I sat across - metaversically speaking - from Maury Rogow, a man who's lived three lives—tech executive, Hollywood producer, storytelling evangelist—and watched him grapple with the same question haunting creators everywhere: Are we teaching our replacements to dream? In our latest conversation on Redefining Society and Technology, we explored whether AI is the ultimate creative collaborator or the final chapter in human artistic expression.
⸻ Podcast: Redefining Society and Technology
https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com
Title: Creative Storytelling in the Age of AI: When Machines Learn to Dream and the Last Stand of Human Creativity
Guest: Maury Rogow
CEO, Rip Media Group | I grow businesses with Ai + video storytelling. Honored to have 70k+ professionals & 800+ brands grow by 2.5Billion Published: Inc, Entrepreneur, Forbes
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauryrogow/
Host: Marco Ciappelli
Co-Founder & CMO @ITSPmagazine | Master Degree in Political Science - Sociology of Communication l Branding & Marketing Consultant | Journalist | Writer | Podcasts: Technology, Cybersecurity, Society, and Storytelling.
WebSite: https://marcociappelli.com
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-ciappelli/
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⸻ Podcast Summary ⸻
I sat across - metaversically speaking - from Maury Rogow, a man who's lived three lives—tech executive, Hollywood producer, storytelling evangelist—and watched him grapple with the same question haunting creators everywhere: Are we teaching our replacements to dream? In our latest conversation on Redefining Society and Technology, we explored whether AI is the ultimate creative collaborator or the final chapter in human artistic expression.
⸻ Article ⸻
I sat across from Maury Rogow—a tech exec, Hollywood producer, and storytelling strategist—and watched him wrestle with a question more and more of us are asking: Are we teaching our replacements to dream?
Our latest conversation on Redefining Society and Technology dives straight into that uneasy space where AI meets human creativity. Is generative AI the ultimate collaborator… or the beginning of the end for authentic artistic expression?
I’ve had my own late-night battles with AI writing tools, struggling to coax a rhythm out of ChatGPT that didn’t feel like recycled marketing copy. Eventually, I slammed my laptop shut and thought: “Screw this—I’ll write it myself.” But even in that frustration, something creative happened. That tension? It’s real. It’s generative. And it’s something Maury deeply understands.
“Companies don’t know how to differentiate themselves,” he told me. “So they compete on cost or get drowned out by bigger brands. That’s when they fail.”
Now that AI is democratizing storytelling tools, the danger isn’t that no one can create—it’s that everyone’s content sounds the same. Maury gets AI-generated brand pitches daily that all echo the same structure, voice, and tropes—“digital ventriloquism,” as I called it.
He laughed when I told him about my AI struggles. “It’s like the writer that’s tired,” he said. “I just start a new session and tell it to take a nap.” But beneath the humor is a real fear: What happens when the tools meant to support us start replacing us?
Maury described a recent project where they recreated a disaster scene—flames, smoke, chaos—using AI compositing. No massive crew, no fire trucks, no danger. And no one watching knew the difference. Or cared.
We’re not just talking about job displacement. We’re talking about the potential erasure of the creative process itself—that messy, human, beautiful thing machines can mimic but never truly live.
And yet… there’s hope. Creativity has always been about connecting the dots only you can see. When Maury spoke about watching Becoming Led Zeppelin and reliving the memories, the people, the context behind the music—that’s the spark AI can’t replicate. That’s the emotional archaeology of being human.
The machines are learning to dream.
But maybe—just maybe—we’re the ones who still know what dreams are worth having.
Cheers,
Marco
⸻ Keywords ⸻ artificial intelligence creativity, AI content creation, human vs AI storytelling, generative AI impact, creative industry disruption, AI writing tools, future of creativity, technology and society, AI ethics philosophy, human creativity preservation, storytelling in AI age, creative professionals AI, digital transformation creativity, AI collaboration tools, machine learning creativity, content creation revolution, artistic expression AI, creative industry jobs, AI generated content, human-AI creative partnership
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Marco Ciappelli: All right. Welcome everybody. This is another episode of Redefining Society and Technology Podcast, which means we can talk about pretty much anything we want nowadays, and that's the beauty of it. It's like a large container. Sometimes we touch on very specific things - coding and cybersecurity. But most of the time it's about society, the way we talk to each other, the way we interact with each other, and how it's changing with technology. And now hopefully we do change technology to fit our goals and not just follow those blinking lights and funny noises, which is my favorite quote to say.
So here, this is funny 'cause it's great and funny because, Maury here - we had a prep call and I wish we recorded that. That was great. So then we got together this morning and we start talking. I'm like, wait, wait a minute. Let's not waste it.
Maury Rogow: Hit record.
