gabrielle called for a community-driven, bottom-up evolution—educators, parents, and community together prioritizing new creative competencies.
  • "That communal aspect of learning, I think is invaluable. And that has to be built into what good looks like for the future." (27:36)
• Will suggested that expectations must shift rapidly, and education should now center not on discrete skills, but on discernment, judgment, and adaptive expertise using AI.
  • "You’re not necessarily expected to be the subject matter expert...[but] the subject matter expert of having good judgment, understanding...then be able to use an assistant..." (28:40)
• Brian argued for a radical shift from the "ethos of convergence, standardization, similarity" to one of divergence, individuality, and true creative confidence.
  • "The classroom space with AI is about divergence, radical individuality. What do you bring to the table that's uniquely you?... If they all look radically different, you're halfway there." (31:05)

7. The Importance of Productive Struggle, Agency, and Purpose

• Brian emphasized humans' "love-hate relationship" with struggle, noting its importance for meaning, purpose, and enduring well-being. He advocated for education that cultivates individual purpose—tying struggle and learning to what truly motivates each person.
  • "Struggle is what lights us up. It feels good, it feels terrible. Underline the word feel like it's such a human thing to struggle. And knowing your relationship with struggle is very important...once you know that struggling tied to your sense of purpose lights you up...it's the most human, incredible experience we can have." (34:22)
• Gabrielle warned not to forget human agency: we choose how to use these technologies and can do so intentionally to enhance or diminish our humanity.
  • "We also get to make choices about how we use them. Right. And so I think it's on us." (36:59)
• Will issued a caution: as with industrialization, many creative outputs may lose their perceived value, and society must grapple with economic and existential changes brought by AI.
  • "We're really entering this era where...the bulk majority of creative outputs that like humans produce...are possible to create with AI using a fraction of the time, the cost, the people..." (37:55)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Brian Johnger:
  • "The joy of creativity, the thrill of creating something new, getting into flow, creative confidence, that's probably for me the most valuable and understated side of creativity..." (04:36)
• Will:
  • "We're actually seeing now that this essentially levels the playing field...folks that are very thoughtful, have really good ideas, are now able to use AI to help enhance the creation process..." (09:19)
• Gabrielle Roizman:
  • "At the heart of it we're all just people sitting around the fire telling good stories." (23:38)
• Dan Kwai:
  • "I'm very much an AI optimist, recognizing that it's not all rosy, but there is great opportunity here if we get it right." (20:22)
• Brian Johnger:
  • "Creative outputs are the only thing that as a society we've agreed for hundreds of years we do value more from humans than from machines." (24:07)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Personal Reflections & Creative Upbringing: (00:13–03:30)
• Defining Creativity—Panel Introductions: (03:30–06:18)
• AI and the Creative Process: (06:18–10:05)
• AI as Leveler in Education: (10:05–14:40)
• AI and Learning Communities: (14:40–20:19)
• What Remains Uniquely Human & the Role of Judgment: (20:19–25:58)
• Evolving Educational Models for the AI Era: (25:58–32:55)
• Struggle, Purpose, and the Human Experience: (32:55–40:15)

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Takeaways

• AI is transforming, not replacing, creativity—by providing new tools, lowering barriers, and enabling new forms of expression.
• Education systems must shift from standardization to fostering radical individuality, judgment, curation, and purpose-driven work.
• Human agency, collaboration, and a nuanced relationship with both struggle and purpose are vital—even as AI becomes pervasive.
• We must intentionally shape AI and educational practices to serve as a force for inclusion, empowerment, and meaningful creative lives.

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“The classroom space with AI is about divergence, radical individuality. What do you bring to the table that's uniquely you?” — Brian Johnger (31:17)

“It’s on us. And as we learn, as the technology evolves, how we use it becomes just as important as the why.” — Gabrielle Roizman (36:59)

Transcript

[Brian Johnger]

This session was recorded live at the

[Will]

2026 ASU GSV summit in San Diego.

[Dan Kwai]

I am Dan Kwai and I'm from Learning Commons. And we're going to have a really interesting panel, I think, on creativity in the age of AI. I'm going to start out with a brief reflection. Every time I come to asu, it makes me think about my own personal journey through education. And I now have daughters who are about to go into senior year of high school. So I think a lot about their education. As you can tell, I'm originally from East Texas.

