The creative case for engaging with AI – Angela Stengel

New technologies like AI often arrive with stories about disruption and inevitability, promises of greater efficiency and limitless productivity. In these narratives. Technology takes care of the thinking and the making. But who gets to decide what matters and whose vision of the future are we building? According to digital leader and strategist Angela Stengel, artists and coders and storytellers are uniquely placed to challenge the idea that these stories have already been written, and to influence what comes next.

I'm Ana Tiquia, Head of Innovation and Research at State Library Victoria, and you're listening to an SLV LAB podcast, part of our conversation series exploring emerging technology, digital experimentation and library futures.

For those of us have worked in digital tech innovation for years, we saw the hope of what the web could bring and then we saw what happened. The same with apps. With social. We've been burnt by some of these tech waves. So here comes AI. Here comes a few powerful people in the US trying to dominate. I think people are rightly skeptical, and I guess what I'm trying to do through my work now is go.

AI is bigger than those few companies. There's small AI, there's locally produced AI companies. If you go to the tech and the algorithm, it can do some really cool things. And I particularly want people from the creative industries to be part of this, because I think people who are creative have a different way of picking something up and then using it for something totally different.

If you don't sort of jump in and understand it, then you can't be part of this discussion about what happens next.

Across 17 years at the ABC, Angela worked at the intersection of emerging technology and creative storytelling, led the ABC's Innovation Lab, and helped develop new ways for the national broadcaster to connect with audiences. After leaving the ABC in 2025, she founded the AI and digital strategy consultancy Future Story. Angela approaches technology from a creative perspective, her practice is grounded in listening to people with deep expertise bringing different disciplines into conversation and creating space to experiment.

For Angela, engaging with AI means bringing questions of power, access, intellectual property, and environmental impact into the conversation. She contends that by becoming involved now, creatives can help shape the direction of AI and discover forms of creativity that are only just beginning to emerge.

The following conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge the traditional lands of all Victorian Aboriginal clans and their cultural practices and knowledge systems. We'd also like to acknowledge and pay our respects to any First Nations listeners joining us for this conversation.

Thank you so much for coming in to the studio, Angela. It's such a joy to have you here. I guess to start off with, I often like to ask people about their practices and how they came to them. And you've had a really long career at the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster, and up until the end of last year.

You were head of digital content and innovation there. Also know that you previously led the ABC's Innovation Lab, which is very exciting, being able to interview you from the perspective of SLV’s lab as well. And now you're the founder and principal of Future Story, which is developing AI and innovation strategy across media, arts, culture and government. I wanted to just ask you a bit about how you came to do this work, this work in tech, in these spaces, and maybe also how you describe your practice or practices.

I've always wanted to do a job that doesn't exist as yet. I think that's how I would put it. Growing up, do you remember, looking at careers books in high school and I'd flick through it and just go, yeah, nah. Yeah. Oh, maybe I'm not actually that good at maths. So it was always like, I'm sure there's something out there that I just don't know about as yet.

And it turns out there was like the internet then became a thing and social media and apps. And I've just always been excited by the promise of technology, but I've always come at it from a creative perspective. So yeah, I spent many years of my career at the ABC in radio, but also working with TV and and news people, and a lot of that is about storytelling, about connection with people, through talent, through narrative.

And and before that, I was in museums as well. And I think there's so much overlap, more so now even than, than 20 years ago between the arts and culture sector and media, because it's about... it's about stories and connection. So I've sort of accidentally just ended up in innovation roles a lot of the time. And I think that's because people who work in innovation roles tend to... tend to have very broad interests, but at the heart of it have an interest in connecting people.

You know, I think back to early days of working in museums, when it was about getting people excited about having their content on a website, and you'd have to understand where that curator was coming from. And that wasn't so different to being at classic FM. Maybe five years later, we're trying to get somebody who knew a tremendous amount about classical music and concerts, but getting them to understand how to tell those stories on a web page.