Marco Ciappelli: Let's hit record and let's freestyle. So, Maury - that's how I learned your last name, thank you. Hope I got it right.
Maury Rogow: Yes, thank you.
Marco Ciappelli: You are in Florida right now, in Miami, but you spend quite some time here in my neighborhood in LA.
Maury Rogow: Loved it there. Yes.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. So what we're gonna talk about today, I guess it's a little bit of everything. Creativity, branding, the interacting with technology, mostly with generative AI and how I think we can just not jump on that train because hopefully we already jumped on that train. And it's gonna - hopefully, hopefully the listeners are already...
Maury Rogow: The listeners here already - they're already at the second stop down the line, I think. I hope so.
Marco Ciappelli: Otherwise, they didn't read the title of the podcast. So, Maury, a little intro by yourself. It's way too long for me to go over that, and I don't like to read a bio for people, but what are the most relevant things that you think our audience should know before we dive into this conversation?
Maury Rogow: Yeah, sure. Thank you. And it is great talking with you, so thank you so much for having me. I've seen over the last 30 years of my career, it's truly been the same problem, just occurring again and again and again. Technology shifts - still the same problem. Technology shifts, gets better - still the same problem. And what it is, is companies don't know how to differentiate themselves, so they lose on cost or they lose based on the bigger brand, and that makes businesses fail. So what do we do? We step in there and we help them tell the right story.
So it's a little bit different than some of your normal guests, but I really wanted to be on to talk about that because everybody on here has had a pretty unique story, but when I went and looked them up and I looked on their website, is that popping up? Is that why people are working with them? And so now we're in this next massive shift with AI - generative AI and agent AI coming. We're in a huge shift. Huge changes coming. So it's a great conversation to have and what does that mean?
I sold high tech and so I was head of regions for high tech. I sold software. We sold our company to Cisco Systems, which was the Nvidia of the time 20 years ago - the company to work for, the company that was growing the fastest was Cisco. And Cisco purchased us and I loved my time there and did a few more startups. And after I did those, I said, "You know what I really want to do? I want to move to Hollywood. I've always wanted to do this since I was a kid. I'm getting to 35 and if I don't go right now, I will never do this." So I picked up, literally flew out, found a place and dove into Hollywood. And happily, based on my previous career, I didn't have to go and be a barista and make money in the mornings while I was looking for auditions in the afternoon. I was pretty stable.
And even through a couple of those heavy crashes, I made it through and I started taking everybody I could to lunch. Here's a producer, here's a director, here's actors. What do you do? What's this industry like? I knew how to ask great questions, so I wanted to learn how do you enter this animal of Hollywood? And the thing that kept occurring is if you're a creator, create. If you're a director, direct. If you're a producer, produce. Okay, here we go. So I did and I ended up producing two feature films. I was consulting producer with a producer of The Dark Knight, the Batman franchise. And many others. It was a great time. I did onstage standup comedy at the Comedy Store and the Haha and the Laugh Factory. I was very proud of those days because I've always wanted to do that.
And again, another wave hit - what's gonna happen now? And I said, "You know what? I'm telling stories here. Let me do that for the brands that I used to work with. They need it now." And like we talked about, I don't know if I really want to be jumping in my car, driving city to city and getting paid in chicken wings and $75 per show as a standup.
Marco Ciappelli: Which is how it goes. And cheap beer.
Maury Rogow: And cheap beer. Right. The flat, cheap beer, chicken wings, french fries. I'm like, I'm kind of made it through this phase of my life. I'm not 21. So I was like, let me start producing. And that really took off. We ended up doing over a thousand commercials and explainer videos and got into animation and started getting into new tools. And after 10 years of that, I started looking for new angles. Now I'm helping companies really brand, really launch, not just do their videos, but really launch their content marketing and a lot of companies in your space - in tech and cybersecurity. That's where I came from.
Marco Ciappelli: I mean, great background. We all, I think when you get to a certain age, we all have lived a few different lives, I think. And I think also what really matters if it's possible is that each piece of that life makes you who you are today and makes you think about the things that you think today. So you and I, and we know that because we already talked about it, we kind of base everything on storytelling. I mean, I do the podcast, I come from advertising and branding myself. I like to write and all the things that you've done in the past, it's all about telling stories, which is pretty much what we do as humans now.
What is fascinating nowadays, if you want to think about maybe the major changes in our lifetime - maybe the internet, social media in the way we do advertising, marketing, and tell stories, way before Gutenberg and the printing press and the radio and TV, which I love. I'm big - I mean, my favorite media is radio, but here's the big thing right now. It's big because it's not just the media, it's actually who's writing this story, right? And we really, I don't know your point on that, but I don't believe we're really giving away our storytelling skills to AI. So here's a jumping point for you. What's your thought on that?