[Will]

I grew up in the UK.

[Dan Kwai]

I went to high school in the mid-80s. Please don't calculate my age from that. But I went to a very traditional sort of industrial era school where you were discouraged from talking to each other as students. It was the stage. On the stage you listened to what they had to say and you tried to memorize it by rote. And you had these very high stakes summative assessments at the end of the year determined like where you were going to go and what happened to you next. I don't think the idea of a formative assessment was even like a notion in the system at the time. And I compare that to the sort of education that my girls have at a public school, Akalani's public school in Northern California, and they have a very different approach there for which I am eternally grateful. It is much more about project based learning. It's much more about students taking part and having a voice in their education. It's much more about the whole classroom being an engaged place of learning. And I think that's wonderful. It's not perfect, but it's so different from the education that I had. And it's the education that I wish I would have been able to have. And it took me many years after I had finished my high school to kind of unlearn the very bad habits that I think it instilled for me. And in particular it was very sort of anti creative. It was very much an environment where creativity was not what was required and was actually kind of like pushed out of you. And my girls have an opportunity to be much more creative. One of them is a published poet and the other is now leading a Model un. You know, they're just doing amazing things that I would not have been capable of doing at their age. And I think that's good. And so we are collectively on a path towards a better form of education. And we want more children to experience that and even better versions of that. And it Makes me think a lot about creativity and how we build creativity in our young people. So I'm going to turn it over to the panel and maybe we'll start with just simply what do you think of as creativity? Maybe you could introduce yourselves quickly as we do this first question and Will, I'll start with you and we'll go down the line.

[Will]

Fantastic. Thanks, Dan. Hi everyone. My name's Will and I'm the head of customer success at a company called Heygen. We are a AI video generation platform. And I think creativity that I've seen is really the ability to express your thoughts in a way that is authentic to yourself. There's really a very, very broad definition of what folks actually do produce to express that creativity. But ultimately if it is something that is kind of an expression of your own, you know, whatever you're experiencing at the moment or a summation of your thoughts, that's basically creativity there.

[Brian Johnger]

Good morning everyone. I'm Brian Johnger, director of education at Adobe, former K12 teacher and then college faculty member before joining the EdTech world. I think of creativity in three arenas. The first is sort of the capacity to build or create outputs that are traditionally creative. So something that's visually stunning or artistic, that's sort of the definition most people gravitate towards. Then I think there's the in between sort of innovation piece of creativity. Usually when it's defined in a sentence as creativity is the capacity to create something new or novel that has value. So a new approach, a new product, a new system, creative thinking, creative problem solving. And the last is the sort of cognitive and effective pieces of creativity. So the creative process from brainstorming and ideation to divergent thinking, evaluation, iteration, feedback, refinement, all of those sort of cognitive processes and then underneath that, the sort of emotional and affect piece, the joy of creativity, the thrill of creating something new, getting into flow, creative confidence, that's probably for me the most valuable and understated side of creativity that actually just, it just feels good creating stuff. So those are kind of the three domains that I find when you say let's talk creativity, people tend to gravitate towards one of those three.

[Gabrielle Roizman]

Good morning everyone. I am Gabrielle Roizman, head of industry for education at TikTok. I love this question because creativity is really built into our mission. Inspire creativity and bring joy. And so when I think about from my seat what creativity means, it's where curiosity, where expression and utility collide, right? And so I think that's innately built into our platform where people come because they're curious, they want to learn something, they express themselves and then they bring joy to themselves and they also bring joy to others. So that's my view on creativity.

[Dan Kwai]

That's great. Thank you. And Brian, you talked about the creative process, which I think is a very interesting part of this. Where do you see AI being successful as taking part in that creative process?

[Brian Johnger]

I think we're getting closer to moving beyond. Like, I want to see something brought to life. Here's a prompt. It was created for me. Great, let's move on. We know that's not creative and it's created the world of AI slop that we're all swearing through right now. I think what we're seeing now is actually processes while using AI that walk you through that process. And that's what I think is most exciting. Interfaces that say, all right, pause now before you run with this idea. Let's generate 20 of them. What do you like about this? Let's go in some different directions. So I think that process that we've known for hundreds of years is a core part of the creative process is so underutilized and so under taught and frankly, frustrating. You talk to most creative writers and creatives, There's a lot of pain and frustration in the creative process. Like how many creative writers say, oh, I just love sitting down and writing. Like, they all describe it as horribly painful and a little bit like a game that frustrates you. There's that joy and that friction and creation that is so antithetical to how products are built today. Where we use the words frictionless, right? It should be an easy, smooth experience. And so this challenge of, well, let's create creative AI that has friction and frustrates you and challenges you, it just sort of breaks how we've been thinking about the product experience and you just step over into game design. And those are the folks that usually get it. They're like, yeah, we're creating this sort of productive struggle where at the end you feel like really proud of what you've done.