So, yeah, I guess to go to your question about what are my practices, I think my practices are about listening and understanding specialists and then finding ways to explain what technology can offer them.

I was really interested in hearing you talk about this idea of innovation roles as being ones that connect people across all these different specialist areas. I'm often interested in the role of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary practice in these spaces, and I was wondering if, yeah, if you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. Good question. And I've immediately jumped to when I worked as a product manager. So yeah, I was a big fan of the book The Lean Startup, which yeah, you may have read yourself that, but working as a product manager, while that was a sort of very... it's a role that's across a bunch of corporations. It's not particularly part of innovation or the creative industries.

It's about understanding, your front end engineer, your back end engineer, your visual designer, UX designer, all of those different roles and bringing it together. And I think there was a time in digital history where it felt like there was nowhere for generalists to go. You know, there was the internet generalist. And then it's like, but are you in IA or UX or are you a front end developer?

But then ultimately the generalists kind of work out how to bring all the others together. And I think that that's where yeah, that's where you get some really fascinating outcomes, because that front end engineer has an opinion on the design, and that might be a different perspective that you wouldn't have thought of if you'd just kept it to sort of one discipline.

So I think people who can move between disciplines and I don't really consider myself one of them. I just like listening to all of those different areas and bringing them together. But it's also why I think having diversity in teams is really important. So they're not the same thing, but just bringing those different perspectives into a conversation ultimately makes for a better outcome.

Yeah. Like the value of having someone in the team that has that breadth to work with those that have depth in specialist areas.

Yeah, definitely. And I appreciate what people can do when they have more specific deep experience. And I guess where we're now going with AI, I think it must be really concerning for a number of these disciplines, like if you're a visual designer or if you're a coder, like how, how is my job going to change? What's going to be different here?

It's ultimately somebody's way of thinking that makes them unique. And being an engineer or being a designer is the output of that.

That's a really interesting point, and I'd love to come back to your thoughts more on where you see things heading in terms of AI and both working across digital teams and strategy, but also, yeah, practices too. I was curious about also your perspective, having worked for so long in in innovation and leading innovation teams at the ABC, I was curious to get your perspective on what you feel the value of having innovation capabilities in sort of media arts and cultural or even government organisations are. Innovation always seems to be like one of those things which can be really valued, but also really devalued at times of resource scarcity.

Yeah. Do you have any kind of thoughts on that?

Yeah. Like innovation can often be seen as expendable or it's the first thing to go. But I think particularly with public institutions and this is why I love the work that I see you doing here at the State Library, that the sharing of what comes out of it, I think, is kind of so important because there's plenty of organisations, whether small or commercial, that have to be super focused on one thing.

Whereas where there are organisations that have the capacity to have an innovation team, they're doing research that benefits the whole industry. So the ABC, we really did see as our role to be a team who could run a bit ahead, look at what was coming over the horizon, be quite lean and look to pilot and test and have outcomes.

But nothing was private to us. It was about sharing, whether it was through a conference that we'd put on for a few years, through a blog that we'd set up, and through just being really generous with peers that that whether it was going on podcasts or speaking at conferences to share our learnings. And I think I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't with innovation teams over different eras of being part of it and not part of it at the ABC, because it can, I think where it works... where it doesn't work, is when it is siloed and everybody looks at that team as a “why do they get to do

the fun and frivolous stuff?” And then it really doesn't work. But I think where we really got into a groove some years back was where we were seen as additional resource to partner with more business as usual teams to test something new, because the the individuals in an organisation who are closest to their area of expertise, whether that is kids TV or radio documentaries, like they've got ideas, they know their craft, they know their competition.

And so then when you partner that with this cross-disciplinary team of somebody who can do user research, somebody who can help with workshops, somebody who can spin up pilots and code things like, that's a really good match. And what we would then do is deliver a pilot that could help with getting ongoing funding for something new.

