Violeta Ayala is a filmmaker, film futurist, and creative technologist who using semantics to create immersive art with ChatGPT and generative AI programs. I had a chance to catch up with her at NewImages France where she talked about how AI has completely revolutionized her creative process as someone who identifies as being on the autistic spectrum, she talks about how AI has enabled her to find new ways to close the gap between her imagination and creative coding projects and immersive art.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast, the podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So continuing on my series of looking at the intersection of XR and AI, this is the second interview of 17 in a series, and today's episode, I'm going to be talking to Violeta Ayala. She's a filmmaker, film futurist, and creative technologist who's been using semantics in order to create different immersive experiences. So she's a filmmaker that got into virtual reality during the pandemic and got into Tilt Brush and saw that she was able to create these whole immersive worlds that you could have these nonlinear experiences. And she actually had a piece called Prison X that premiered at Sundance a number of years ago. I actually have an unpublished interview. with her about that project. But as these different generative AI tools started to come about, she found that that really started to transform her own creative practice. She's someone who self identifies as being on the autistic spectrum. And so for her, it's difficult to communicate exactly what she's thinking about. And so she's found that given her multilingual background to talk to these generative AI systems that she found that she's able to actually close the gap between what she's imagining and being able to either create these Generative AI images or even start to do different types of creative coding projects in a way that she used to have to rely upon Communicating with different developers to get where she wants now She's able to talk with these generative AI systems to take her own creativity to the next level So that's what we're coming on today's episode of a severe podcast So this interview with Violetta happened on Saturday April 8th, 2023 at the new images festival in Paris, France so with that let's go ahead and dive right in
[00:01:48.935] Violeta Ayala: Hi, my name is Violeta Ayala. I'm a filmmaker, or now I'm a film futurist. I describe myself as a film futurist. I also work a lot with scintography, and I also, I think through the last two years I became a creative technologist, and I use a lot of semantics to create. I made Prison X, that premiered in Sundance a few years ago. Before I made like five feature films. I'm a member of the Academy Awards, And I still work making films, but I think everything is changing, and through these changes I see the new possibilities, but also see the needs of the people, the population, that in the past you needed to tell stories. I'm Quechua, I'm indigenous, and there was a law about self-representation, but today we can represent ourselves. And so with TikTok and Instagram and all social media, everyone can represent themselves. And I'm never going to do justice to how you can represent yourself. So when you see that changes philosophically, also inside myself, why I'm doing this work, it changed deeply. And I see that there were different needs coming to me and also different interests.
[00:03:06.718] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey from getting into film and creative technology, VR, and now AI.
[00:03:16.803] Violeta Ayala: I think it's more like a deep rabbit hole. You just jump and you don't know. It was gradual. I think it started COVID-19 hit, and I used to work at making documentaries about a protest, a big protest in Bolivia, where the people in the end got the pension, thanks to the work that I did. I worked in Algeria and Mauritania, working in Morocco, made a film and ended up finding some people were slaves of the others. So my work was always very politically human rights. But then I see how everything changed. and my interests also started changing. I started making prison eggs, because telling the stories that I couldn't capture with a camera, and I started playing on the possibilities of what could be possible. I was in a workshop at Tribeca many years ago. They selected a few creators in the world, and Arnois Collinart from Atlas 5 and Mari Libert were in the same group. Yasmine Elayat, so we were at the time. And so we were at this farm in New York and we were starting to develop these projects. The first project of the Atlas 5 voice was developing there. And I remember I wasn't very interested. I thought the first time I tried a headset, I was like, oh, I really don't like this. It didn't catch my interest so fast yet. I thought, yeah, it can be interesting, but it's not kind of what I wanted to do. So I did it with my hands. I got an architect to design like a prototype of the prison. And I was thinking, how can I play with this inside? I was like... And then I was like, I wasn't sure. And then I premiered a film at TIFF and then a documentary and started going to all festivals. And I was in Toulouse and Amari Libert, I went to visit him. And he said, come, come. And he put the headset on me and showed me Tilt Brush. And the moment that he showed me Tilt Brush, just an empty space and I started playing with it, and I said to him, in this little paper, can you please write what kind of software and hardware I need? And I'm going to go and buy it, and I'm going to go ahead with this project, because now I understand what I can do. It was like a realization on that moment. And the first thing I wanted to just, we made the prison. First, we did 3D scan of this model that I said I did before. But then it was too square. And then Tillbrush gave these possibilities of creating. You had nothing. And you didn't have any structure. You didn't have a beginning, middle, and end. And I am neurodiverse. And also, I come from a culture that is Quechua philosophy and metacognition. And the way that we understand the world, it is not linear. It's circular. And it's in many different levels. And the fact that I could do this, the fact that it was nothing, that will impose a narrative or a way to tell a story on me and the fact that I didn't see much of VR before and I didn't want to see it because I wanted to just say I'm going to have a clean go to this. So this is what attracted me first, this possibility of this creation from maybe my own internal ideas plus all my cultural context, it intrigued me. And I don't know why I'm already this, because we were together in this lab, so we probably saw, like, yeah, I think he hooked here. He got me hooked. And from that, I started getting more grants. We pitched it for the MacArthur Foundation, came on board. I was invited to the CPH lab by Mark Atkin. and I went to the MIT and I did a collab with Kat Cizek and I was still really questioning the things I wasn't very like I did understand and of course I was like thinking but I was like Then I wanted to make a robot, like a devil robot. That was my idea, but I really didn't understand how machine learning worked. And I really like to understand everything, or try to. So I was like really just experimenting around, looking at everything. And then COVID-19 hit. I went to Sundance and I was invited to do a panel by the MacArthur Foundation about something to do how we'll be retelling our past and reinventing our past. Then I came back to Sydney, I couldn't live and then my work as this documentary filmmaker that is in the streets and with the people and fight hard is over. for me so I didn't know what to do I was really bored so I actually had to learn and it was luck that I had Prison Next Door because it got funded because I started working on it and got the production funding from Screen Australia and going to Sundance and I assembled the team and Through that process I realized that not even the technologists knew what to do. It was so difficult to rig faces, it was so difficult to... Everything was complex and I realized that the only way I could speak, I could direct something like this is by understanding it. So I went deep into understanding why is this problem. So I was actually, rather than being at some point an artistic director, I was like a problem solver. I was solving why this work. Then I realized that nothing was compatible, that you could do a motion capturing one software. And then, like if you did in Rococo, from Rococo to Blender to Unity, even the X, Y, Z, each of them have different references. So it was like, how to rig, how to... So it grew, I think, from there. Then I started getting very interested and then I realized this is really complex but yet really simple. I can create characters really fast because I understood the relationship between puppetry and 3D. Everything is a puppet and I realized that you could rig anything that had a humanoid form under five minutes and anything can have a humanoid form if you just teach the hands and legs to anything. So I started, like, it was a journey. And then premiering Sundance, I think you talked about prison eggs. At Sundance took more attention. They invited me into a clubhouse meeting because they said that you did a panel and everybody said that it was the most innovative, blah, blah, blah. And in that panel, they start talking about AI and crypto. and then I got hooked, and then I started following the person that I was in the panel with, and then I started following, and I started listening, and it just was crazy during that time where I started following Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, I started following, I didn't understand the language that they were speaking, it was a foreign language, so I started learning this language, and then I challenged myself to create one experience a day, Because I couldn't do much else. So I said, I'm going to do these flowers. And I start playing with Unity, with Unreal Engine, with Reality Composer. Reality Composer was the first, because easy. Then I start playing with everything that was around me and just doing things like the meta, not meta humans, the ones, the ready player me, like the avatars. I took them out. And I rigged them and made them speak, like start painting their clothes. And it was just from there. It's just a gradual thing into today.
