360. Human Creativity and AI with Craig Detweiler

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Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

The machines aren't coming to get you. The machines hopefully are coming to help and to serve you. And so have confidence in your HI, in your human intelligence, your human imagination, and your human ingenuity to create inspired innovation.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. 

Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping. 

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And our guest today is Brilliant. His name is Dr. Craig Detweiler. He's the President and CEO of Wedgwood Circle, a philanthropic investment collective funding creative projects of meaning. We're going to talk about that a little bit, I think. He's also the Dean of the College of Arts and Media at Grand Canyon University. 

In recent years, Dr. Craig has worked in various roles with academia, including Professor of Communications at Pepperdine, Associate Professor and Chair of Mass Communications at Biola, and director of the Real Spiritual Institute at Fuller Seminary. Dr. Craig's cultural commentary has appeared on Nightline, CNN, NPR, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many others. His award-winning documentaries include Remand, which was narrated by Angela Bassett, Purple State of Mind, and Uncommon Sounds. 

In 2016, he was named Variety's Mentor of the Year. And for many years longer than that, he has blogged at Patheos as Doc Hollywood. Dr. Craig, we got a lot to talk about today, not the least of which is your new book. Welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today. 

Dr. Craig Detweiler:

Thank you, Dr. Richard. Honored to be here and eager to dive in. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

We are going to dive in. I'm excited to talk about your book, but I want to first jump in the Dr. Craig time machine. Talk to us about what put you on the journey you're on today. 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Well, I would -- I don't want to overanalyze my childhood too much, but trauma can make you creative and trials can force you to figure out imaginative solutions. And I think because of that, I was always drawn to story, I was drawn to narratives, I was drawn to film and kind of walking into how to, in a sense, write my own happy ending perhaps a different way of getting to somewhere.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Are you open to talking a little bit? I mean, was it trauma that you witnessed, trauma you experienced? 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

I think it was a little more of dealing with I'm going to say some mental imbalance in our household. I think there was a lot of paranoia, a lot of fear that was generated by my father, a way of seeing the world that was a little cracked and crooked. And so I kind of gravitated, I think, between fear on the one hand and maybe an attraction to fantasy on the other, right, as a means of escape. 

And so, even now, when I think about the rise of, say, Harry Potter and a whole generation that's grown up with Lord of the Rings movies and that type of thing, it's like, why have we gravitated towards fantasy? I think it's a way of processing a really tough reality that all of us have dealt with collectively over the last really decade or so. Certainly, last 5 years. And so I think for me trying to deal with the unknown and the insecurity of a parent who was very up and very down, that film and media became a way of writing a different story.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

As you mentioned, so many people will find something to escape that, although it's for a lot of people, it goes the other way. They grew up in it and they don't recognize that it's maladaptive, that it's pathological, but clearly you did. Clearly, you saw that imbalance, the ups and the downs you described was not normal and didn't feel right to you and you just escaped. Did you -- for many people, it's kind of a lifelong struggle. And I imagine a lot of what you experienced has made its way into your work in some fashion. 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Yeah. Even one of the early movies I wrote, it was called Extreme Days. And ostensibly, it was like an extreme sport, surfing, skating, snowboarding adventure, but underneath it was the death of a sister, and two brothers left to kind of deal with that, which again, we, as a family experienced. My sister died in a car wreck. I know you had that scary car wreck situation, even in your own life and life can change so profoundly in just a flash in a moment. And so we experienced that phone call, that visit from the police, those things that as a parent, or as a sibling, you never want to experience.

And so again, how do I turn that shock, grief, trauma into, you can never, I don't think you can necessarily call it a positive, so to speak, right. But how do you turn it into an opportunity? How do you turn it into healing? How do you turn it into a future oriented experience? And so, yeah, even when I was writing comedy, it was still rooted in tragedy, right, which is that's that famous phrase, right, comedy equals tragedy plus time. And so I've been a comedic screenwriter and worked in Hollywood making people laugh, I think out of my own pain and out of my own sorrow, 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

You mentioned something that that really resonates with me. I think when bad things happen to people, you have a couple of options. One is you ball up your fist at the sky and blame whatever deity you choose to believe in for these terrible things that happened to you. Or you could say, what could I learn from it? What could I do differently? 