And I think the really tricky thing with Innovation Labs, and not sure if you have have this issue here as well, if you're trying to prove something out and say, hey, here's a new thing, and in media, it would often be... there'd be new platforms to distribute to, there'd be new formats. There'll be... how do we do vertical video now?

How do we do distribution to Spotify and YouTube, etc.? In order to do more, you have to stop doing something else. And the what do you stop doing is always the blocker.

That's true. Especially when when you see the value in doing many things at once.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, absolutely. No, that's really interesting to hear. I think just in reflection of what we've been doing here in SLV Lab in the last year we see ourselves very much as one in like a lineage or history of GLAM Labs.

And I guess, yes, definitely that knowledge sharing and that sharing of resources is so important we think about the fact that labs don't necessarily last forever, but they can leave a really big impact and a really big legacy too, and definitely seeing the work that previous labs such as New York Public Library Labs did in terms of their sharing of resources and code, so much has been built off the back of that.

Same with DX Lab up at State Library New South Wales. So I guess, yeah, that was really a core part. And that's really lovely to hear that that too has been a big part of innovation too in the labs you've worked at.

Yeah. And it's such a good point you make about that sort of legacy as well, because I think innovation teams need to demonstrate that at the time in terms of, we've just delivered this research or this pilot, and here's the result and something new changes or it doesn't. But probably a lot of that impact is actually some years later.

And it might even be in that young staff member who got a leg up and got new experience. And then they now go on to do something quite different. So I do think the yeah, the value and the outcomes aren't always immediate with Innovation Labs, but we don't necessarily measure that either.

You've had a long time engaged in working in labs and running labs. What do you see as a value of lab as a format too?

I mean, it relates to my interest in that Lean Startup book as well. I think as somebody who's always I'm not fully on the technology side, but I'm not fully on the creative editorial side. I'm sort of on both. And I think that when I first read Lean Startup and also just from working with amazing user experience designers, this was sort of more than ten years ago.

I would see their ways of working and go, oh, what if I applied that to content? Like what if? What if we did something super lean to test a concept? For instance, we launched a second classical radio station called classic two, and it made me think, why do we need a website? And this was when was it 2014 or something?

So like we set up a Tumblr, we just thought, well, we have a stream and we just need a place to house a stream and then we want to put content on social. So I was trying to apply those lean principles to to a content initiative. So I think that... that wasn't purely in a lab, but I think that what a lab enables is a place to experiment and try something new, a space to get out of the business as usual.

I think the thing I would hear most from colleagues who had daily, weekly deadlines, projects that they had to deliver, is that they just didn't have the headspace to think about that. So one thing that we'd set up at the ABC some years ago was having people seconded in and out of the lab, so we would have six months.

We're looking for a video producer leave your day job, come and be part of of our team. And we would gain so much from their business as usual knowledge, their deep connection with their existing audiences, platforms, brands. And they would get some time out to test something new. So I think, yeah, certainly it needs to be a freshness of perspectives in a lab to keep it from, I don't know, maybe getting to navel gazing.

Absolutely. That secondment model sounds amazing as well. Just as well in terms of also understanding, I guess, different opportunities for innovation across the organisation.

Yeah. And I think I mean, and that relates maybe a bit separate to innovation, but digital transformation in organisations, there's been there's so many occasions where digital comes in and it's threatening or it's people are losing their jobs here because that thing needs to grow. And I think people working in digital have had to and this comes back to the human part of our jobs that so much of that is about, how do you connect with people and want them to be part of this thing that that you love and understand that it's not a threat like it needs to go both ways.

I wanted to talk to you about your work in AI strategy. You put AI strategy on the agenda at the ABC about five years ago, and now you branched off to lead Future Story, which is a strong AI strategy and innovation focus. I was curious about what you saw five years ago in the opportunities or risks perhaps inherent in this latest wave of AI development.

And of course, so much has happened in the AI and general of AI space since then.