[00:10:48.279] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so I know we had a chance to meet in one of these virtual spaces. I think it was an Oye, one of the karaoke places and one of these after parties for one of the film festivals. I had a chance to catch up with you a little bit and you were talking about some of your further explorations and artificial intelligence and machine learning and I had a chance to catch up with you again here at New Images, where you've been doing quite a lot of different types of experimentations with AI, generative AI, and chat GPT. And so you mentioned that you had heard about AI from a clubhouse and that you started diving into some of the crypto stuff. Where did the next steps from your involvement with experimenting with artificial intelligence come in with your own creative process? Because you had, as you said, you're learning all these different tools to be able to tell these stories. And with Prison X, you use Tilt Brush to create these avatars that take you through this spatial journey of this prison, moving through spaces and having these avatars that had a lot of Flourish and flare from different elements from your culture. And so yeah, I'd love to hear at what point Did the artificial intelligence start to tie into your own creative process?
[00:11:52.904] Violeta Ayala: Yeah, so I am a neurodiverse person I am on the spectrum and so a lot goes on on my brain, but my brain and my hands don't connect and And the first time I saw, I don't remember what it's called, but it was the creator of Surawrite had a thing for images first. And I saw a tweet with how you could create images with words. And I was just fascinated. I thought, Wow. Now my brain can connect to my hands. And I was so happy. I started playing. And it was really creative. Really creative. I really loved it. It didn't last too long because everything else came and they were small. I think pseudowrite is still today one of the most creative writing tools for filmmakers. It's much more creative than JGPT. And it's called James Yu. So from that, I went and I tried, you know, it's all algorithms, so everything comes to you, what you should try and what you shouldn't try. There are lots of things and I started trying different ones. And then when DALI came, COVID was finishing and I could leave Australia. And the day I could leave Australia, I left Australia and I went back home. because I already saw Dali and I said I'm going to do something. I'm going to go back to my grandmother's town and my grandfather's town and I'll spend time there but I'm not going to take photographs and I'm just going to write what I see and feel it because I'm going to find out. I want to know how my grandmothers look like. I want to know how my ancestors look like and I want to understand and I know how to now. So I went and I spent like a couple of weeks in Vila Vila, a town in the middle of Red Mountains where it's called Tiumpampa. It's a place where the dinosaurs walked and where the first mammals appear. It's an era in the world called Tiumpampense. And then I spent time in my grandfather's town that is much more like a valley in the middle of the Andes, closer to city, a lot of water, a lot more wealth because it's more water and a lot of agriculture. start looking at my ancestors. So I came back and I start just typing and I start making how they would look like on the descriptions that I was remember and I was writing. So for me it was like so liberating not to be tempted to photograph them but like how can I recreate them by observing and the moment that I photograph I stop observing. So I just said like look how can I do this? And I just started playing every night, and I started doing it. And at the time, Dali, you had to do just little squares. You couldn't augment in the same time, so you had to bring them out and in Photoshop or Procreate, like, do the square by square by square. And each square was very different than the other. It wasn't what it was today, but it was like, after a lot of trial and error, I got it right. I got it right. I got it right. So I was playing with that. So I was fascinated when I started getting out these grandmothers. And just like that, I went to an art gallery to take my daughter for something. And then one of the guys who's organizing an exhibition asked me what I was working on, and they wanted to put prison eggs, but they didn't have the headsets. And I said, I'm working on this. And he said, can you have it ready in two weeks? And I said, do you have the budget? And he said, yeah, we have the budget. What do you want to do? And I said, I want to print them big, these grandmothers. It will be called The Grandmothers of Everybody and No One. And he said to me, you have them all. I'm like, I had a lot of them by then. And then I had to go through the selection process. So my partner that I work with, Dan, he helped me to produce like the collection to eight. And I went there and I scanned the place and then I start putting and see how they're going to look. And that's when I thought that very big, they're going to look quite fantastic. and then I had the exhibition opening two weeks later and I explained to everybody and it was written like how it was created. I was thinking that it's going to be a lot of controversy and a lot of questioning but it wasn't anything of that. It was so beautifully received. They're now today part of their permanent collection and people could see their grandmothers onto these grandmothers and see them with a lot of dignity. So for me it was like You change this framing because we were always photographed from a colonizer point of view. And because of how photography even exists is from that point of view. And we start copy those behaviors. So when you go and you put a camera in front of a woman from the Andes, she started crying or looks really sad because that's what we think that we have to look like. And was always from up to down. And with this, we changed it all. Like, I described how I wanted them, and I wanted, like, no, they're not happy and smiley because I never see them smile, but they have a lot of dignity, and for me, that's dignification. And then I was starting to write with the right things, and I started to, just from them, things move very fast. From ChatGPT, I already knew how to use the system with Sudowrite. I think I used something called Jasper. That was terrible. It's like a marketing tool. I hated it. But you have to train yourself. How you speak with the computer, how you prompt what you say. to get things happening, right? So I was doing the training with images, and then I wrote an article about these grandmothers for my website, of course, website, I think, and I just put it on Twitter. And then the guy who created Dali, not Dali 2, but I think Dali 1, he contacted me, and he said, I'm so proud, thank you so much. I didn't even think that that could be possible, and I'm so proud that you are finding your ancestors through this. It's quite amazing for me. And then I got invited to create with their tools, with OpenAI tools. I don't want to do an advertisement for OpenAI.