Obviously, you couldn't control getting a phone call from the police, a visit from the police any more than I could, that 17-year-old kid that ran a red light and slammed into me. But you're also in a similar medium to where, for me, I have this feeling of responsibility that when something bad happens to me, like the car accident, like the stroke I had in 2020, to share that with as many people as I can to help those things not happen to them. Right? And it feels like that's your approach as well.

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Well, I think the role of art and creativity in general is to remind us that we're not alone. And to have a sense of solidarity across the human community and say, I too have lost, I too have suffered, let me show you my scars, right, and you show me yours. And so grief, pain, sorrow is a wonderful starting point for building a bridge across the human experience towards joy, hope, healing, but I don't want to jump across that bridge and make it look easy. I want to be, in a sense, honest about the hard parts of life, if I want to try to be helpful to those who are also maybe experiencing a trough, a valley, rather than a peak.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I love that. And I know that that guiding principle shows up in your book, which we're going to talk about in a bit, but I didn't want to lose this because I mentioned it in your bio. Talk to us about Wedgwood Circle, funding creative projects of meaning. How did that get started? What are some of the projects you're doing? That's intriguing to me.

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Yeah. Wedgwood, it's a collective of folks who have made wealth in other areas and want to channel it into, I would say positive cultural contributions. It's named after Josiah Wedgwood, that's Wedgwood, the founder of Wedgwood China, who turned his business into an opportunity to take on the abolition of slavery in England. 

He literally was turning both the art in the cameos that he was creating that were saying, yeah, hey, is the slave now also not my brother. And that was being bought and worn by women in England, who were part of this movement, and they were a community in Clapham, England. And so they called themselves the Clapham circle. William Wilberforce came out of that circle as the politician who led that abolition of slavery. 

So it's an organization that's trying to say, can we do positive social change via storytelling? And it may not always be -- it could be hard stories. One of our members funded a lot of Martin Scorsese's film, Silence, that was about priests in Japan who were murdered. So that's a hard story in a sense, but then it also becomes a hopeful story. 

But it also -- we've helped musicians early in their careers. People like John Batiste before he was on Late Show, before he'd won five Grammys, and he was looking for some money to buy some instruments and experiment with different forms. We provided him some funding. There's a great band called Sleeping at Last that deals with kind of songs about the universe and Saturn and asteroids and outer space and expands your mind in a very peaceful, meditative way. So these are some of the bands and songs and shows that we've invested in. 

When a little bit of money can go a long way in encouraging an artist along their journey. Maybe they're earlier in their career trying to get over the hump. During COVID, we hosted house concerts that were over Instagram and paid musicians to perform that evening and invited people to give even more money to help them pay the rent and step in on the situation where they couldn't tour anymore. And then we've seen some of the artists who perform there. Madison Cunningham, a year later won the Grammy for best folk album. Super proud of Madison. We really didn't have anything to do with her success other than like helping her pay the rent in May of COVID year. But then down the road, she can keep going and get to that next level. So that's part of the daily helping that we try to do. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

It’s so cool. I'm glad I asked because I loved hearing what you're doing there. It's fantastic. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes too if anybody wants to help out and contribute to that. Now, let's talk a little bit about your new book, Honest Creativity: The Foundation of Boundless, Good and Inspired Innovation. And before we dive into the meat of this, talk to us about what was kind of the moment? What was the light bulb going off in your head that said, I have to write this book?

