This is Culture & Code, a 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.
Seattle AI Film Festival Update January 9, 2025
The Seattle AI Film Festival (SAIFF) will take place at Seattle Center next March 29-30, 2025. The Culture & Code podcast and newsletter will spotlight the very best visual storytelling brought to life with AI in an unforgettable Spring weekend dedicated to the Creator Economy and Artificial Intelligence.
To date, we have received 40 AI Films from 16 different countries ranging from Korea to Kazakhstan. Our categories span from extreme short form and music video on one end of the spectrum to long-form narrative or non-fiction films that are over 30min.
Next Monday January 13, 2025 is the final deadline for Early Bird submissions. Standard submission fees rise to $40 after that. If you’re a filmmaker using AI to expand your potential, we want to see your work. Head over to FilmFreeway for a full description of the Festival, rules, and submission guide.
Judging Podcasts and AI Films 2025 Edition
The past holiday season marked my 4th year judging podcasts for the Ambie Awards, which are given out each year by The Podcast Academy. There are two rounds of judging by the “Blue Ribbon Panel” that I belong to as evidenced by the fetching graphic below. ;-)
Because we’re still actively judging podcasts from the 2024 season, I won’t reveal current categories or my choices until after the winners are announced publicly in February 2025.
However, in years past, me and my peers have judged Best Science & Technology Podcast, Best Business Podcast, Best Fiction, Best Scriptwriting to name a few.
Each judging category typically arrives as a set of candidate episodes that add up to ~20hrs total listening time. To listen effectively and be fair to the candidates, it’s about a 5-6 week process of disciplined audio consumption accompanied with a clear but flexible rubric of judging criteria.
I’m not rattling off stats just to toot my blue ribbon horn. Per the previous announcement, we’re running the Seattle AI Film Festival this coming March 2025. As Director of the Festival, I can’t judge any of the submitted work.
However, I did need to design the submission criteria for AI films along with the judging rubric that will govern the selection process. Our rules state that each submission must be at least 50% derived using Artificial Intelligence. It’s very simple rule to write.
The rub comes when you try to quantify exactly what 50% AI-derived actually means. Is it a digital nutrition label? If someone generates an image in Midjourney and then uses Photoshop to finish it, does that count? What about using the Generative Fill Feature of Adobe Photoshop? How much of that should count for AI?
This is all to say that much sooner than many people think, AI will touch almost every aspect of the story creation, story visualization and story production. Saying that you used AI to help make your film or podcast, graphic novel or social media campaign will be about as differentiating as saying you used electricity or had access to clean water.
This means if we don’t want to be up to our eyeballs in AI Slop, the role of judges and audience voting will be all the more vital. Of course, there will be challenges even there to ensure we don’t inject technical biases into the judging process that are as real as our frail human biases.
Through my podcast judging background and personal participation in AI film festivals online, plus Los Angeles and Phoenix, I’ve been exposed to multiple rubrics that try to account for both human and machine creative expression. As a creator, I’ve won a few times too.
Our bet at Culture & Code is the awards & festival model for organizing social communities around elevating creative work will continue to thrive. Differentiating truth from falsehood, quality from mediocrity in an AI-powered world will push creative humans to raise their game to a different level.
If that sounds like something exciting to you, I’m recruiting judges for the upcoming Seattle AI Film Festival. I’ll need ~10hr chunk of your time from beginning to end. We’re committed to be fair and transparent to the submitters while ultimately serving audiences by shining a spotlight on the very best creative work. It’s dead important we get this right in these early days.
Email me if you’re interested.
john<dot>gauntt<at>cultureandcode<dot>io
Interview with Seth Hallen, Creative AI Investor and Advisor
This week’s Culture & Code interview is with Seth Hallen, a creative technology executive and investor with over 25 years running companies across production, post-production services and technology. Along with being a founder, investor and advisor to multiple creative AI startups, Seth is past president of the Hollywood Professional Association, which is a nonprofit that advances the art, science and business of the media and entertainment industry. Additionally, Seth is a member of the AI Task Force and Production Executives Peer Group at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
In this conversation, Seth and I explored ideas he introduced in a series of articles entitled Beyond A.I. Unraveling the Economic Disruption Shaping Hollywood's Future. There are numerous well-researched essays about the economic and technology shocks impacting Hollywood and the rest of the creative economy. But what drew me to Seth's work was his mission to help the creative community recalibrate its focus in order to navigate today's challenges. After all, Hollywood has experienced multiple cycles of disruptive change for over a century. The key job is to pinpoint what's actually different about today's environment, while spotlighting principles that have held true.