[00:17:52.762] Kent Bye: It sounds like you got early access to some stuff. You were able to get some access to some of these AI tools that you've been playing with for quite a while.
[00:17:59.285] Violeta Ayala: Yeah. Yeah, because I believe in open AI. Not in open AI, I believe in universal access to all of this. So today I was then a bit disappointed, right, that open AI became closed AI. But when I started with them, using their tools, the idea and the attitude was that this is going to be open. That was the spirit and the philosophy behind. And then I got access to all of these tools and I started just playing with them. And then I created a cyberpunk thing. Then I said, can I train my own models? Because they still very biased. All of these models give me biased results. And one of the things that I did a lot for a long time was like, say, bias, bias, bias, bias.
[00:18:43.726] Kent Bye: reinforcement learning with human feedback, the RLHF, which is that you have the large language model. It has all these associative links, but it ends up replicating a lot of the bias of the data it's trained on. And so they have humans come in and do that training of the reinforcement learning with human feedback. So you were a part of that process then.
[00:18:59.384] Violeta Ayala: Yeah, it wasn't like I wasn't paid to do that. I just did it because I was trying to create my own stuff. So I prompted. Like if you prompted a woman in La Paz, it always came a blonde woman in La Paz. It's like, no. Or a cyberpunk thing who I prompted and it came a white woman or a white man. And I'm like, no. to the point where it starts changing and it starts coming to much more open to a much more diverse idea of what we could be. Although the colors still vary, they use a lot of ethnographic photography from white people coming to photograph us and that's kind of the feeling, the raw feeling of that. And then how you break this, you have to think and mentioning photographers like Dorian Ulises from Mexico to take it away from this ethnographic idea and give it a much more artistic approach so that it will universalize the use. And then you realize that the more specific you are, the better that will come. Like, sometimes, the thing is, it's very personal, your relationship with this model, right? Whatever I prompt is the way that I start getting things to work. So for me, sometimes, the more specific you are, the less surprised you are. And sometimes, a surprise is really good. So you're less specific, and you get something quite amazing. And then sometimes, you cut and paste things like this. What I do a lot is I cut a part of this, and a part of this, and a part of this, and I create my own. And then reinforce, like, feed it back. and said I make it more even or make it more that and then when I started to you couldn't use faces they didn't allow you to put yourself like the face of anybody was forbidden so you couldn't feed human faces so I did a 3D scan with this program for 3D scanning I 3D scanned my face and I fed it and I tricked it and they still gave me this with my face and because I wanted to train it in a way that I didn't want to use other people so I tricked it. And then they realized that we will be able to trick the system anyway if they try to impose a no-use face. So they just forgot it and they let us use faces. But for a while they didn't allow us. You just had to do 3D record. You took a photo of yourself, of your face, 3D record and it was like made of dots and that's it. And then you put it inside and you correct the dots and became you. It was the same, really. And then I realized that the more restrictions that they put, the more that we naturally as humans will fight those restrictions and find our ways around. And it's kind of fun to do that because that's human nature. They challenge you and automatically you want to react to this challenge, right? You want to push like, come on, a machine won't beat me and artificial intelligence won't beat me. I have to be the machine. And then from that you realize, oh, what if I can do code? And I have no idea about coding. Zero. Like, I know it works in zeros and ones and that basic thing, and I've seen it, but I didn't know anything. And the first thing that I prompted with code was games and poems and things like this, and I wanted in HTML, and then I wanted in Java, and then I... I was using CodePen for just cutting and pasting code before, so I keep using CodePen, and then if we jump forward and then GPT-4 came and that was... The jump for certain things, like coding, from 3.5 to 4 is massive. But I also was using, in the middle, their OpenAI model. They have a lot of different models. And I was using those models that are not so easy to use. The interface is a little bit harder. But I was using those interfaces. And then we download the chat GPT-3.5 on my own computer. and start running it, and gets really hot. It's crazy, but it's not online anymore. It's outside. And then I start also playing with a scenario, GG, and start training my own models with my own pictures. And then I realize, ah, to do this is not that hard. You realize the mistakes that you make when you train, and you realize that quality sometimes is better than quantity, regardless what you want to do. You start understanding how this system works. And it surprises you because you say, I want interactivity. I want to use TouchDesigner. And I ask, how can you give me the notes? I go and read how TouchDesigner works. And then I go and tell them, can you give me a guide, A to B to C to D, and then give me the code to put in TouchDesigner to be able to transform an image into a sick art or something? As you do, it becomes very addictive. in a mentally way because the more that you do the more things that you can get out and you say oh I think maybe I can design a system like Netflix to do self-distribution of our movies and I did it and it worked and it gave you and you put the code and you're like oh wow so You start seeing the possibilities and then you realize that nothing will be the same. Then you realize why we are speaking about a technological revolution, why this is going to modify our lives forever. There is no way back. You understand also that the gap between people using and not using, or understanding, can grow bigger. And then you understand, you start thinking about the implications of how many people will lose their jobs, what will happen. Each person is different. For me, my connection with the AI became my hands. became this outing of my brain. It's so difficult for me to explain what I want to people. It's so difficult for me to communicate in English, Spanish or any language that I speak because I speak about a hundred things at the same time with my brain. Now I was in front of something that this was a plus. That to do what I do, to speak in this way, It's a bonus. It's a gift. So this AI and me became a gift. This became like, wow. Because all of these crazy ideas, all of these ways, I don't need to try to communicate and make people understand me anymore. It actually does understand me. And as a neurodiverse person, as a creator, you feel like, It's so liberating. And then you, when you start thinking about the ethical consequences, I don't know, it's complex because you understand, if everybody understand the possibilities, you understand how liberating can be for all of us. You understand how can improve our lives dramatically in every sense. And then you see these corporations fighting for our attention and these corporations fighting for controlling and you understand how horribly wrong can also go. And it's like, you don't know.
[00:25:52.942] Kent Bye: It sounds like it's obviously unlocked all these new dimensions of your ability to express yourself through these creative coding projects. I've done some coding in my past and sometimes when I'm trying to learn a new language there's this tricky thing where when you're first starting to learn how to do something there's basic common sense knowledge that people who already know how to use it know and it doesn't get explained anywhere, and so there's often quite a gap between trying to figure out why something isn't quite working, and then to eventually get to the point where you get something compiling and working, and then from there you can start to look through Stack Overflow or other places to get code snippets, but to go for that intermediary step, it's very difficult to find those good sources to bootstrap you from zero up until being able to get something running, but to just chat GPT to be able to onboard you and to explain the basics and then to ask the step-by-step and then ask and basically describe what you want and then get the pseudocode. And then you were telling me yesterday that there were some other tools of p5.js that it's able to then help do some verification because sometimes there'll be some errors in the coding. And so even then there's other ways of getting enough of the pseudocode to test it and then to then deploy it out in different ways. So I'd love to hear about your process of that type of coding because you've worked with coders in the past with PresentX, but now with this new capability, you have the possibility to start to do new types of projects where you can push forward your vision without having to have not only the communication barriers, but also the time and money to pay the developers to do what you want. So I'd love to hear a bit more about that process for you, what this is also opening up in your own creative process.