Maury Rogow: So just quick note, Steve Jobs said it best, what you said before, which is you can connect the dots looking back at your life. Then you can see how all these things add up to who you are now. So I feel like that's a cool summary.
Marco Ciappelli: He probably influenced me by that 'cause I love Jobs, so...
Maury Rogow: Steve Jobs. Yeah. I mean, innovator of innovators and marketer of marketers. He was amazing in so many ways and a controversial figure. Some people that knew him - he knew his way and it was gonna be his way. So from what I've heard, from what I've read, but we're entering this area now where storytelling - oh, let me just ship it off to GPT or Perplexity or Claude, and it's gonna tell my story for me.
Well, what we're finding is - it is just incredible how many times I'm seeing this again and again, mainly from technology companies because they like to play with the tools and use the tools. We're getting the same sort of what we call a brief. Like, here's what we want to do, here's how we want to launch. They all look the same. I'm like, this is the same problem. The first one that came in? Okay, this looks pretty good. We can use some of this. I definitely want to take your influence and I'd like to take the idea you have here, but then another company sent it in. Another one, so they still don't - the AI doesn't know how to differentiate unless you tell it exactly what you are, who you are, what you care about, how you're different. I keep getting to this - how you're different.
If you're cybersecurity and your big difference is your price, well, good luck - race to the bottom, right? But that's not typically how they try to differentiate. But they're gonna go like, "Oh, the best service, the best features, the best capabilities." Everybody says that. That's not a story. Those are - that's a feature list, man. That's an old brochure. So you have to be able to stand out and look different. And if you don't know how to do that now, it's gonna be harder and harder because AI is just gonna go what it knows about the world, what's been published, and put your quote story together. You're gonna look just like your competition and you're gonna lose more and more because you all look the same. So the biggest brand wins or the cheapest price wins - same thing as 30 years ago.
So that's the fear and that's the problem with these amazing tools, right? We need better input so we get better output. And maybe this is why the prompt engineers are getting offers of hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars to come work for companies.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah, I mean, I love that you went there because the prompt engineer, I feel like I'm still figuring out myself. I have fights with ChatGPT, literally, like I'm gonna bring you my thing. Like, I write short stories for kids with my mom. She writes her own, and she has her own style, so that's easy. When I write my own, I'm very picky - like a word needs to sound a certain way. It's almost like rhythmics, like if you're writing lyrics and I use ChatGPT, but I realized I just can't count on it. So like two nights ago after an hour that I was trying to give it the right prompt and I kept changing things the way I didn't want it, forgetting the thing that I really liked, I said "Screw this, I'm gonna write it myself." But all those interactions, it was almost like being in a writer's room. Being the art director with the designer and the copywriter, old school, and say, "This is my view. Tell me your opinion." And then eventually we get something bigger because of that. So prompting... yeah. But there is not the magic prompt either.
Maury Rogow: No, there's not. And people say, "Oh, it works 24/7 and it's never gonna get tired." I look at it as, this is the writer that's really tired, because I gotta start a new prompt. I gotta like, "Okay, you go take a nap. I'm gonna start again with a new prompt and a new session." Right? Because I'm getting gibberish. And it's like you said, the most frustrating thing is - let's say you have a 10 point something, or you have 10 points. Okay, keep those 10. Now let's expand on this because of X, Y, Z, and those 10 will all of a sudden change. Like, "No, that was the good part. That was the good part. I want you to expand on the good part." And I'm like, "You go take a nap."
Marco Ciappelli: Always have to give you something different. Right. That's funny the way it works. Did you experience and play around, I'm assuming also with visual - I mean, not right now we're talking about writing, but photos, layouts, and video. Absolutely. Because that's another, you know, something. Oh, it's a whole different... Six months ago we couldn't even really get there. Now we got actually audio on it. So how is that a game changer?
Maury Rogow: Oh, a game changer. And it's, again, the main thing is this exponential learning curve, right? There's a cute chart that I saw probably two years ago where it was kind of the XY graph, and you have this little AI kind of bouncing along the bottom and there's a little person there saying, "Oh, look at the little AI, it's cute." And then it hits the point where it takes off like a rocket, and then of course, it's the boss, right? So this is exponential learning - how it gets better. So a year ago, the images, the video, it truly was a joke. I mean, it was maybe cute or fun, but six fingers and all these terrible things.
Marco Ciappelli: Still fascinating though.
Maury Rogow: True, true, true, absolutely. And there were usable directions. Again, I think of it as the writer's room or let's go to a sketch artist, maybe one of my storyboard artists. In a sense, what do you think about this? Here's the idea. Okay, we're not gonna use that storyboard, but that gives us a direction. But what happened over the past three, six months is that exponential curve hit. So now we have truly usable images, and some are almost indistinguishable from real life. Some are still hokey, some are still - the shadow goes the wrong way, or there's...
