Culture & Code for 19 November 2025
Creativity and Artificial Intelligence
This is Culture & Code, a weekly newsletter and podcast about Creativity and Artificial Intelligence. Culture & Code explores innovation across storytelling, technology and audiences to help creative professionals collaborate better with AI and each other.
Report from Seattle AI Week
It’s been two weeks and change since Seattle AI Week 2025. Promise I won’t venture into platitude or ponderous recount of every session. Suffice to say this town finally has a proper week long crawl through AI topics/pubs as one expects from the home of some of AI’s largest hyperscalers.
For this post, I’ll just cover the AI Film + Music Video Gen Jam the Seattle AI Film Festival held at Tenacious Ventures on 10/29 plus the follow on Film Screening and Party we held at VICE on Halloween Night to close out AI Week. Together, they give a good illustration of our twin goals of elevating creators and igniting new cultural scenes around AI in the Seattle area and abroad.
October 29: AI Film & Music Video Gen Jam presented by SAIFF, Tenacious Ventures, Machine Cinema and Griptape
Forget about “it takes a village” stuff when it comes to guiding people en masse through an experience. More like, it takes an army.
Fortunately, SAIFF had allies on all sides. Colin Christianson from Tenacious Ventures graciously offered space and infrastructure at Victory Studios on 15th Avenue close to downtown. We partnered with Colin and Machine Cinema as repped by Giulianna Gasparotto, who facilitated the evening for around 55 participants. Supporting us with people and resources was Griptape.ai. The CEO Kyle Roche and some of his team came to filed technical issues and demo Griptape Nodes.
The Gen Jam lasted from 4pm-9pm. After some networking, onboarding, team building and tutorial, the participants had roughly three hours to create a 1-3min AI film or music video that had to touch on Seattle, Halloween, or both. After three hours of solid hacking by eleven teams, we showed the movies and music videos.
It’s amazing what people can accomplish in 3 hours using the new tools. However, I tell people that’s not the key point. The real value is the experience people have making creative and production decisions in the context of new AI tools.
If we’re learning anything about mainstream AI, we’re learning that skill acquisition isn’t so much about learning technical tools so you can better divide labor. Rather, the real skill is learning AI tools to collaborate better as a smaller team. The more closely technology can mimic the output of a human, the more important it is for flesh and blood humans to collaborate closely to ensure the output shows the human touch.
Gen Jam experiences that place people on teams to use AI tools for achieving a specific goal tend to help more than just exposing people to tutorials. We want to see how the tools work but also how they work in action. Alongside are the human connections made through joint effort. This is the real value we believe.
The audience voted via WhatsApp for the top three projects, which would go on to a public screening at the SAIFF Halloween Party at VICE two nights later on 10/31. Based on audience voting, here are the top three projects:
1.) Whiskey & Bones. Directed by Kelly Roche (1:49)
2.) Amalgum by Jessica Benner (3:15)
3.) Don’t Wake The Trolls by Lesley, Marina, Matt, Dis & Manoj (1:00)
October 31: Halloween AI Film & Music Video Party at VICE
Halloween Night in Seattle 2025 brought an atmospheric river. This is a rare instance in which the metaphor and the science are just about 1-to-1. Imagine you suspended a river over a city and pulled the cord to release sheets and buckets of rain. Perfect weather for dressing up in costume, right?
But that’s exactly what a small but mighty crew of AI film and Music Video Enthusiasts did exactly that. From 5pm-9pm at VICE Seattle, we had AI films, a DJ, and featured AI art on the LED Wall.
A Motley Crew but committed to a good time with some AI thrown in for garnish.
Here’s a highlight reel that captures the warm vibe on a wet night (1:35).
Building a Creative AI Scene in the Seattle Area
It’s been a whirlwind of a year since Keith Ancker and I first floated the idea of an AI Film Festival happening in Seattle. We executed four primary activations in March, July, and in October toward the goal of SAIFF becoming:
1.) A Stage where creators could seize their dreams and inspire audiences’
2.) A Catalyst for bringing creators and technologists together for better stories and smarter AI
3.) A Channel to connect our partners to the intersecting talent, technology and resources of the Creative and AI Economies
In the B2B realm, for those brands or organizations that want either bespoke media or media products made in part or in full with AI, we have Culture & Code, which champions creative professionals learning how to collaborate better with AI and each other.
Together, the two brands aim to serve the wider environment plus individual opportunities to establish the Seattle area as a global creative AI hotspot.
Local Scene <> Global Impact
Watch this space during 2026 for sets of live events, training workshops and the 2nd Seattle AI Film Festival happening in late May just before the World Cup. DM me
john <dot> gauntt <at> cultureandcode <dot> io