AI Manifesto

But we really also wanted to talk a little bit about product. And we'll start on one of those that is definitely in the hype cycle, right? I think all of you are dealing with with all this just now. So the challenge of AI is an interesting one, right? We're also still faced in a world with the big tech and Silicon Valley domination, again, people that are dominating the world but think like they're still in here. Hewlett Packard's original garage. We've been here a couple of times before. Our great hero, that's always our guiding saint, Doug Engelbart was there in the early 50s when people also were talking about AI was going to take over the world, robots, you know, all these things. And he wrote his famous manifesto, Augmenting Human Intellect, this very humane vision about that we can become more human with all the tools we're using, instead of diverting into the dark side. So for us at TwentyThree, we love AI, but we're also very distinct on what we see, the world we want to be living in and what we want to be pushing for as a company and as an organisation, together with all of you. Because when you start doing AI, it's fairly simple that, you know, you start thinking, we should do some virtual backgrounds because that's a really good idea. Instead of getting into the board room, instead of getting into your home office, instead of getting into all these beautiful offices that you have in locations and factories and test kitchens and demo labs and whatever, where all of you are broadcasting amazing stuff from, we should really abstract into a sort of virtual world with pixelated virtualisation on it. Then the next thing you start doing and we've even been here and we'll show something in this very shortly, you start thinking, oh, we can make people look into the eyes of the camera at all times. Incredible innovation, incredible technology. But we're literally faking video now already, right? And then you quickly get to where we are today, where you have €150 million funded startups driving that we should be doing fake video as an innovation. Really kind of this, you know, Valley mindset, of... they're even chasing what problem they're trying to solve, right? And they come up with terms like synthetic media, but it is a deepfake, right? And why do you want to make me speak Welsh when everybody knows I don't speak Welsh? Right, and you can just click once and and make me be subtitled into Welsh, right. So we stand at a point in time where we need to decide on what team we're on. Are we on Team Real or are we on Team Fake? And this is not about whether we use AI in general or do generative content or all the amazing innovations, but is about how we do video, because it is so important that first we create the tools, then the tools creates us, right? So also us as humble toolmakers what we decide really impacts it, right? Because we're pushing it, right, and the tools foster behaviour, right? They create us. So over the last few months, we've been internally, building our guiding principles for AI and done a little manifesto. I'll read it out for you. You can dress algorithmic video up as synthetic, generative or any other buzzword. But at the end of the day, it's fake, and a society swimming in fake will eventually sink in it. Trust in brands will decline. Social cohesiveness will erode. Why are we so determined to deploy technology that will seed suspicion in every digital interaction? And when we can't trust what we see digitally, how long before we lose trust in what we see physically? We are at a crossroads. Do we double down on fake or commit to real? At TwentyThree, we see the real promise of AI in helping humans be more human, not less. Because you can't fake connection. And we shouldn't even try to. That's the preamble. We have three principles we're designing and working with AI at TwentyThree. Number one: that we believe in it, and we believe we can make us even more human, do more video, do more production. Number two: that we always start with solving a problem. Instead of looking at a technology and and trying to find a problem to solve with it, where it often leads you into darkness, like fake video. And lastly that we need to have transparency to create the trust, because else there's nothing else. So that's our guiding principles that we stand by. We have them launched on our website today. You can sign them if you're also on Team Real. And even here at the TwentyThree Summit, we have a three square meter big board that you can sign in person, and we can create a beautiful human object out of it, on being on Team Real.