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

I, as a professor, have experienced so much anxiety in my students who are fearful about the future, who see the rise of AI as potentially displacing them. If they're a design major and they see something like mid journey that can create a world with a few prompts or if you're a screenwriter, and you realize that Chat GPT can also write screenplays and write them much faster, you start to get very anxious about your job prospects in your future. Is AI coming for me and have I wasted my time working on my musical scales, if AI is going to be able to create a Mozart like symphony in minutes? 

So in the face of all that fear, I decided to write a book about the power within us, the creative engines that we remain and to really try to trust that human intelligence, human imagination and human ingenuity will prevail and figure out how to work alongside AI rather than being replaced by AI.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So we've done a couple of AI episodes, and each of them had kind of a different feel to them. But the general consensus is that within a decade and a half, AI is going to be smarter than the smartest human being on earth. It looks like it's going that way. And so, when you're talking about a supreme intelligence, who really can kind of come up with anything, right, they're saying that, oh, AI is going to give us the solution to cold fusion. AI is going to solve hunger. AI is going to solve X, Y, and Z. But you're talking about, hey, let's not live in fear of this construct until it starts shooting bombs at us, right, but let's work with it.

And so I think there's great wisdom in that because, and I do think too, like if I was a young person out in the world, kind of early in my career, I would be doing everything I could to learn about AI, to master AI so that I wasn't downsized because it's absolutely already having an effect professionally. There are companies that have laid off significant percentages of their workforce because they're able to use a chat bot to replace customer service. 

So take us through, I guess, walk us back from the edge a little bit, maybe it's a better way of saying that, of how we can leverage AI, how we can use our creativity and still create amazing things and be able to pay our bills.

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Yes, yes. Well, I have, I would say, faith in the metaphorical power of the human mind and imagination. Even to this day, I typed into a generative AI engine the other day, give me an image for dipping your toe in the technological pond and it gave me a pool and it gave me a foot, but it didn't understand even what a technological pond was. It was too metaphorical for it. 

And I think art at its best is always giving us analogies for the way things are or what things are like. And so the best songs if you think about it like this is what heartbreak looks like, this is what heartbreak feels like, this is what falling in love is comparable to, all of those things AI will kind of aggregate, will say that the complete history of human creativity. I hope that we will figure out how to give people -- acknowledge the copyrights, give people credit, pay them for their content. All of those things need to be worked out. 

But in the meantime, I still expect that AI as something that can't really feel in the same way we can feel isn't embodied in the way we're embodied, won't in a sense have that same kind of experience where we say, I don't know what to do with this pain and I don't know how to express this much joy and we figure out how to put it in a song, how to put it in a show, how to put it in a movie, in a story. 

I think even last year, some of the best films that were Oscar nominated were some of the smallest. There was a film called Past Lives, it was just about a girl who had a crush on a boy back in Korea, moved to America and thought about him for 20 years. Now, what happens when they come back together? The deeply human story, it’s very small scale, but also deeply moving as you see them kind of figure out this awkward relationship. 

Like, I'm not sure how well AI is going to do awkward. It can give us efficient, it can give us effective, but the awkwardness of the human experience, I'm in my skin but I'm kind of still stuck in my head and how do I reconcile those things? That's a unique struggle that I think we'll continue to have. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Yeah, that's well said. I want to ask you a question even back to the book title, Honest Creativity. So what is the difference between creativity, regular creativity and honest creativity? 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Yeah. Well, I think again, I think a lot of my students are struggling with the question of, is using AI dishonest? Am I taking shortcuts that might shortcut my output? I get to the end result faster, but is it a little dishonest in that? And so how do I give credit where credit is due? And how do I not shortchange myself through that process? 

You think of, I don't know, a songwriter like Bob Dylan still creating, telling stories, you know, it's like he had his, you could say he had his creative peak in his twenties, but then he really made some really good work in his thirties, forties, some of the stuff in his fifties was also really strong and really even things he's done in the last 10 years, really great. All of them in different stages of life. And so I think he's been honest about his questions about life. It went from the times they are changing to I think later in his life, he had a song that was called Things Have Changed. It's like, they're not changing, they changed. I literally watched it happen. 