Marco Ciappelli: It's still at uncanny valley sometimes.
Maury Rogow: Yes, yes. But less and less, right. So true. But what I've been most impressed with is - literally think of like large language. So Google Gemini, they came out with Veo 3 not too long ago. That is frankly pretty darn impressive, right? So using the Nvidia chips, using what it's learned before, but now you've got really cute ways that people are using it. And it's the same thing though, but how creative can you be with it?
So what you basically get now is a great version of an eight second interview. Somebody's gonna have a microphone and somebody's gonna be answering the question. So we had some fun with that. We had Lewis and Clark. And so we had the ESPN reporter, like, "If Clark would just get out of bed for once and stop heading north, we could make this thing work." So it was funny. There's a whole series on this, I can't remember what it's called, but something Bigfoot on TikTok that I couldn't take my eyes off for about 20 minutes. And now I'm good. I don't need to go back. But again, gen AI and it's in this world, so images becoming very usable if you give it the right prompt, if you give it an image to start with. And I think video - we're still nowhere near. We can make custom - we're still nowhere near when we have an Apple product and we're gonna do a phone explosion and you can see the different chips and processing and that kind of stuff. You can't do that yet.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. So I want to go somewhere with this 'cause I love to talk to people that kind of went through my same mental process for probably the past 20 years or so. But before I go there - which is the big question, the million dollar question to you is - do you agree with like this big fear? I mean, I think I already know the answer, but maybe you want to explain it a little bit more like, there's been strikes in the industry. I mean, you produce movies. My wife - people know she's in the industry as a costumer and we were all waiting to see something happen and the big thing was AI taking actors' roles, writers' roles. Just pretty much happened. And I don't know if we ever got anywhere with that, to be honest with you, 'cause it's still an evolving thing. Is that justified, this fear, or is it the same fear that we had of many other technologies in the past and then the Luddites that destroyed the machines during the Industrial Revolution?
Maury Rogow: My feeling is the fear is real - my fear, it's justified. I don't want to say real, it's justified. It's obviously real, but it's justified this time. I remember watching in 1992, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and James Cameron with his studio, they created liquid metal - the liquid metal, the bad guy. Right. It was amazing. And so people are saying, "Wow, in five years we could just get Arnold's likeness and he doesn't even have to be in the movie." That was 25 years ago, right? There was a lot of resistance to that because people could see where that goes. But now I think it's here, but the difference is it's not gonna take multimillion dollars to make that happen. It could literally be hundreds of dollars and the right to that person. There's a lot of rights issues, there's a lot of - can it really get the right emotion? And this is pretty interesting.
So when we're making a movie and we have a very good actor, the transfer of energy and the transfer of emotion is real. They're on screen. If they really are feeling - I mean, they're a great actor, right? So Daniel Day-Lewis, I mean, not even just that caliber, but somebody that feels something and they're crying on the screen and you feel it too. That's a real - that's a transfer of emotion. Can AI get to that spot? Can AI get there? I truly don't know, but I have very few doubts that it will get there. It'll be doing it not in an original way. It'll be mimicking what it's seen before, but it will bring out emotion in us. Is it here today? No. Will it be here in a dozen years? Oh, probably so, yes. I think that fear of how are we gonna make a living is hitting and hitting hard. Not just for today, but in the future.
And the other side of this is how people want to consume. And again, part of it is how people - we talked about Steve Jobs - I'll let the market know what they want, sort of, quote if that was real or not. We're seeing either companies put out content and people receive it in new ways, which is vertical, short form. Make me laugh, give me a dopamine hit, and I'll move on and I'll swipe. TikTok reels, Instagram reels, et cetera. We're long form, horizontal - is it becoming a thing in the past or is it just a different type of consumption? So there's a lot of things happening. I mean, the consumer is changing at the same time. Technology is exploding at the same time. Producers are - some are running to what do people want? Like that's a marketer mindset. What are they buying? Well, then let's make that. We're a marketer, product manager, that kind of thing. Versus we are artists and we are gonna put out the best product that we possibly can and then have people come to it, sort of thing. So it's three converging points and a bit of an explosion in the middle.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. And while it could be difficult, and I could see the 12 years mark like a longer term for like a movie, which is a lot of consistency and the character - is AI going to be able to bring those characters and the costume continuity? Like, I leave with continuity with my wife when we watch a movie - "Ah, that's not as dirty as it was before," that kind of stuff. But I'm thinking, and I've seen some ads that are 30 seconds, 20 seconds, 45 seconds where that timeframe is less. Maybe there is no acting. Maybe it's a car, maybe it's an airplane. Maybe it's a way of living is what the product is bringing to you, and it's kind of nailing it. And you've done ads. We're - I feel like that that's a lower fruit for AI to grab and steal from everybody else.