[Dan Kwai]

Gabrielle, I want to hand this question to you as well. How do you see AI coming into the creative process?

[Gabrielle Roizman]

So I think that AI comes into the creative process in a hybrid way, right? Where we are leaning on our experience, our perspective, our taste to influence what good looks like, and then really leaning into AI in terms of both scale and then speed to market. And so I think as a creator, as a creative person, your role becomes more of a curator and moderator and AI becomes more of the enablement piece to allow you to scale your stories, to scale your creative abilities. And so that's kind of where I see it coming into play.

[Dan Kwai]

Great, Will.

[Will]

Yeah, I think it's actually really an interesting era that we're in right now where I know Steve Jobs early on described computers as a bicycle for the mind. We're seeing AI really take that role where essentially in kind of the realm of creativity, we're actually using. We're seeing a lot of folks use AI to actually figure out how to tell their story in a way that they were not naturally able to before. Whether they are not naturally charismatic or don't actually have the capacity to tell compelling stories, or they don't necessarily have the technical chops to do fancy editing or the production studio and nice equipment. We're actually seeing now that this essentially levels the playing field where folks that are very thoughtful, have really good ideas, are now able to use AI to help enhance the creation process and be on par with. With more professional, polished publications in like, larger institutions and producing content that is just as compelling. So it's a very exciting time for everyone.

[Dan Kwai]

Yeah, that's great. And that segues very nicely into my next question, which is let's start sort of centering on education a little.

[Brian Johnger]

Right.

[Dan Kwai]

We know that what are traditionally seen as like, creative skills of writing and drawing and coding even are not evenly distributed. Certainly some people are better than others. Do we see AI sort of helping to level that creative playing field and what's the impact of that in the educational setting? And Will, why don't you pick that up?

[Will]

Absolutely. So we actually see a lot of educators are exploring applications of our platform in order to really help them reach out to their customers, which would be students in new and more dynamic ways. And one of the primary ways that we see this manifesting is in the form of personalized learning and also multimodal learning. Where before, it would actually be quite prohibitive to figure out how to tailor an explanation of a course and actually effectively convey content to a student that is tailored to their needs and their progression. We're seeing actually a lot of applications nowadays where folks are actually using large language models and then supplementing it with our platform to be able to deliver individualized, tailored learning experiences that reflect the needs of a student at any given point in time. So we see this at the graduate student level. We see people also exploring this for K through 12 learning as well. I think it's actually again, quite a force multiplier for educators to be able to reach out in ways that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

[Dan Kwai]

Great. Gabrielle, how are you thinking about that?

[Gabrielle Roizman]

So I think it's important to Frame that at TikTok, we are really at the top of the student journey before they even get into the classroom. But I think the value there in terms of how it aids their learning outcomes and skills are the stories that we're able to help advertisers tell the right message. Not only from the perspective of there's a perception that it needs to be infotainment, but what are the technical, programmatic learning opportunities? What are they actually going to get when they are in the classroom and bringing those stories forward to aid in the decision in terms of the student discovery to enrollment pipeline. And so I think that's where we really do a really good job of helping advertisers push that forward. And I think that's where I see the benefit in terms of where I sit.

[Dan Kwai]

Great, Ryan.