[00:27:26.835] Violeta Ayala: Yeah, like with CodePen, it just comes as a mistake. So you just cut and paste a mistake back to chat.jpg4 and ask it to fix it. While with p5.js, it tells you what's the mistake. So you tell it what is the mistake, and it helps you to find it. You say, this is a mistake. So in the beginning, for me, I had to say, can you write a whole code again for me? Because I didn't even know where to put it. But today, because I'm learning, as I do, then I just go little snippets and I can find, like, I know where to put X, Y or Z because even that is a process that you learn because if you don't know anything, even they say, you know, put this line in this part and I'm like, OK, where is this part? And so I used to go and do a lot of much more like deeper things. Also, I think that I figure out how it works is like when I will make a film, If I think about the finished film and how hard will be and how difficult will be, I will never make it. So I always think about the little next step that will take to develop what I'm trying to make. So in this case, it's the same for me. So I don't think about I'm going to build blah, blah, blah. I just think about the most simple thing first. So it's successful. Then I add an extra level. it's successful at an extra level. So I was trying to make an Aguayo game that you will be weaving an Aguayo and then my daughter came and said let's do like a game and so then we say first the Aguayo and then I said like a composition of Andean colors that will be like that and would feel like weaving and then the next step you say I want it to have randomly so you play and the next step you said I want it to be able to have like a score, some sort of gamification. And then when it gamifies, it becomes really lame, the game. I'm like, oh, this game is lame. So let's try to think about how. So you go up with complexity. So you go from, in my experience, you say something so complex, it's going to be harder to win, to achieve. Because in my case, I don't know how to fix the code. So I need to think a way how I'm going to get it right. So if you get right and right and right, it's like you're training the AI and it becomes more confident. It's not a person, so I don't know. Becomes more confident in achieving this. And also because you're more clear and direct in what you're prompting and what you're telling to do. And then you go up and up and up and up and up. And then you go up to use it for 3D objects, for Blender. to give you code, to change the textures. So it's just this process that I think no one can do it for you. I think that each person that, and this is the scary bit, that is this your personal relationship with AI and how you will develop this personal relationship with AI? Because if we're all going to use it in the same way, I think it's gonna eat our brains and our imagination and everything will be standardized. And I think that that's the danger that we are in today. So we need to actually be able to work out our own way to solve the problems and our own way to use these systems. And then you start thinking, you know, who's going to lose their jobs? How many people will lose their jobs? I was thinking we will have to have a universal income at some point in a lot of developed countries because of this. It gets scary and it gets scary because women in general are technophobes and it's also a very negative reaction amongst artists and filmmakers towards AI in general because of the futuristic dystopia that was painted to us by movies and by the media so far and the cat is out of the bag. It's no way back. Now we have two choices. One that we fight and we take this opportunity in the world because no one controls the metaverse. Everybody's fighting for control and everybody's pretending. But look what happens when you see what's happening with JGPT 4 today. You know that Google is becoming totally irrelevant. It's out of the picture or they come with something quite special soon or we will see what happens to them, right? So, new players are coming really fast and we have a chance, a little window in time where the future of our children and the children in the world not depend on how we react. So, if we let these corporations, techno-authoritarianism is going to win and they're going to control us totally. Or, if we realize the potential of what we can create now, and we actually create our own distribution models for films, for games, for everything that we can create, if we can create a way of data sovereignty, and we take the time to understand, yes, it's not easy, like Facebook or whatever, because it is a bit more complex, the process. But if we don't do that today, It's going to be very scary tomorrow. And what Mozilla is doing is quite amazing, because they are trying to put a stop. They are trying to say, we can do these things. And we have the two sides. We have stability AI, and they have a philosophy of an open model. And you can download a new computer, and it does not cost you a cent. It's free. It's harder to use, yes, but it's free. And we are feeding this model. And if we feed this model and we all work together, we will take away the control from these corporations, from their hands. But this is, I think, where we are. That's why I think that this revolution, it's a revolution. It's a revolution like any other revolution in the world. It's where, you remember when electricity was invented? didn't change the world from one day to the other but it changed the world dramatically forever and this is what's happening today. If somebody tells me that they know what will happen in the future I will think that that person is a liar and is just making fibs. If somebody says you're an expert in artificial intelligence and the effects I also will think that you may be an expert too big for yourself because I don't think no one is an expert on You might be an expert in machine learning and training these models, but you cannot be an expert of how this will affect us, because we don't really know. What we can do is predict the future, and we can dream a future, and we can design a future that we want, so at least we're going to have a chance to say, like, you can encrypt all your podcasts. you can encrypt your work, you can actually have the data ownership of your work. So at least in the future, when they use your work to train a model, at least you will be compensated for that. And also, it's not just the financial side, but it's also the intellectual property side, right? That it's going to be like a trademark to know where this is coming from. And yet the misinformation danger is massive. And that's why we need governments, we need Governments that understand what's happening. So we need to start putting the rules before it's too late that everything created with AI should be, should have some sort of mark that says this is AI. So we know that that's not true. But because at the moment there is no rules. It's almost like we're going to see what happens and then we're going to put the rules when it'll be too late. And it's almost too late, but it's not too late yet. So we need our governments. We need politicians. We need people to take this seriously. This is not a game. This is a game changer, not a game. This is not a fad. Artificial intelligence, it is already ruling our lives within the algorithms, already deeply changed our lives. But it's nothing compared to what's coming. Nothing.