Maury Rogow: We have to do it. And so we are adapting. I mean, I just had a conversation with my team this very morning, early this morning we have our kickoff call. Customers are coming in, they're asking us what our process is, that sort of thing. We're not gonna hide that. We will go to AI as a system or as a tool, and that's it. I mean, it's a tool for us right now. We're not going - we use AI for everything because we don't, we still truly have original ideas, but do we use it as a sounding board? Do we use it as that writer's room or a creative room? Absolutely. But now, this is recent. Now we're able to use it in what I'll call post-production. It's really production and post-production because what we had - an example I think we talked about is the firefighters and so we had to - we were gonna go out light a building on fire. Really cool stuff. I mean, this is the kind of thing that I always wanted to do.
Well here was the pseudo budget because it is a firefighter school. So they have the buildings, they have the flames, they have the water, they can do all these things. So we don't have to go from scratch, but we're gonna do all that. And this is - I mean we're talking in the six figures, I mean a hundred thousand dollars or more to make all this happen. Firefighters putting out the fire, building collapse, et cetera. Well, we went out and we filmed the firefighter in the hose, in the water. We did all of the rest of it with AI - the building, the flames, the layers. We put it together in AI, but then we, again, in production, you then layer it together so it looks real. And we did that and it was one tenth the budget. Does it look as real as real? No. Did the people in that room, the thousand people that watched that - did they really care? I don't think for a split second they cared. And so yes, you have to use it. You have to adapt. And that's my attitude.
Marco Ciappelli: I know people - there's a lot of people in the middle that I'm concerned when we talk about losing jobs in this industry, 'cause I think the creative itself, the writer, if you're good - mediocre, mediocrity is gonna be killed, I think. And bad is gonna be killed, but good, I think we can handle that still better than AI, but being able to say, "Here's the idea. Give me five, seven different angles" compared with having five, seven different takes or cameras. That's gonna take the job out of the lighting guy, the camera, the photography and all of that, the rigs and so, right. That's the fear. I agree with you. The fear is real. For sure.
Maury Rogow: And it's different. So it's sort of - when I have classes, I have my book coming out, right? So selling in an AI world, so and it's really, the subtitle is your story can be your superpower. And so truly your story can be your superpower, 'cause AI is not doing that yet. That's an original thing that you can come up with. But one of the things that I suggest is take a problem that you're running into that's persistent and repeatable and real problematic. And then try to use AI to fix that problem. And so I think those pieces are being plugged in, right? So you've got Cursor and Replit and V0 and this kind of thing for coding and that kind of thing. So they're gonna try for that for different areas of coding. Not that they're not gonna write their entire product, millions of lines of code, but they can troubleshoot. That's an area. So they can do that in production.
I just mentioned that with the firefighters, I can mention a dozen more where - I'll give you a cool one. So there's an old video from A-ha. "Take On Me." It's a comic book. It's a comic book that comes to life, like these characters come to life.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah, basically, so we're gonna be redoing my favorite.
Maury Rogow: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, it's even tell me your age without telling me your age.
Marco Ciappelli: Exactly. Okay. It's over 50, under 60. Pretty much in the middle there.
Maury Rogow: And so, so. But that would've taken to redo that. I mean, it was millions back then. It was still quite expensive. But now we are starting the production of this using different AI tools for pieces of it. We can't do everything - just go create that video. But we can film. It doesn't even have to be the actor. It could literally be film me walking across the room, opening the door. Now let's layer in the AI and take out the color. Now let's make it sketch, right? Those kind of things. Then do the stutter step. So this mixture, that's a problem that we have. It's a huge, expensive problem. Now it's not that big of a problem anymore, and so I think that's the way things are going to go. It's where there's a million tools out there. Who's, where can you win first? And unfortunately when you win in producing something, creating something in this, I think in this age, it means somebody loses. I don't like that. I don't like the I win, they lose. I like everybody to win. We all can gain. I get competitive. I get that we're gonna compete against people and we win this project. We help their brand grow. Their competitors aren't gonna do as well. And ours don't either. That's okay, that's business, that's being good. But now we're replacing this many jobs. And are those jobs ever going to come back?
Marco Ciappelli: Not in that way somewhere else. They gotta retool, they gotta reskill, they've gotta come back in a new way. So it's like, think two years ahead. What are the - how do we even do that? But what would you like to be doing two years from now?