[Brian Johnger]

When I think about creativity and AI in the classroom, back when I was a K12 teacher, and even today, when I asked every teacher, what's the really cool thing you've always wanted to do with your students? One cool assignment, one cool project, they all have an answer right away, oh, I've always wanted to do. And it's almost always creative in some way. Oh, I just want to do. What if we did a project in math where they could actually design a city? There's always that thing that they wanted to do forever. And you said, well, why aren't you? And the answer has been the same every time. Well, all of the things that they would be doing aren't, like, necessarily in our standards. It's a lot of stretch. It's not relevant to the test or our assessments. It's like an additional thing. We're already strapped for time. Teaching them how to do this is not really in my wheelhouse. And maybe I tried that once and no one really liked it. What they made, they weren't really proud of. And then I thought, like, oh, man, have I just taught them to do something that now has crushed their creative confidence. If you think of that workflow and then throw AI into it, suddenly what I'm seeing is teachers being like, oh, actually, well, this thing that we wanted to do where I would have had to teach them how to do all these skills, they can now have AI assistants. In my mind, this was gonna take five hours. I think we could do it in 30 minutes. And at the end, students are like, oh, damn, this is actually really cool. This looks professional. Maybe I wanna do more stuff like this. So it's not really revolutionizing what I think most educators I talked to have always wanted to do. It's just a lot of those barriers, the structural ones like time, but also just the confidence barriers have sort of been removed.

[Dan Kwai]

Yeah, I love that. And it reminds me in a different field of one of the things that China is doing is that they are promoting this idea of one person companies that they're trying to get like entrepreneurs to build companies with just one human being and everything else being done by automation. And it's that same idea that you can bring in skill sets that you don't have and you don't need to have a huge team. Now, I'm not suggesting we do that in education because I think actually one of the. But it's an interesting idea. Right. And it's that idea of AI can be a supplement and bring in and enhance skills and allow you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do because of restraints in the everyday. One thing that I'm particularly interested in is how does AI help communities of learners in education be more effective? And that might be within the classroom or spanning across classrooms. Gabby, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

[Gabrielle Roizman]

Yeah. So when it comes to communities leveraging AI in the classroom and out, I think that first understanding where the gaps are, right? And then from that understanding, using AI to fill and iterate. I actually love the point that you made about this idea of one person companies because I think that points to the necessity of understanding where the skills gaps are currently, today, and what is it going to take in terms of being expected to leverage AI to support an economy that's built on potentially one person organizations. Right. Where you have more builders of AI rather than consumers of AI.

[Dan Kwai]

Brian,

[Brian Johnger]

I think probably the biggest potential for communities of learners is actually creating collaboration in the classroom because that's if we jump forward to the workforce, what every employer is asking for. Very cool that you have a one person building a company, but can they work with other people in RIF and give feedback? We have this dream. It's a little bit like the dream of project based learning of like collaborative learning, right? Where I'm going to tell five kids you're all working on this project together, go and assign your roles and someone can be note taker. And it never works. Like in part because are kids good at feedback? Well, adults certainly are not good at feedback. Like how many of us with our teams have had to coach at some point on like giving and receiving effective feedback? It's uncomfortable. Like and then you say collaborate, and we don't have rubrics for collaboration. It's an impossible and fundamentally important skill that we have to teach. I think the ways in which AI can help facilitate that and build confidence and let people not just take the role in their team that they think they're good at. Well, what are you going to do? Well, I can kind of draw, so I guess I'll do the visuals and that's what I'm good at. Well, no, you all have an AI assist. Like, you try this and I try this and I need to give you feedback. And I'm really uncomfortable giving feedback. So I'm actually going to use AI to be like, how can I give some productive feedback on this? What's my rosebud Thorn? I think that's probably pretty exciting because that's the actual community of learning where they walk away saying, yes, I could create this company entirely on my own, and I know it's going to be better if I work with other people.

[Will]

I'll take this from a slightly different angle too. I think actually one thing that is maybe a little bit underutilized right now, where I see the greatest potential is AI being used to reach underserved communities and folks that are in a position where they're historically underserved or at a disadvantage. Where if you look at communities, we've actually talked to a lot of educators here where they've expressed that there's folks that they work with where their families do not primarily speak English at home, or they do not actually have the resources in their district to actually devote towards individualized lesson plans for students that are in special education. And what we're seeing is that there's actually great potential here for AI that is able to provide multimodal learning experiences that are able to seamlessly transition between someone asking conversationally questions in Spanish or Chinese or Italian and being able to relate that back to the actual lesson plan and help reinforce the learning standards that they are expected to reach. Those kind of situations can be delivered in a tailored way at a fraction of a cost. And it's not even displacing people because those people were not actually allocated to those communities in the first place. And I think it's a situation where I will say, I'm sure you folks have all seen the weird little bumper stickers that are like, oh, AI is taking your jobs or whatnot, all throughout this conference. But what I think is really, again, there's a great potential here for all of these new AI tools to really Help bring folks like that into opportunities and kind of help them develop to get closer to the mean in ways that really we're not currently set up to deliver in any other way.