[00:35:26.811] Kent Bye: Yeah. And when we talk about this issue of intellectual property ownership, you know, there's this debate from Kirby Ferguson has a whole series called everything is a remix where he goes into how so much of the culture is remixing other aspects of culture. But then there's other dimensions of intellectual property or ideas that What's the boundary between taking someone's idea and making your own? And there's fair use laws that try to differentiate between what's enough of a transformation of something. And so I think there's some current debates as to what degree are these types of generative AI models, is it a transformation or is it somehow storing the core essence of some of these photos in a way that is violating copyright, and I think there's this Getty lawsuit that's happening against Stability AI, Midjourney, Dahle, where a lot of their photo archive was scanned, and obviously there's a lot of copyrights on those photos, and then now the essence of some of those photos are integrated into these models to the point where you can even see a ghostly like recreation of that Getty Images like watermark that is on some of these images. But you had an interesting anecdote about your own connection to Getty Images and one of your relatives. I'd love for you to share that little anecdote but also reflect on this tension between how much is it that everything is a remix and that should be a commons that everyone has access to this type of cultural commons that we're able to build upon kind of like the creative commons in the public domain. But then there is this need for people to survive in the absence of larger universal basic income and the larger political and economic and legal infrastructure to prevent this large dimensions of wealth inequality and having the rich get richer and the increasing gap between the people who have access to those resources and people who don't and so that universal basic income is a nice way to think that yeah that could be a solution but we're far from that and so we're we're left with the situation where we do still need to have some mechanism for people to create art and to protect their art so love to hear some of your thoughts as an artist and who is using these tools but also recognizing some of those ethical dilemmas.
[00:37:25.398] Violeta Ayala: I started asking myself, you know, is this fair or not fair? I started questioning myself very critically about it and I started thinking about how these photographs in the first place were taken. There are a lot of photographers that go to countries in development or anywhere and they start taking photographs of people sometimes in the past without even their consent. Maybe today they have to ask for consent, but in the past they didn't have to even ask for consent. The image of the Andean woman, or the Quechua woman, or even the first documentary, An Oak of the Oak, it is a, I would say, a very deep violation of our human rights, in a sense that the white men didn't just colonize us, but then they're representing us and telling us who we are, and in a very brutal way, and telling us how should we behave, and it was brutal. And even the invention of photography, it is a colonizing tool. It's a tool and it's a colonizing tool. And we can revert the tool and we can use the tool, but it still comes from that eye photography. So what happens, my grandfather was photographed by Getty Images. My grandfather was an indigenous leader. He spent 10 years in prison. So Getty Images came to my town and photographed my grandfather, very amazing photographs of him in La Plaza with his big hat. And then when my grandfather died, everybody asked me, they said, oh, you remember the photograph that is in the internet of your grandfather? Like, we want to have it in a funeral, blah, blah, blah. I said, OK, OK. So I asked them. And they said to me, oh, yeah, you can buy it for $300, $500, $600, $700. And I said, it's my grandfather. They said, yeah, but the copyright has Getty Images and the photographer. They didn't even offer me a discount. I bought the lowest version, the cheaper version. It's funny because now with Dali I took out their watermark for a better version. Anyway, and I was upset. And then when you're a filmmaker and you travel to film festivals and they photograph you and you don't even have access to your own photographs. And they don't even allow you some of these festivals to take your own photographer. So then you have to pay to get images or stock images of all of these corporations, the rights to your own image we're talking about. So when you photograph a person, you are the owner, that was the idea. But is that ethical? Is that correct? Like, we are in an interaction now. You photograph me, I photograph you. Who owns this? Those problems that are going to become more deeply embedded in AI, it's not that they don't exist in non-AI, it's that they were formed already in a very unequal relationship between subject and object. between the photographer and the person. And I'm coming from a background of documentary filmmaking, where I made films, and I question myself today, like, yes, it's different because in La Lucha, people with disabilities got their pension thanks to my work, but still, what is this relationship between me and when you do it in another country, in other cultures, it's even more complex this relationship and how we learn like if somebody says to me Draw a table here. I'm going to draw something that I saw that they told me it's a table I think that we also start questioning us how we come with the images that we describe, right? So because it was in the past we didn't value or we didn't think much about the creation of thought the creation of thought was something that it was put on mostly on men and So men were the philosophers who create thought, the thought processes. But these men didn't born in a cave and are alone and no one talked to them. They had mothers, fathers, communities. They went out, even the painters, even Van Gogh or Gauguin, when they went to Puerto Rico or, I don't know, the Dominican Republic, and he went and came and did an amazing exhibition after. It went there to observe and then had this power relationship of the observer and the money to go to these places, even at the time, even at the beginning. We also have to remember that cinema is only 100 years old, only 100 years old, where we're in humanity more than, I think Aboriginal people were in Australia more than 60,000 years. So before we told stories, before we passed stories, Great-grandmothers pass stories to me through the aguayos, through this weaving, through these other ways. So we can't be so reductive in the way that we see film. We can't be so reductive in the way that we see this passing of information. Film is only just a medium, too, and this medium has framed us so much that we don't even know when reality stops and fantasy begins anymore. We are so framed by everything that we are now in an overconsumption time where everybody is with their phones taking thousands and thousands of photographs all the time. And cinema was to escape reality and now we need experience to actually escape the digital reality that we created for ourselves. We need to go back and understand what's happening around us and where humanity lies. And that's how this process of AI works. It will deepen these gaps or these problems, but it's not creating these problems. These problems always existed. These problems still exist. All television is very problematic if you see all live, even when this idea of a film and a director and the actors and then a lot of those actors, ones who are not celebrity A-lists, they don't have any ownership to their work and some of them might even go and live in poverty while the directors are the ones who benefited. As if the director was capable of doing this film on its own, the editor has not a cut on the film like the producers and directors do, but like the whole team. So it is a model that is deeply unfair because Some people get paid so much and then the rest of the team doesn't benefit further into this. And then it's a deeply capitalistic, macho, unfair model. So can we change these models today? Rather than go and freak out about this, can we sit down and think and talk and think about how can we dream another reality? How can we dream a future where we understand the value of these things? You know, as a filmmaker, as a creator, Today, I am like an artisan. I'm an artisan of images. I create models, I create ideas, I challenge ideas and I dream it and I do it with different tools. Sometimes it will be with a camera and sometimes it will be with AI, right? Like, I just want to have enough to live, always. But I don't think it's fair that the gap of how much money people earn in these industries is so big. And I just think it's not fair. I think that I didn't make the films on my own. I didn't create everything that I do on my own, alone. I think that we need to find fair methods of distribution of everything. And I think this is a time where we can find better methods of distribution. We need to think a lot about our intellectual property. How can we protect that intellectual property in a way that we will mutually benefit, us and the ones we're going to use. So I'm working on a film called Cyberpunk Thinkers and what I'm doing at the moment, I'm training an AI with my own metacognition and then I will use all the books and