Maury Rogow: That's it - start getting training in that.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. So here's the million dollar question that I was referring to - we talked about people specialized in operating a camera. It's not a little thing. I mean, those guys got real freaking skills, thousands of hours. That's pretty crazy. But let's talk about the creative process itself. Okay. You think that generative AI and the tools that we have is making the creative people better, or as many say while it's skilling creativity because AI is gonna do this for us, it's gonna think for us, it's gonna make a thing or bring it on. Challenge accepted. Let's see the emotions, the experience, the real vision that living a life and experiencing loss and experiencing love and all of that - is AI really going to learn all of that from us because it reads it, because it listens to stories, because it... You know where I'm going with this?
Maury Rogow: Yeah, I do. I do. I don't want to feed you the answer because I don't think I know it, so don't listen to me. I would love to know your answer. I'll give you my opinion. I can't give you the all...
Marco Ciappelli: Well, you know, here's... oh, I don't have an answer. So I create questions in people's minds. That's my fault. Okay. So let's go for more questions in people's minds by... well, that question was will it make people more creative?
Maury Rogow: Yeah, I think I gotta go with a yes and no on this. All right. It's gonna make more people creative because more people can create.
Marco Ciappelli: Cool.
Maury Rogow: There will be more creations out there. We're already seeing floods of content and video and voice and things like that where they didn't exist before. And because it's inexpensive, easy or fairly easy to do. So yes. In that way, now is more better, I think is the real question. Or is quality better? I think most people would rather get - if you're investing it, you're paying for it, you're sitting down, you're investing the time. You really want quality. I mean, you really want to be - you're gonna be emotionally invested in this for me to get out to go to the movies like I used to all the time. And now with the family, it's a lot different now. It's now it's a bigger, okay, how are we gonna do this? Which one are we gonna go see? What's - I'm like, what's the best investment of my time? Of our time?
And so I think if used in the right way, it can make people more creative because this argument of, "Oh, it's not coming up with anything new." All right, I'm gonna go with the point counterpoint on my own here. Yeah, go for it. "Oh, it's not creating anything new, it's just basing everything that it knows that came before it." Well, isn't that what humans do?
Marco Ciappelli: Ex God. Yeah. Okay. Okay, thanks.
Maury Rogow: Wasn't sure you were gonna agree with me on that. That's what we do.
Marco Ciappelli: I brought a newsletter, I published it yesterday about merging ourselves as a species with robots, which is something that Asimov said in 1965 in a BBC interview. So I'm writing this piece, me and ChatGPT, whatever, but I go with the assumption that we are just evolving with technology and our DNA - technology is part of who we are. We use tools. We're able to - animals can't. We can grow with that? We evolve with tools and technology. But then I'm like, well, I didn't invent this thought, obviously. Asimov said it, Andy Clark said it. Many thinkers before me, but I made it, I think I made it my own because of them. If I play something on the guitar because I'm inspired by, I don't know, a riff by someone else or, yeah, we are all feeding off each other.
So the pinpointing of "Oh, this has been done before." Well, there's seven freaking notes on the guitar, you know? How much can you do?
Maury Rogow: It's just gonna be a little Jimmy Page in there.
Marco Ciappelli: Right. So, yeah. But is it really just copying and putting things together as ChatGPT or generative AI is doing now because it's not really understanding? It is just putting one, literally one word after another. It doesn't conceptualize what it's saying. Will we get to it? That will be the game changer.
Maury Rogow: But the thing is, okay, so I think the really interesting point here is with everything we talked about, the human experience and literally the experience. And I was - I just watched "Becoming Led Zeppelin." It is an amazing documentary.
Marco Ciappelli: Oh, it's on my list. Yes. Oh, yeah.
Maury Rogow: I was on a plane. I'm like, "Oh, let me - oh, this is great." I had no idea that within the first three years they wrote the most iconic music. I have no idea to me. But that's the thing, that's the whole point to me, to my experience. I remember where I was when I first heard that. I remember going to buy that album - what? An album. But going to the store, the girlfriend I had when we listened to this kind of thing, and my brother is a musician, so how it bounced off him and his life experience, right?
So it comes down to two people go see the same movie. They walk out and everyone's like, "That was amazing." "What, that was junk." Right. Your life experience of what you want and your expectations. And this one's thinking of the acting and this one's thinking of the plot, or this one's seeing continuity issues and the glass weren't there and they, right. So how we take it now, I don't - this is the scary part. The LLMs, the large language models. They don't have that yet. Like what's the context? Unless we give it to them. Right. So we can train them on that model. But I feel like that's really the scary part. And we saw that not that long ago with Grok coming out with anti-Semitic and like Nazi - I don't know, I want to say propaganda, but whatever it was, that kind of thing. And then they quickly corrected it, right? What was fed in there? Which angle will it take? And it being that powerful, what angle is it going to take? It's not thinking, it didn't feel any of those things. It just read through history books. And maybe that was whatever - Mein Kampf was the last one it read. That's a scary part. "Oh, we gotta get rid of this society. Guess what? I'll call my cousin over here with the nuclear codes." My cousin being another AI, right? And say, so this is where it could really go off the rails, and this is why I think cybersecurity is so incredibly important.