Yeah. And it probably... I remember being at speaking at a conference in New York in 2019 called Voice AI, that that was much more about smart speakers, natural language processing, conversational user interfaces. Like being a radio person. I was really excited about, oh, where is this going to lead, Future of Radio, etc. and there was a keynote given by a woman from Microsoft who talked about this project called the JFK files.

And this was where a big data set of, I think it was 50 years after JFK death, a big data set was released of all of these documents, and she demonstrated how using AI, they could really quickly get across all of the key moments, characters, timeline. And this is from documents that may have been handwritten, typed images, etc..

And so now like we hear that and we’re like, oh yeah, that's AI. But in 2019 and I'm like, oh my God, this is imagine if investigative journalists got the Panama Papers and then they could chuck it in to this. This is really cool. Like how can we be part of this? But it took then and I think also back then, like AI was hard to work out exactly what it was like.

It didn't have an interface, the GPT didn't exist. It was very much hanging out with the smartest and nerdiest of ML engineers at ABC to to learn more about it. But yeah, then I had some of my team do the journalism AI fellowship with the London School of Economics, a great journo in the team and the ML engineer, and they partnered with the Spanish startup to build a sort of fact checking tool.

And again, this was pre GPT. But it taught us some of the fundamentals of how do you train a model, where does your data come from, what needs to be involved in this. And I was I was fascinated with it sort of since then. Of course, back then nobody thought it was good or evil. It was just a bit nerdy and boring.

And so but for better and worse, it's now seen as... I think some of the downsides of it are rightly to the front of mind, because I think we have... for those of us have worked in digital tech innovation for years. We saw the hope of what the web could bring, and then we saw what happened. The same with apps, with social like, we've been burnt by some of these tech waves.

So here comes AI. Here comes a few powerful people in the US trying to dominate. I think people are rightly skeptical. And I guess what I'm what I'm trying to do through my work now is go. AI is bigger than those few companies like this small AI. There's locally produced AI companies. There's...if you go to the tech and the algorithm, it can do some really cool things.

And I particularly want people from the creative industries to be part of this, because I think the creative industries, people who are creative, have a different way of picking something up and then using it for something totally different. And if you don't sort of jump in and understand it, then you can't be part of this discussion about what happens next.

That's a really great point. I was talking recently with some other colleagues about that risk of real bifurcation between those who have real concerns with AI, real worries about the extractive processes that are around the extraction, the continued extraction around data, that concentration of capital and power involved in so much of the big commercial LLMs and systems, but also, yeah, where the risks are, if you completely sort of opt out in some ways and don't engage to understand or develop a direct understanding yourself.

I really love when we bring in speakers and can talk to like concrete examples sometimes. Sometimes it's hard to see. Alternatives are hard to see possibilities without hearing from those. Are there any examples of... so you mentioned small AI or local language models that you're finding particularly inspiring at the moment, or that perhaps indicate a few alternative developments in the AI space?

Yeah, I think the thing that I'm probably most excited about at the moment is an Australian built AI system called Othelia, and it was created with the film industry in mind, and particularly staying across long narrative forms. So this could be if you're writing a book, if you're writing a film, if you've got a language model that then can pull out, here are the characters, here's the timeline, here's the places, here's a different way of navigating that data set.

If you're then told by your producer that you need to kill off that character in three quarters of the way through, you can make that change. But then almost a prompt this language model to explain what the ramifications are and where you need to change things like, I'm not a feature film writer or a novelist, so I haven't used it in that way, but I believe that then... I don't think it will actually touch any of your creative.

It's just helping you navigate it. And it is your personal LLM for this project and it's yeah, it's locally made. Its private. They've got offices in Hollywood now as well. And they've been around for a few years and it's on my long list. But I've got plans to like digitise old music interviews I did 20 years ago, feed them all... feed the transcripts in, and then try to go like, what might some themes be here of a Sydney music history book?

Or like what large datasets do I have where I could play around with this? But I guess you don't need a language model that involves all of the information in the world to do some of the tasks that we're doing. And I think that even with the more commercial models, you can still just put that on top of your own organisation's policies or your own content here.