everything of Ketra literature and what we have And then will be my writing assistant. I will co-write. So then I wanted to be decentralized in a way that then others can use my model to write. Anyone can use my model to write. But there will be a percentage of that money that will come to me and another percentage that will go to create a fund for Quechua young writers or whoever. Ketra filmmakers, writers, artists who want to use, we will create a fund and that will be automatically go back to them. So then they can create their own and we can grow our own ideas, our own way to see the world and our own art. And we can grow in a very fair way. We're not going to grow as like they looking down on us and giving us the or begging or something, we're going to create a much more fairer way. And then anyone can create over. And then what I'm creating now is the system. And then anyone can use my AI. But also, when someone wants to, oh, I want to use a Quechua person or an Andean person, they don't go and invent themselves an Andean person with Western characteristics and Western ways of being or Western ways of understanding the world. But they can actually use my AI to write a character that will actually reflect who we are for real. And then we will actually gain a much more cultural insight into this. And it will be mutually beneficial for the world, and for me, and for everyone around. So how can we think about these things that we can do? So rather than trying to steal stories from others and tell others stories, we can co-create with others. It will be a great service to the creativity because everything at the moment is boring because we are repeating these patterns that are boring and we are tired of this boredom. So we don't have to be boring. I deeply believe that there is no other moment in time. I never thought I would be alive today. I never thought that this would happen in my lifetime. It's quite amazing. And I think it's in our hands to decide the future. It's a deep responsibility that we have as a generation. I'm 45, and my generation was a very lazy generation and was a generation that got caught in mortgages and in the system after our parents fought so hard. And now I think that is coming to us and saying, Now it's your turn. Now you have to fight. You couldn't go through this for free, like, as people. And this is not something about you or me or anybody. This has to go. So I grew up, and people of my age grew up thinking that when we grow up, we're going to do very well. If we study hard, if we go to school, we achieve, we're going to have a career. We're going to be able to buy a car and a house. And it was all about you as an individual. And we got us here, but now, My daughter has to grow up thinking that everybody has to have access to public education, that everybody has to have access to water, that it has to be a public transfer for everybody. It's a totally different change of the chip. And it's already, in a sense, happening. In a way, it's already happening. I think that this idea of ownership of things is not as deep as it used to be. My own personal well-being is important. The survival of my culture and my people is more important than my personal well-being and whatever I create. Yeah, of course, it gives me pleasure like everybody else, but everyone will create on top of what I create is what will give me more pleasure and is going to contribute to this bigger intelligence than us. And that will be the only thing that will ensure our survival as people and as our differences. So we have to stop this individualistic idea of creation. We need to stop this snobbery and this idea of Look what I do, look I do what I do. We're fighting for peanuts. We need to understand as artists and creators our role in this historical moment. And this requires of us to say bye to our egos a little bit and say we need to develop further ways. And I don't know the answer.
[00:49:16.447] Kent Bye: Well, I know that when I was at IFA DocLab, there was a book that was from MIT Co-Creation Studio by Kat Cizek and William Uricchio that you were actually featured in talking about some of these aspects of how to move from this individualistic approach into more of a process of co-creation in this more community-based practice. And so, yeah, I see these deeper movements from what I phrase as this Western metaphysics of this substance-oriented way of seeing the world as these individual objects that are static and they're separate. moving into this more of a process relational approach where you see that the underlying nature of reality is this relationality and this processes are unfolding and very similar to a lot of the indigenous ideas of all my relations or more Eastern modes of thought where it is much more focused on that unfolding nature of reality is this dynamic change, but also this underlying relationality to everything. So I feel like that there's parts of the underlying economic, political, legal, and cultural systems that we have that need to make this paradigm shift from this focusing everything on the individual into this more relationality perspective. So I feel like in some ways, both the virtual reality and the augmented reality, as well as the artificial intelligence in each of their individual ways, our technology that's giving us a view into these new realities when we take this more relational approach. I mean, even the machine learning models as they're being trained, they're coming up with all these relational dynamics in this higher dimensional latent space of they're ingesting all these pieces of data and they're figuring out what those relationships are and it's through the relationship to those images that they're seeing through the computer vision connected to the text captions, that they're able to see how we describe these things through language, that they're able to make this multimodal jump from language into the image that is very much a relational dynamic, that the core basis of how the AI and the machine learning is even working is moving into this more relational ontology, and I would argue even deeper into the metaphysics of process-relational metaphysics. Yeah, as someone who comes from an indigenous culture, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and reflection of moving away from this more Western mode of the individual and the separateness into more of an indigenous way of being more in right relationship to not only to each other, but the world around us.
[00:51:25.061] Violeta Ayala: You know, I think I used to always be very sad about what I lost through colonization. And now I think that the world is sad because of what the world lost through colonization. Can you imagine? We're facing what we're facing and we only have a monolingual, monocultural, mono way to understand and come up with solutions. We're fucked because it needs a lot of people and it needs people who think differently and it's people who think different ways to find a solution, right? So my sadness of being like what we lost as Quechua people or as Aymara people or like Aboriginal people in Australia is what the world lost doing what they've done. It was a self-hijack. Self-hijack. because I think a culture that's lived 60,000 years in Australia, like the Aboriginal culture, or 26,000 years in the Americas, like my culture, probably knew a little bit things that we could learn from them, like you don't touch the Amazonia, and knew a lot to be able to survive continuously for such long periods of time. And I think that this appetite for having more, and this appetite to conquer, It is a horrible trait. It's a trait that shouldn't be cultivated and shouldn't be applauded as it was until now. You know, this trait of destroying and imposing your own. Like the Spanish, the first thing that they did when they came, they destroyed our cultural sacred sites to destroy our culture. They destroyed our quipus. They destroyed everything. In a way, hijacking themselves into the future, into 2022 and now what we do, right? Because also cultures evolve and we have to think in this evolution what would have happened to this culture if that destruction didn't happen. But that threat was cut. There is no way back. We are where we are. I think that we're very fortunate in Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador. that we survive, that we don't have to put our culture in a museum, that we somehow evolve. We become chixi, we become this mixture of everything that comes from Spain or Europe or whatever today or in Asia. Today we make it our own and we find our own way. So this is a good thing. But I'm not a purist at all and I think that we evolve and we learn from each other. The way that we solve problems, if you think about agriculture, perhaps. The diet of European people before they came to America was incredibly poor. The potatoes just don't come from air. That's a heavily engineered food. It's an amazing engineering that goes through the production of our foods. We actually gave humanity, the entire world, a different way of food and elements so they could grow stronger and better. And I think that our staff were taken for granted. It was like because it was this idea of looking from up to down and that way that we didn't appreciate everything that we created. So if you see the Andean, the Quechua agriculture, it's a fantastic thing. You go in the mountains and you have terraces and the water goes from the top to the bottom and goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, I don't know, terraces. And not one drop of water goes to waste. Because you go the first terrace, the water goes to the second one, to the third one, to the fourth one. What an amazing thing to think about food production and how that's an engineer process, right? Food is going to become one of the things that we need to think about it because people don't even think about how we produce food and what we eat. And the diet in the Western world is quite poor compared to the diet in my town. It's no comparison. because we produce a lot of natural products and they're seasonal because that's what our bodies need and this is this process of engineering that went through thousands of years to make us who we are today and we just were so arrogant that we think we don't need that and we just let it die and trying to kill it and this is really interesting. So this Idea of what is relevant what it matters to you. Yeah, some people just care about money I don't think you can eat money. You can have a lots of money and when there is no water or no food Wow, you're gonna eat the dollars. I don't think so It's not even dollars today is a number on the bank anyway But also the over consumption that we have of things and of course, I'm not going to say indigenous people didn't love fashion we are incredibly fashionable we love fashion if you think indigenous cultures and the fashion that we have today and we always had it's amazing but we do have a respect maybe for craftsmanship and for what it represents and it's not something that you will use it every day and so you're not going to over consume but you're going to value what you have right so because of the nature of colonization just to survive We had to work together, we had to think of us as a group of people where individualism was not a trait that we valued because it didn't matter to us. I remember at some point when we talked about feminism and they said to me indigenous people are not, there is no feminism and I said you can't say that but we are fighting at the moment for the survival of all of us. So it's difficult. And that was an imposition from the Catholic Church and from colonization. So you can't come and say that we didn't care about feminism, but we care about the group of us. We care more about... And as the group gets better, we start caring much more about individualistic things, right? So I think because this engineering of food production, it was very sophisticated and we don't say Zonzo did it. We just did it, right? It's ours. And Aguayo, the quipus, we don't say Z and Z did it. It's we did it. It's part of our culture. And you know what it matters? That we did it, that we have it, that we can use. And then what can we study today? The few quipus that exist, the quipus are how we used to write these notes in a way that we used to communicate. And it was like, not written, but like a way of communication. So can we go back to that and can we see how it was thought? What was the thought process went into seeing the world in this way? Can we go back to understand those things? Can we understand also, in the past they used to say that the intelligence was produced by where you're born and you develop. But I don't think that's right. I think that now it's been discovered that we have also ancestral intelligence, that you inherit genetically and you inherited the way that you think, how you solve problems. So for me it is not a coincidence that I'm here or I did what I did because probably I inherited these traits from my ancestors to be able to survive. for almost 20,000 years because I can trace my own ancestral background to the Bering Strait and I belong on my grandmother's side to the oldest people that inhabit the Americans that actually lived in the Bering Strait before crossing entirely, right? So there must be a lot of traits that I probably inherit, and even maybe I am neurodiverse in this Western way of understanding this world, but maybe I'm not neurodiverse in my own community and way to how we understand the world, because that's the chixi bit, that's how we understand the world in a cyclical way. For us, in theory, the past is in front and the future is behind, because The future is behind because we haven't seen it yet. And the past is in front because we've already seen what happened. So it's a very different way of even understanding the world and the time in the world. And the time in the world is cyclical. And the time in the world, we live in three different realms. And here, when you think about it, like when people believe in Christianism, and that for me is funny, And then we believe that we have three different worlds. The now, today, is called the Kaipacha and the Ukupacha is everything that is behind us, everything that we can see. And we think that the dead and the new life is in the Ukupacha and is all these, all the meats and everything that lives in the Ukupacha. The Kaipacha is everything that is here now and we can affect. And the Hanampacha is all the planets and everything that we can see and we know exists, but we cannot affect. So this relationality of how we produce thought and the world is a complex ecosystem. I think colonization goes deeply than men to men. I think colonization goes like we are now getting into the Amazonia and killing the animals and the jaguars because we believe that our life is more important than the life of a jaguar without realizing that we are co-dependent. The jaguar is an apex animal that actually eats everything else. So we can have fish in the river. And so we can eat fish. So the moment that we kill a jaguar, we're killing 200 or 2,000 of us, humans. We need to start thinking in this relationship. And this is something very important in Quechua culture. Everything is related. Everything is related. So when people say augmented reality, virtual reality are different, I'm like, yeah, of course, but they're related. Everything is related. It's like you cannot see the relationships. And this is the thing. This is the way that Quechua people understand the world, in this relational thing. We are related. I ask myself, when somebody says, you like more jaguars than people, I say, no. But yeah, yeah, I do. Because actually, by preserving the life of a jaguar, I'm preserving the life of 2,000 people. Think about it. How are you going to eat? If you kill the habitat of the jaguar and burn to grow cows to send it to China and to the US for meat, you're actually taking away food for everybody else too. We have to rewild the world. We have to make the world more wild in every sense. We don't need so much. We don't need so many material things. We need less material things. We need different relationships between us humans because buying and buying and buying things won't make us happy. And yet we do have this window of time. And I think that for us to understand how the human brain works and how artificial intelligence can fulfill a lot of these desires that we have because we're bored, I think that it can give a lot of young people hope. And also this idea of belonging and this idea of curiosity and this idea of experimentation that we are losing and we're bored. And because you're bored, you consume more. Because you're bored, you do things that you wouldn't do. And because the way that kids are born now, attached to their mobile phones, and you have kids that are already old people without even being young. because they don't move, they live in the cities, in this environment, that they don't have to be like that. And I think we have this opportunity today where we can change these things and we can look at not just indigenous communities, but we can look at different societies. I don't know, in India, in many, many African countries, in my own country, in my own society, we don't even have McDonald's. In my city, we don't have malls. And you know, we don't need it. You realize that when you come here, you need it and you want these things. But when you're there and you're there long enough, you realize that it's not important and you actually don't need it. So we need to start extrapolating these things. What makes people happy? These relationships, the public spaces make us happy. That's why I think, for me, the potential of artificial intelligence to help us to redesign society and redesign and think about an architectural way. And sadly, even if I wanted to, this is not up to me, and this is not up to you, and this is not up to ten of us, but it's up to all of us or lots of us. And lots of us is what we need to... They need to wake up. and we need to help and each of us matters because we're so connected one to the other and the well-being of each of us in these communities that we have, even within our own community that we have, the well-being of each of us is very important for the whole community. And this is something that we also see a lot in my culture, the way that we look after each other and the way that we care for each other and this culture of caring rather than competing. Because what are we competing for? Like, I hate competition in that way. I don't want to compete for anything because we can't compare pears and apples and oranges. We're all different. So we need to get away of that. And I think this is quite important.
[01:04:39.310] Kent Bye: What do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality artificial intelligence might be and what it might be able to enable?