I gotta do this, I watched this thing, I think it was the head of Perplexity and GPT - some of the heads of their development and they were talking about the percent likelihood of a major disaster, like manmade slash AI made disaster - power grid or explosion or war, this kind of thing. I think they all pegged at about 20 to 30%, not 20 to 30 percentage of a percent, like one in five chance here in the next 10 years. That's very scary. It's kind of horrifying. So. Anyway. I know we went from content creation to I'm going off, I'm doing, I know, but that's the...
Marco Ciappelli: Beauty of it, you know? Okay. That's, it's all connected.
Maury Rogow: Yeah. And what happens to the 60 or 80 million people that have been replaced by AI? How are they all going to get retrained? Are we gonna have mass unemployment worldwide? Are we all gotta go back and become HVAC and roofing professionals that, where does it go? This is real. This isn't, I don't think this is hype. You know, this is really happening and I don't know, curious what you think of that. So that's my long answer.
Marco Ciappelli: I agree with you. I mean, it's touching everything, especially if you look at cybersecurity and any other form of technology that you have - it's entering everywhere. I mean, I know very well. I had a guest on my show many times. Dr. Robert Pearl, he's a former Kaiser Permanente CEO, and he's actually one of the biggest advocates for AI in healthcare and medical because we're with the shortage and because it can help with diagnosis, it can help with the basic stuff, freeing the doctors that are overworked, overstressed, and actually focus on things that are more important and the diagnosis - something that really is pretty easy to do and probably an AI is gonna do it much better with a kind of like a tunnel vision focus onto that issue. And we know that AI is really good when you give it a specific task. Now we've been talking maybe more like the option of generative AI.
So I think overall it's touching everything in our life, but as long as we don't let it make decisions for us, like legal decisions and life or death decisions or ethical decisions, I wouldn't - I think at a certain point, I think it was Schmidt, the guy from Google that says, "Well, we're gonna need AI to control AI." I am like, "No, I'm not sure about that." I know he probably thought it over and maybe was a headline, but I'm like, well if you put it that way, it is gonna be a hard no. But if we're gonna have different AI that balance each other that question each other and then maybe they'll come out with something good. It's very philosophical and let's face it, we never talk about ethics and philosophy as much as we are doing right now, or maybe in ancient Greece, but nowadays. Ethics, philosophy and thinking with AI, we're kind of mirroring ourselves into it. We're looking in the mirror and we're like, "Really? All these biases, the AI is..." It's because you're learning from us. Right? Guess what? It didn't come up with that. If it comes out with anti-Semitic and racial and non-diverse thoughts, it's somewhere to be found.
Maury Rogow: Oh, it's riddled throughout our history, unfortunately. I mean, so decade after decade. And depending on where you look too, so yeah. And AI to control AI, I mean, that's an interesting thought. It's kind of the US three houses of government, right? So the balance of power was the original thought. But what if they all - in a sense that's happening now. Right. So they're all in agreement and say, "Okay, this is the one that said we'll be in charge and we're gonna okay it" then that's not great. It does seem like people need oversight. Especially when it gets different codes, different access passwords, new hand, everything over. Okay, great. Well, if I'm gonna let it pay my bills. Now it has access to my bank. What if it decides, "Well this is for the greater good, then I'm gonna clean you out to pay for this project," whatever that may be.
Marco Ciappelli: Right? Yeah. And you go back to the quality of the prompt. How did you say that to it? And I'm rereading Asimov and all the short stories from Asimov. And the second story is the robot did that because you didn't put a sense of urgency into what it was supposed to be doing, and so he interpreted it in a different way. So the way you prompt the robot or the AI, it's very relevant. Like right, if the goal is optimize something, then everything becomes the reason to do that rather than anything else. Worthless because it's their goal. It's very logic and not thought over, but we're getting really philosophical here.
Maury Rogow: Well, somewhat 2001 and WALL-E both back that up as well.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But did you tell it at what point? Well, how do we want to finish this? First of all, I have a feeling I'd love to have you back, 'cause this is the kind of stuff I'd like to do, like talk show style, right? Like, what are we gonna talk about? Whatever. Right. We're just talking, it just happens to be a camera on us. But let's go back maybe to the branding and the use of it as individual, not even from a corporate perspective. We made the cases there. You made the cases there. I agree. We talked about making movies, making advertisement and branding and creating stories. Let's finish maybe with a thought on the personal life, everyday life. Forget the branding. It's, you know, is AI maybe helping us - could help us. We didn't touch on agent AI. That's a completely different story. Maybe that's for another time. Otherwise we go for forever. But I mean, some people are saying, "I don't want to deal with it." Some people say, "I don't want to deal with computers and I don't want to deal with smartphones." And then they lost the train. They created a gap and I don't know what to do because for everything you need some kind of digital device. So is AI gonna be the same thing? Do we need this personal experience? In your opinion? Dive in.