So it's not... you're not running a Ferrari every time you're doing a search. But yeah, I mean, to your point about the the extractive nature of these technologies as well and that sort of focused massive growth of just a few companies.... And this is me being hopelessly optimistic as I love being.

But if anything, it's helping to shine a light on things that have been there at a lower level for a long time. Like data centers aren't new. I've got way too many photos stored in the cloud, like we've all just been taking this stuff for granted. And yes, AI is supercharging it, but if it's making us as a society better understand that and question it, ultimately, some good can come from that, and it doesn't mean you have to say no to AI.

That's a really interesting point definitely around, I think surfacing the environmental and material impacts of the computational culture that we're all embedded in and the systems are embedded in as well.

We all like new devices, don't we? But sometimes you just have to say no.

You're working with organisations now to help develop, with executive, AI sort of strategies. What are the kinds of challenges you're seeing for leaders of organisations working around developing a strategy or navigating their way through what's a very complex and quite rapidly evolving technological landscape?

What I'm seeing most is there is a sense of FOMO or anxiety that I should be doing more, I should be more across this. But this is... and this is not from people who AI is their job. It's the... I think there's a lot of people who they're already in busy executive jobs have already got a whole area of expertise they need to be across.

And I think just the amount of focus on every little news item development in AI, every day and every week is just adding to this sense of it's hard to keep up. You know, the pace of change has been unlike any of the tech developments we've seen in the past. When you think that AI was a term that was coined in the 50s and then was... largely not that much happened for some decades, of course there was automation.

There was... machine learning has been around for decades, but it was only 2022 when ChatGPT or Dall-E GPT came out and it took ChatGPT two months to get 100 million users, whereas it took Instagram, I think was it five months or two years? Like nothing has grown at the pace that this is growing at and we haven't been through something that is changing as quickly.

So I think people are understandably overwhelmed by everything that's going on. So part of my work is almost just starting with, like, you don't have to listen to all that detail of it. Like there are some fundamental principles here to assessing what AI can do for you. And and probably having been through those waves of everybody wanting an app, everybody wanting a Facebook page, it's a bit like that that everybody thinks they need it.

And so my first question tends to be, okay, well, what's your strategy? What are you trying to achieve? Like start with what you're doing. And then how might AI help that. Do you want to do something faster. Do you want to do it newer. Do you want to do it cheaper? And even in arts and not for profit, they're important questions to ask.

If you can put more money towards your core mission, most organisations would want to to do that.

Yeah, that's a really great point. That kind of applying the right tool for the job. And perhaps that might be an AI technology, perhaps it won't be. Or it could be a mix, you know.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that while there's there's a great pace of change and there's new information every week, the fundamentals aren't changing that quickly. So I talk to people about what systems are you already using? Okay. Well why don't you keep using those. Like where do you have good data? Where do you have repetitive processes. Like some of those questions.

You know, it doesn't matter what happens in a certain lawsuit next week, or it doesn't matter if there is a hacking incident there. Like that's all... If you're interested in it, that's great, but you don't need to stay across the daily news items of AI to come up with an AI strategy for your organisation.

Just hearing you talk makes me think of Stewart Brand’s 'Pace Layers'. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that model, but the idea of looking at almost a sort of stratified or almost like a geological stratification of things that move at different places at the same time, and I think, yes, with the news cycle and particularly what feels like sometimes a lot of hype or fear or anxiety that is generated around reporting around AI and technology developments.

Yes, that's a really lovely kind of reflection about, well, what stays fairly constant in amongst what seems like a lot of change, what is moving slower?

Yeah, that's a really nice way of putting it. And I think it also comes back to the topic we've touched on a lot around a lot of this is very human work. Like it's less about the what button do you press and more about what are you trying to achieve? How is your how is your organisation feeling?