[01:04:48.139] Violeta Ayala: I think that at the moment software is going very fast and it's very sophisticated. And hardware, I think, is going very slow yet. So it's very difficult at this moment in time. I don't see virtual reality yet as a big outlet because it hurts your head. I think that once Apple comes with a mixed reality headset, it might be a game changer and then everybody follows suit. Like, a screen is so horrible. Can you imagine? We went back from big screens in cinemas to this horrible little square that we use in our hands. Like, actually, rather than allowing technology to expand us, technology is reducing us into this.
[01:05:26.874] Kent Bye: Where you're holding your hand in front of your face, like, stuck in your phone.
[01:05:30.758] Violeta Ayala: It's horrible. And I think that's the possibility that will change again with AR glasses, that we will be more free of that thing on our hands and we will be able to have a different relationship with people. I can imagine, like, I will be able to have my auntie here with me and visiting parties with me and I will be able to see my daughter in Sydney and be with her at the same moment. This idea of embodying these realities. We can't accept technology that will reduce us. We have to fight for technology that enhances us. And if we do that, then the potential is massive. The potential of AI in the hands of the people is massive. If you imagine the ideas that will come, even for feminism, for women, for cultures, the things that we don't even dream about, that they're going to be able to create with semantics. Because those people who didn't have that possibilities of coding and all of that, they don't need it. And the ideas, once these reach the people, you imagine the revolution that will be, what we're going to create. We're going to create things that, like, and that's the thing. That's why we need to fight for not being controlled by few. One, it has to be universal for everyone in the world, because it's the only way that it's going to grow in an expansive, amazing way. and we need to be very conscious about the biases and very conscious about not trying to do a monolingual like film and don't try to frame it as one way but try to look at this expanding way so it doesn't become a replica of what's not working definitely. It's a time where I think film, flat film is going to be something like of the past of course it's going to exist but it's going to be something of the past because you don't want to see what you can embody The creativity that we're facing today is amazing. The possibilities of that creativity. I want this to reach the people. I want this to reach a lot of women and men to be able to use these tools. And that universality now is in our hands and the hands of our governments. Not just in our hands, in the hands of the governments to say this needs to be universal. This needs to be for everyone. And then we're going to start working physically and working mentally less and enjoying more and value more life because we can optimize tasks and do things that we couldn't. Even for me, I'm fascinated by it and I'm kind of addicted to it, but I actually can enjoy my time more now because I can automatize so many things, even grand applications. I know I can do it in an hour. I can have three more hours of play, I can have three more hours of experimentation. I'm finishing a film and before I would be struggling and stressing, I wouldn't have come because I had to do this color correction and everything. Now I can automatize the process, I can be here and that's giving me a better quality of life. And this is the point, right? The point is that it has to improve our lives. the medical point of view, like how it's going to improve our lives. This needs to be open and universal. And that's why OpenAI and all of these organizations need to think deeply. And if they don't want to do it by choice, we will have to force them to do it. And we will have to force our governments to impose ethics on them. And they need to make these things open. They have to be open. And we did this fight for the internet when Microsoft was to control the entire internet. And we fought, and we won. Kind of, but we won. And now turn into this disgrace. Today is a disgrace. Now we have a new chance. So let's do the best of this chance. Thank you.
[01:09:06.927] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Violeta, thank you so much for joining me to share your journey into both the film, to VR, and to all your explorations of AI and all the possibilities of how it's transforming your own creative process. And yeah, it's really exciting to hear the possibilities, but also all the challenges yet to be made in terms of having this shift into this more relational mode of being, which I think that you've really beautifully articulated. So yeah, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast. Thank you.
[01:09:31.378] Violeta Ayala: Thanks to everybody and thanks Ken. I think it's interesting always to talk to you because I don't have to go into this very simplistic way of explaining things and I can go into much more deeper conversations of things that are more complex but also I don't have to focus on a message. I don't have a message and I also don't want to focus on making advertisement for anybody. I think that there is a lot to do and I think that it's in our hands and I really think that critical thinking is so important and critical thinking is key to our evolution and we need to try to speak and understand different ways of thinking and we need to be more open to listen to everybody, the people that we like and the people that we don't like, the people that we care for and the people that we don't care for the people from the right and from the left and from the center and from the middle and from up and down and from all sides. I think that we are in a too extremist time because of algorithms that make us very extremists and I think this is dangerous for democracy, this is dangerous for evolution and dangerous for humanity because without thinking we're going to be killing each other again based on our sexuality, whatever. Like it's always an excuse to kill the other because it's easy divide and conquer and it's a time where we need to listen to each other and I appreciate that on your podcast a lot. I appreciate that you give me the opportunity to listen to people that I might never listen to them because politically I disagree with them or even ethically I disagree with them, yet I need to understand them. and I need to understand how they think, so maybe I can be more educated in the way that I disagree, but I also need to understand what I can even learn from that person that I probably will never have a common thread, but maybe we both have a common way of, we all maybe want humanity to continue, maybe, maybe, maybe not, but we might think that we do, yeah? Even Elon Musk, we need to hear each other, so we will have a better idea of where we are at. So thanks a lot.
[01:11:36.315] Kent Bye: Yeah, thank you. So that was Violeta Ayala. She's a filmmaker, film futurist, and creative technologist who's been using semantics to be able to create different immersive technologies and use all the different types of generative AI systems. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, it's just super fascinating just to see how Violeta is using these generative AI systems to be able to close the gap between her imagination with the different types of projects that she wants to create and starting to not only find the different gaps and biases of ways that her own indigenous heritages may or may not be represented within these different models, but she's been participating in their reinforcement learning with human feedback and reporting different aspects of bias. But even given those constraints, she's able to push forward her own creativity. She's got this daily practice where she's continuing to create these different creative coding examples. And she identifies as a filmmaker, but also as a film futurist who's thinking about these new levels of cinematography that's coming from using semantics in order to create her pieces. And given her multilingual background, she finds that actually is a benefit when it comes to these different generative AI systems. And she said in the interview that she's on the autistic spectrum and she finds that sometimes it's difficult for her to communicate with other people but that with these generative AI systems she's able to be a lot more independent and have a lot more of her own sovereignty when it comes to creating these different immersive projects and these creative projects and a lot of augmented reality filters and really pushing the edge of what's possible with these immersive technologies. And to also look at these different understandings of time and the more cyclical nature and the nonlinear aspects of creating these immersive worlds and spaces that you can explore and more of a self-directed way rather than in a linear way. And so she's also finding the medium of XR is a really great platform for her to be able to express different aspects of her indigenous understandings of the nature of time and storytelling as well. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a message-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