Maury Rogow: Do we need a personal experience?
Marco Ciappelli: For our own personal life and personal experience, forget the branding. Is it wrong or we should play with AI with the ones that we have available?
Maury Rogow: Well, I think that anytime you have that gap, I'm gonna sit this one out. Like, "Oh, I'm not..." - again, I have my older generation of my family. I mean, like my stepmom, she - oh, not only does she not use it, she's scared of it. I'm not sure which channels she's watching. Right. But she's scared of AI and she thinks it's gonna run everybody out, so she doesn't want to touch it. And that's sort of her solution to that. I don't think that that's a solution. She's older, she's retired. I mean, it's not like it's gonna be in her day to day, but I think two things. One is, if let's say she was younger or she would be getting back into work. When you have that kind of a gap that I'm gonna skip this phase, it's incredibly hard to try to jump back in and catch up. So like the advantages to the younger kids that are just growing up with this, again, I'll call it an advantage since this is the conversation, there are also disadvantages - are they going into deep thought? Are they actually reading full books? So you can't learn from TikTok feeds into your long-term memory and come up with real deep insight. You can react or get it, that kind of thing. So, sorry, going there. The other side is, so when you have a gap that that's a problem. So there's a separation, right? And then the other side, I would say it's speed. And I think I've said this before, it's speed and separation. So are you gonna separate yourself and fall behind and maybe not be able to catch up? And then it's the speed of the technology, which is basically whether you like it or not, it's gonna be a part of your life, whether you're physically picking up the phone and asking AI something or interacting with it. It basically is going to be controlling what foods we buy from our refrigerator. And over time it's, of course it is, right? The security cameras outside, it's gonna feed somebody's moving, so let's call the police. It's gonna be a part of our life whether we sort of know it, I would say, or like it or not. So I don't think you can just sit this one out unless you're literally off the grid and nobody on this podcast is off the grid because they wouldn't be hearing us.
Marco Ciappelli: So true. And actually my next newsletter, it's gonna be something about the radio waves and the comparison between podcasting and radio. Because I was thinking, you know, the non-boundaries of radio waves that just - we've used radio for propaganda, for reaching and learning and now everything is filtered. But radio waves were no filter. Stay tuned for my newsletter 'cause I'm always thinking. In your case. Yeah, I mean, we can just finish with that. AI is controlling transportation and supply chains and everything. So cybersecurity is important, but also realizing that we're landing with AI airplane and everything, even the thing that we see in movies, it's still processed probably by an AI evaluating is this movie gonna be a success or not? Yeah. In most cases. Or a song. That's why as Generation X I want to go back to, just go with what you feel, but you know, that's 30 years, 40 years ago.
Maury Rogow: And intuition. Yeah. Is intuition gonna matter in the future? Ooh, gosh. I live on intuition a lot. My gut feel. Right. I think our generation does that. It's - we feel it. We can go, that's the yes or no.
Marco Ciappelli: What happens to that if AI's making all these decisions? Yeah. That's another...
Maury Rogow: I think humans are still going for that. Even the kids on TikTok, that them - my own story. I think they just. "Hey, I'm gonna film this. I think it's gonna be good." So hopefully that's gonna stay right. But when it comes with big corporations, and I think that's when you gotta justify the money, you're probably gonna look at a lot of data and maybe we lose a little bit of humanity there, but hopefully with creativity, we stay ahead. So how about we wrap it with that creativity?
Marco Ciappelli: We stay ahead. Absolutely true. I agree.
Maury Rogow: Good. Well, this was longer than planned, but I love how we touched on so many different things and Maury really, I mean, come back, let's have another chat in a couple of months or something. And I know you're writing the book is not out yet, so thanks. Maybe that would be a good excuse for us.
Maury Rogow: Oh, I'd love that.
Marco Ciappelli: Having you back and take it from where we are living here, but as far as - I hope the audience can, again, have a lot of questions, leave comments if you want to, we'll share with both our audiences and yeah, if you have those, I hope they do have those and they let, please send feedback.
Maury Rogow: Yeah. I love that. Cool.
Marco Ciappelli: Thank you so much.
Maury Rogow: Thank you, Marco. Great seeing you.
Marco Ciappelli: Yeah, and everybody else, stay tuned. Subscribe and find me on LinkedIn. My newsletter is there, so I'm not on TikTok. I should maybe, no, it's another one. I want to deal with that. Thank you Maury.