How where are people uncomfortable? Where are some people trying to run really fast ahead whilst others are saying, why are we doing this at all? So there's definitely a layer of work that's about people just having the same context and understanding, like, how do you have a shared baseline of information where you can make your decisions from and get away from all that clutter of, of those layers that you describe in the geological chart?

I'm imagining in my head, yeah.

I have to show you an image. It's quite good. It flashed into my mind while you were talking.

Get Claude Design to build one of those. Yeah. Prompt that.

There you go. Yeah. I was keen to ask you as well, because you're spending so much time in this space, what you're seeing sort of emerging that you think might have relevance for organisations developing strategies around AI or innovation, particularly anything that you might think weird or interesting or just curious.

I think... and this is, again, on my long list of things where you just want to, like, play around and work out what new products you can build. I did spot... I'm not sure how to... I might give you the URL, you might be able to put it in show notes, but there's a guy who works for the Guardian in the UK called Chris Moran, and he recently shared a weekend vibe coding project he did called Plot Lines.

I'm not sure if you Google that if it'll turn up, but it was essentially a weekend vibe coding project with his daughter where they uploaded classic English literature Dracula, Pride and Prejudice, etc. and built a site to navigate it via place. And then heaps of other people were contributing books. And there's something very like DIY crafty about some of this stuff that reminds me of the early days of the internet, where things weren't as homogenous as they are now.

Yeah, so I do want to spend some more time kind of noodling in those areas just to see what I could make. But I think that what's most interesting, particularly for creative sector, for media as well, is IP like where you own intellectual property. That is really valuable. And I'm hoping that organisations can understand the value of their intellectual property and how they might want to leverage it for their own mission, for their audiences for the good of of society as well.

Because I wonder if the web is a visual interface that was built because it became a thing like us scrolling and clicking doesn't need to be forever. So I kind of I'm going on a bit of a tangent here. Let me give you my example. So I use the New York Times cooking app all the time.

And it's occurred to me that, like, I use it because I want to know what to cook, I don't use it because I want to scroll and click, and that's a massive data set of great information, all these recipes. And yes, you want to see the photos as well, but ultimately I want to know what do I cook tonight?

So I wonder how the internet, as we know it will evolve as we move to more agent to agent experiences. Like how does my agent get the data that it needs from the New York Times, the State Library of Victoria, from wherever else? How might yeah, experiences from entertainment to information be crafted in ways that aren't all through a visual phone interface?

But I don't know if anyone's doing stuff there. That's where I'd noodle.

Oh, that's so exciting to hear. We've been contemplating at the library about the future of our website, and obviously at this particular moment, it's interesting to think about future developments and design of the site, but also who's going to be visiting the site, not just in five years time, but even in the next year, in the next few years.

Like, I think it's been fascinating to watch the changes in web traffic and that shift from human viewers or visitors to websites and traffic online versus the the proliferation of bots and our agents. And it's a really interesting question. I think it could be a little existential if web development in traditional, orthodox ways is what you kind of are very vested in, but also amazing in terms of thinking about the possibilities of how we navigate this informational space, which has been the web.

Yeah. And I think it also makes me think about the who might miss out as well. And how do we ensure that future experiences are designed for all and in this race to keep up with current tech developments that we're not throwing out everything we've learned from years of making digital experiences more accessible or making them, yeah, more appealing to a diverse cross-section of audiences and then thinking about who doesn't have access because of the cost or because of, yeah, whatever else.

I think there is a real risk that we made some good developments in a number of these spaces, and then we throw it all out because we're working in a totally new domain. And I know there's a woman at Data61 at CSIRO, Didar Zowghi, who'd done some really interesting work in diversity and inclusion and, and AI and yeah, I think there's people like that who will, I think lead the way in how we make sure we don't run down a path that we regret in years to come.

Well, please keep us updated about your noodling in this space. I'm so excited to see what you end up creating or prototyping.