[Dan Kwai]

Yeah, that's good. I agree.

[Will]

Thank you.

[Dan Kwai]

No, look, I think personally, I'm very much an AI optimist, recognizing that it's not all rosy, but there is great opportunity here if we get it right. And I think that feels like the work ahead of us is us collectively, is to try and make AI a force for good rather than something that has a less good outcome. And that sort of brings me to the next question, which is, as AI, inevitably, I think we can agree at this point, is going to become more and more part of our world and more and more part of education, for sure. What remains distinctly human in the sort of the creative and the intellectual space as AI systems become more prevalent will. Do you want to start us off?

[Will]

Absolutely. I think, first and foremost, above all, judgment. I'm sure everyone in the room has at least tried to use OpenAI, like ChatGPT or Claude, and I think you've all seen the symptom of it. Just whatever you ask it, it says, yes, absolutely, you're absolutely right. And whatever, like, crazy crackpot situation you're in, you are the smartest person in the room. And I think that is something that is going to be, you know, it's actually a very serious risk. Right. Where, you know, you think about educators using this, children using this, there's this, you know, we call it like, psychopathy, right, or psychopathy, where essentially this kind of takes you down, this spiral of ultimately just thinking that you're absolutely correct all the time. And I think that's something where, again, these AI models, everything that we develop, is really trained to optimize for giving you good feelings. But as a human being, you need to really be the person that understands when what you're seeing is actually reflective of reality or when you actually need to really push the brakes and then redirect so that the outcome that you're looking for is actually what you're seeing is actually aligned to the outcome that you need to deliver. So that is not going away anytime soon. And I think the folks in the room that are going to be standing out amongst their peers for folks that are using AI are the people that understand that they need to be the ones that continuously exercise good judgment and leverage these tools to help achieve the goals that are best for you and best for society.

[Dan Kwai]

Gabrielle, what do you think?

[Gabrielle Roizman]

Yeah, so I think what remains human are a couple of things. Number one, the ability to remain curious, to have multiple sources in terms of validating and to Will's point, understanding what's good. I think that goes back to my earlier point about the human role becoming more of a curator. I think at the heart of it we're all just people sitting around the fire telling good stories. And the ability to determine what's good or not is what's going to make those who leverage AI well stand apart from those who possibly don't embrace it or don't build that filter mechanism to determine quality over scaled output.

[Brian Johnger]

What gives me hope about keeping the human and creativity is I think creative outputs are the only thing that as a society we've agreed for hundreds of years we do value more from humans than from machines. We don't place a premium on handmade brake pads versus automated brake pads. We don't say ah, but this handwritten finance report is just intrinsically more valuable to me than a printed one. But ever since the rise of the printing press, the premium for illuminated manuscripts went up because they are more special as soon as printers became wide scaled. We still pay someone to handwrite calligraphy on our wedding invitations to because they're beautiful. Like within the artistic space. They actually have very sophisticated economies for this. Right. We value at a certain level an artist hand painted oil painting and at a separate level they're lithographs. But if they're signed lithographs and limited edition, now there's a separate level there. Like we've become very sophisticated in what we value or don't even down to these mass produced artists where they do some of the painting but then someone from their team comes in with a separate hand. There's a different value structure there. Yes, I really love the sweater, but the hand knit sweater, I'm going to pay a little bit more for that. Even further if I know the story of the person that made it and what inspired them and their background and the conditions. Not only like economically do we put more of a premium on that. It just, it feels good. We want that. So what gives me hope is yes, AI can generate creative slop and we have a pretty solid cross cultural multi hundred year history of saying but these creative things, when a human is involved, that's different than a brake pad.

[Dan Kwai]

Yeah. And that's interesting because I want to talk about how education can help as we transition into, I think what will look quite like quite a different world. A world where we really value that sort of innate human creative spark all the Things you were just talking about. Brian but that's not really how our education. That's not what our education system is setting people up for. Right. You know, I talked at the beginning about my children have a better system than I did, and I'm very grateful for that. But it's also not a system which is centered around creativity. It's one that I think we do better than we used to about that. But it's still not like the center. The center is still make your grades, get into a good school, get into a good trade. It's still very work oriented in general. How do we see what does education need to do? How does it need to evolve to set children up for a world where a lot of what we've traditionally seen as work is being partly or wholly done by machines. And maybe we spend more of our individual time on creative endeavors, which could be great. But how does education need to change to enable that?