So even that long sweep of creativity is a little bit of what I hope that honest creativity, leaning into our fears, leaning into our hopes, leaning into our disappointments, all of those things I think will get us there faster, maybe not necessarily through the most efficient path, but through the most honest and earned path.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

It makes me wonder if people back in the 60s and 70s who were obtaining PhDs in mathematics saw the calculator adding machines is the same dilemma that your students are having.

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

And it is. It's an old story. Even when sound came into movies, there was an uproar of people protesting that it's going to put musicians out of business because musicians were playing live in theaters, right? They were playing, the piano was playing with what was up on screen. Yeah. It costs jobs for those people in that theater business. I don't think it killed music, if we have more music than ever. So I actually expect the AI boom to result in more creativity because the tools are going to be available to more people. You're not going to necessarily need a camera to make a movie. Can you describe the movie that you want to see, right? The new engine will be the English language or some form of prompt. So the ability to describe what you want to see, which is the screenwriter's art, it's like the screenwriter isn't going to need a director. You can be the director now. If you can write it on the page, you may be able to see it realized. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I had recently read that Tyler Perry was going to spend $800 million building a new studio in Atlanta and saw a 30 second clip of open AI's new text to video engine Sora. And after he watched that said, nope, I don't need a studio anymore. I just need this. So yeah, I think you're right. The tools change, but the end result can be the same. 

And so now I know you didn't write your book for aspiring screenwriters. You wrote the book for anybody. So talk to us. I know you've got tools and you've got strategies that people, regardless of what they do or where they are in their life, that people can use to implement, to have this harmonious approach to using this technology. Because regardless of what you do, no matter what you do, AI is going to impact your job in some way, shape or form. So let's do Autos Creativity 101 here. Take us through some of these. And I know we can't do them all but take us through some of this kind of key tenants that people need to understand. 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Well, to me, it's a three-step process of first being honest with our own fears, wants, desires, in a sense that's psychological, self-analysis that becomes a starting point. Like, where do you see a need in the market? Where do you see something you would love to buy or an experience you'd love to have? That's where ideas, businesses, all kinds of ventures begin. 

Then the middle of the book is how to get in a posture where you've practiced your craft enough or looked at the market enough to then be open to honest perception, seeing things clearly. And then I think we have to be honest about where we still have needs, where our shortcomings are. So, you could be a great idea person, but maybe you're not a great implementation person. So you're going to need a collaborator. You need to be honest about your need for a collaborator to fill in those gaps and to be strong where you're weak.

And so those honest team ups is when we see, I don't know, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, these seminal bands came out of these, sometimes what should we say conflictual relationships, right? But even those that last in some cases, it's because they actually have a business manager who's an equal member. It's like Brian Epstein was that fifth Beetle who got them through the hump and helped manage their career. I think when they lost him, they kind of lost their core to some degree, and they didn't hold together as a result when they didn't have that business sense in the room. 

So honest needs are saying, I need someone who can do the things I can't and how do I find that legal help, that business savvy, that marketing advice. And so you can't get to honest marketing without acknowledging I'm not good at marketing, I might need help in that area. Or I'm good at marketing, but I'm not sure about the supply chain and how to bring something into the marketplace. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

So, when we've gone through these three steps, which ultimately, it's essentially a gap analysis, right, of ourselves is what we're doing. When we've identified that gap, how then do we or should we then use AI as part of the solution? 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

Well, what's interesting is I think it will become that helpful partner that is affordable, can be affordable, and is accessible. So, right now, right, with legal help, you're being charged by the minute, by the hour, and that bill can ring like that. If, no offense to the lawyers of the world, but if AI lawyers become available, right, we already have a lot of boilerplate contract. It's now online in the world, but if AI lawyers can help us with that, get to the market faster and cheaper, if things can be prototyped without a lot of upfront expenses, if you can show people what it is you're trying to sell or do, then I think you can perhaps raise capital with less risks on the front end.