Yeah, and I think for yeah, creatives like us, that's kind of the... there's all the heavy and evil side of AI, but then there's like there's new tools and we don't quite know how they work. And that's sort of fun to play with. And certainly there are plenty of musicians and artists I know who have been working in this sort of algorithmic space for some years.

So when people sort of have headlines of ‘no AI music’, I sort of think of a friend who's been doing algorithmically generated good music for more than a decade and go, I know what you mean by no AI music, but I don't think you mean him. So like, the AI is a headline and an umbrella for everything I'm really sick of.

Yeah, we actually started all of our internal conversations workshops around AI ethics and principles at the library this year, and Jasmine Pfefferkorn and Vanessa Bartlett, who led these workshops, made a really big point on really just publishing a glossary up front and just kind of really trying to actually make clear that when we're talking about AI, we're talking about a range of different technologies.

And then actually you need nuance in this conversation.

Yeah, that's so important. And I feel like it's the gray area between the AI is bad and AI is amazing. That's the interesting, messy and important work.

I think just also that recognition that, yes, AI, analytic AI and different forms of AI have been and different types of machine learning have been just a part of all of our systems that we use every day. It's interesting how I get to use sort of almost like as a broad brush stroke to just largely talk about LLMs or GenAI.

So I wanted to ask you a bit about the work that you've mentioned, the work of creators and obviously relevant to IP, but particularly storytelling. I can't help but notice that your practice has you've titled it Future Story, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the role of storytelling in your practice and why you feel it's so important?

Yeah, and I think it is that contrast between technology and media art storytelling. You know, traditional media has been in decline for years, but it's also been evolving. And I think that while technology makes so much change, at the same time, there are some core fundamental human things that will continue to exist. And storytelling is one of them.

So, sure, 100 years ago that was sitting around a wireless and then it's become TV and it's become the internet. And a lot more recently it's short form video. So the platforms change, the technology changes, but that human need to connect to other humans to listen to stories isn't going away. And that's something that I guess that was some of the reasons I called my company Future Story.

And the last sort of five or so years at the ABC, I did a lot of work around bringing content creators into the building. And this was at a time when five years ago, TikTok was seen as a place for dancing videos. So there can be a lot of new technology comes along and there can be a lot of dismissing it as something frivolous, something that's not intellectual, something that's not valued.

But, through work that different people in the team did in Innovation Lab, we pulled in creators who were scientists, who were art historians, who were engineers, comedians like top of their game, and really smart individuals who are also really good at storytelling. So they knew storytelling, they knew the platforms. They knew how to start the first five seconds to be a hook that would get you in via the hashtags.

And that's a very valid form of storytelling. It's not TV, it's not radio. And it might be short form, but it's what people are consuming. Now, I'm not sure if we'll ever get our attention spans back, but yeah, we're here. Lean in.

I really love this idea of good futures, because I feel that we bring our own values to whatever we think an idea of a future might be. And I was curious to ask you what you feel a good future for AI in media, arts, culture and government looks like?

Yeah, I think it probably goes back to some of the things we have touched on already around the creative industries leaning in, creative industries understanding the value of their intellectual property and then being able to differentiate what the tech can enable with the problems of concentrated power of a few tech companies, because there's sort of two different things.

I mean, ultimately, it's hard to say what's going to happen next with AI, but I do see the potential for more creativity by and again, just touching on what we're talking about earlier, that cross-disciplinary use of tools and systems, I think, is something that could bring totally new things for creative practitioners. You know, I think back to when I was first sort of learning to do electronic music and radio recording and stuff, and the tech was so hard, like needing to deal with mini discs or CD burners and not having laptops like the tech got in the way of the creativity.

And we've certainly seen as tech’s developed, like whether it's GarageBand giving kids a way into making music or other tools that just make it easier for people to record and process, AI can be another one of these. Like, sure, it can lead to laziness, but it could also unlock a whole heap of creative thinking from people that don't necessarily have some massive tech set up or don't have somebody teaching them piano.

So yeah, you've got to jump in and play with things and just see where it goes.