[Gabrielle Roizman]

Gabriel I think first, it can't be a top down approach. I think one of the things that's very important in terms of setting students up for success is bringing along educators, parents, this community that aids in the learning process to actually prop up and prioritize what's important as we think about using these tools. And so that communal aspect of learning, I think is invaluable. And that has to be built into what good looks like for the future.

[Will]

Will yeah, I think really, actually fundamentally expectations need to change and frankly, they need to change pretty quickly. I remember growing up, of course, you learn printing, you learn calligraphy, you learn how to do all the calculations on math by hand. And I think while those are very valuable skills, I think it's very easy as all adults now we have phones and keyboards and everything to do all of that for us. I think a lot of what we need to start thinking about is what is a world of functioning adults that are currently children look like where AI is an embedded part of their everyday life. And I think it's an interesting thing where we'll see this being probably a situation where it will still be chaotic for a couple of years. But what we try to do at Heygen is we're already intentionally hiring for the profile of people that we imagine be good stewards of leveraging AI in the workplace, where we actually have a hiring profile, where we prefer to hire interns out of college that aren't necessarily expert product marketers or salespeople because they actually know how to use AI to actually supplement, where they don't have that experience. And I Think in the education community, one of the things that I would personally really think is needed is to really help children understand how to work in that paradigm where you're not necessarily expected to be the subject matter expert of a particular set of skills. You are actually meant to be, again, the subject matter expert of having good judgment, understanding how do you really discern what is the correct course of action, or understand what the all of the variables are and what you're trying to achieve, and then be able to use an assistant to help you actually tactically get from where you are to where you're trying to go. Having those kind of skills are, for the foreseeable future, going to be what sets students apart from those that are not able to adapt to that kind of a paradigm.

[Brian Johnger]

I think modern education, from the scaled Prussian system to the standardized assessment era that we're still in the ethos has been convergence, standardization, similarity. That's just the ethos in which we've been operating structurally now. And the individual in that equation is interesting but not important. In fact, individuality within that ethos sometimes gets in the way. And we don't know what to do when it comes to AI. When the question is, well, you created something incredible, you put in this prompt, could someone else have put in the same prompt? If the answer is the same, then this notion of similarity, value, individualization really becomes pretty fraught. So I think our opportunity now is to radically rethink that and say, the classroom space with AI is about diversions, radical individuality. What do you bring to the table that's uniquely you? When I see teachers playing around with creativity, not even just artistic creativity, something where students are doing creative thinking in their classroom, they'll usually say, how does this look? How did it go? Did I do okay? The first question I ask is, how different are the things that your students made? The projects, Are they radically different from each other, or did you do all right? We're going to build a snowman, and everyone's snowman looks exactly like the template. That is not creativity, that's craft. It's a wonderful craft project you did. If they all look radically different, you're halfway there like you get what we're trying to do. The next step is without knowing who created them, can you tell every student that made that, can you say, that is Will's, that is Shana's, not because I've learned their style, because I know them. That is so uniquely them. That is theirs. That's when you've crushed it. And that's where not just, you're doing great teaching. Those students say, I can do things only I can do. When I make something, people can say, that's mine, it's me. They've cultivated that creative confidence that is so different than the ethos and the era of convergence. But with AI, we have to go there. Otherwise we are just all spitting in prompts and something cool comes out. But it's not us. I'm just the one who wrote a really great specific descriptive language prompt.

[Dan Kwai]

So we've talked about a lot of sort of related ideas around curation, around taste and discernment, and it's clear that that sort of human judgment about what, how the machines are supporting us and helping us is an important part of what comes next. But I was listening at a very interesting panel about productive struggle yesterday and that's something that's come up as well. And at some point, do we lose something by if we pass off a lot of the deep hard work of a subject to the machines, do we? If you don't have to learn addition and all the way up through math, you can just rely on an AI system to do that perfectly every time. Have we lost something as people? It's not just about freeing us up to be creative, but maybe there's value in some of that deeper work that we're now thinking machines might take on. I'm just interested in how do we still capture some of the value that might be there. Brian, what do you think?