And so ideas do have a chance of hitting the marketplace without the same level of capitalization. That's actually exciting again for that entrepreneurial spirit that people have within them. So AI can maybe level the playing field a bit, if it's not priced out, if it's not sort of exclusive to only those who can afford it. So I'm very much for I would say the democratization of AI, would be a great hope of mine. It might be a false hope, right, because the market might say, no, no, no, whoever can afford is going to have the best AI helpers. But if you've done the research and figured out how to train the bots to fill in your own gaps and you can be very powerful no matter where you're sitting on the planet. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

You alluded to concerns about the democratization of AI. What other concerns other than androids or cyborgs coming and murdering us all, but what are the other things that you worry about with this technology?

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

I do think we need to figure out, I would call it fair compensation, particularly for creatives whose work is being used to train models. Right now, those things are happening without consent. As an author, I'm offended if you're using my books to, in a sense, take the knowledge and not only not giving me credit, also not giving me compensation. 

I read this horror story of a woman who found an AI generated book in the same area of expertise that she has using her name that was posted on Amazon right beside her other books. So it's like they created a fourth book by her. She didn't write it and she wasn't getting paid for it. That's outright theft. That's theft of a persona, of ideas. And so the rigor that we're going to need, the legal rigor and protections into some degree is only now just beginning. And so that will be sorted out. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I'm going to flip the script here a little bit. I'm going to ask you the opposite. What are the things potentially coming down the road with this technology that just excite you beyond belief? 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

I think it's the instant iterative process. My daughter's in landscape architecture and in the old version, you'd have to like build the physical models to maybe show people what you were looking for. Well, now you can, in a sense, prompt your way towards it. Right? It's not immediate. It takes some work, but the idea that you could build things just through, in a sense, writing or suggestions and be able to say, this is what a cathedral or a synagogue would look like, right? Something that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and you can at least envision it for a much lower cost. 

Again, the idea that it could be built actually maybe goes up because everybody can see it faster and quicker, and the changes and the suggestions can be incorporated much faster. And so the things that will be created, that will be built because of that lower barrier of entry, I think will be just voluminous. It's going to be a very creative century. Right brain folks should be happy. The left brainers have created this tool, right, this computing algorithmic tool that I think right brainers can potentially really explode in their creativity as a result.

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

That's an outcome that I think we could all get excited about. Well, this has been fun, Craig. I can't wait to read your book. I want to ask you this question. As you know, I wrap up every episode by asking the same question, and it is, what is your biggest help, that one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our chat today?

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

I would say first and foremost, fear not. The machines aren't coming to get you. The machines hopefully are coming to help and to serve you. And so have confidence in your HI, in your human intelligence, your human imagination and your human ingenuity to create inspired innovation. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

I love it. Dr. Craig, tell us where people can learn more about you online and get their hands on your book, which is available everywhere now? 

Dr. Craig Detweiler: 

I’m on Twitter some, the platform formerly known as Twitter, so you can follow me on X. I spend a little more time on Instagram because it's such an image driven world. And as a filmmaker and educator, I love to communicate a lot of thoughts through image. 

Dr. Richard Shuster: 

Perfect. Well, we'll have everything Dr. Craig, including the book linked in the show notes at Drrichardshuster.com. Craig, I loved it. I loved our chat today. It was fun. It was cool. You've given us a hopeful scenario for the future, which is awesome. Loved it. Thanks for coming on the Daily Helping. 

Dr. Craig Detweiler:

Thank you, Dr. Richard. Keep up the great work. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I appreciate that. And I also appreciate each and every one of you who took time out of your busy day to listen to this conversation. If you liked it, if you're inspired, if you're no longer worried that robots are going to kill you and your loved ones, go give us a follow and a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, because that is what helps other people find the show. 

But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are and post it in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping because the happiest people are those that help others.