[Brian Johnger]

I mean, I think out of the gate, we love struggle as humans. It's a love hate relationship. Just struggle is what lights us up. It feels good, it feels terrible. Underline the word feel like it's such a human thing to struggle. And knowing your relationship with struggle is very important. I think underneath that is we are very, very happy to struggle. In fact, love doing it if there's a sense of purpose behind it. If any of you have ever rabbit holed on the research of purpose, it is fascinating the fact that purpose affects everything. It affects our sense of well being, it affects our physical health. There's metrics on how high a sense of purpose you have, and it's been shown in public health studies. People that have a higher sense of purpose, lower heart risk, disease, they sleep better, longer lives, they're happier in everything. And yet how many people can say succinctly, this is my sense of purpose? Why have we never even had a one day lesson plan or a one hour lesson plan on we're going to talk about what sense of purpose is and what it is once you know that struggling tied to your sense of purpose lights you up. If my sense of purpose is altruism or creativity, then when I'm struggling with something that feels purpose driven, it is the most human, incredible experience we can have. That's what I would love to see re injected into the education system. Not least in higher ed where I love talking about careers and jobs because I think it's so important. And all of my former colleagues are like, brian, enough. That's not the purpose of higher education. It's theory of the mind. It's cultivating civic citizens. Yes, I agree. And as a first generation college student whose parents didn't even graduate high school, who was a literature major, I have to tell you, it's a hard sell today saying, and that was me a hard sell saying, no, no, there is roi to this thing. So I struggle when I ask faculty, don't you want your students to get good jobs? And so I just changed the words. I'm an academic, right? We just change our words. And I say, do you care about your students living purpose driven lives that's tied to a sense of economic stability? Everyone raises their hands. I say, well that's, I'm getting a good job. That's what I mean by a good job. So that's my hope.

[Dan Kwai]

That's great. Gabrielle.

[Gabrielle Roizman]

Dan, Sorry, could you ask the question again?

[Dan Kwai]

Yeah, just asking about, are we losing something if we move into a world where we're about curation and taste rather than the deep work that sits underneath it?

[Gabrielle Roizman]

I think something that's missing from the conversation is just human agency. Right. It's like we have these tools, but we also get to make choices about how we use them. Right. And so I think it's on us. And as we, as we learn, as the technology evolves, how we use it becomes just as important as the why. Having a solid context and perspective that informs the use of the tool. So I don't think that we lose anything. It's a choice. And we can either use it to propel us forward or we can use it to create barriers. But I think we're figuring that out in real time and time will tell.

[Dan Kwai]

That's right. Will.

[Will]

Yeah, I think I'm going to say the contentious position here that I do think we lose quite a bit. And I think it's interesting because to Brian's earlier point around brake pads, I mean, we're really entering this era where you would argue the bulk majority of creative outputs that like humans produce, whether it's Something as mundane as an email or something as complicated as a movie. All of these things are possible to create with AI using a fraction of the time. The cost, the people, most especially, that it would traditionally really require. And I think this is an era that no one is really prepared to fully tackle where, you know, again, you know, you look back though, maybe 2,000 years, 3,000 years, and a lot of us would have been farmers. And you know, it's like now you'd think, you know, is a calorie of food that you consume that is like hand grown by someone is that intrinsically more valued than something that is factory farmed or produced using crazy pesticides, et cetera. I would say to some people that it matters, but to the vast majority of people, they would rather buy the cheaper product that allows them to be able to reallocate their resources towards something else. I mean, we're all very privileged here, being folks with all white collar jobs and with a situation where we've never had to deal with that kind of disruption in our lives. And ultimately we're looking at a situation where, yes, there's a lot of threat to our way of life, to what we do. I do think that it's again, a situation where you do have these illuminated manuscripts that are incredibly valuable, but we don't need the monks to write them anymore, at least the vast majority of them. So yeah, I don't have the right answer or a magic bullet here. I'm not going to flog our software and say it'll solve the world, but at the same time, I think as a society we need to figure out how we tackle this shift in perspective and also kind of the ultimate impacts, economic and societal that that entails.

[Dan Kwai]

Well, thank you. That's the end of our time. And a good note to end on. Look, there's lots to think about here. I hope that this has been a thought provoking panel. It certainly has been for me. I appreciate all of you and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.