Daniel Terdiman

🚀 How My Past Is Catching Up to My Future📡 ... Things I realized from thinking back over the past 12 months at Creative Force In my VFX days, I spent hours meticulously tweaking pixels, making explosions look cooler, monsters scarier, or skies more dramatic. If you’d peeked over my shoulder, you’d see a stressed-out perfectionist hunched over a screen, whispering to the software, “Just one more render, please…” Fast forward to now, and I work in AI-generated imagery (and a host of other things AI). These days, I type a prompt, and AI serves me visuals faster than I can say “control-alt-delete.” It’s like the technology finally caught up to what I always wished I had in VFX: a team of tiny, tireless assistants doing the heavy lifting. And that's the tooling we are building for our customers at Creative Force! At scale!! Not for VFX specifically, but for all sorts of content generation... and we do it at scale! But the real kicker? All that VFX experience still sneaks in. AI doesn’t just magically know what “vibes” you’re after (yet). It needs guidance—understanding color, composition, and a bit of that storytelling magic. Turns out, those late-night rendering battles weren’t wasted after all. Now I could be the director, collaborator, and critic rolled into one, teaching machines how to imagine. The shift from VFX to AI isn’t so much a career pivot as it is a reunion. Everything I loved (and maybe a few things I didn’t) about VFX are now tools in my AI toolkit—just with way fewer all-nighters and way more “wow, that was fast.” I like to think my career is proof that the creative journey isn’t about straight lines. It’s about weird, unexpected loops where your past keeps sneaking up, tapping you on the shoulder, and saying, “Hey, you’ll need me for this.” What can I say... I'm not afraid to admit that 99% of this is luck and timing, but that doesn't diminish how much I am looking forward to year two 🤠 Anyone else feeling like their past is tagging along for the ride in unexpected ways? Let’s hear your story!

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New Culture & Code interview with Helen Todd (Human), fellow Creative AI podcaster, Cincy AI meetup organizer, SXSW advisor, and all around authority on AI impact on creative industries, especially for brands and marketers. In this show, Helen and I explored the nexus of creativity and AI from both a professional and a social point of view. We drilled into what people mean when they discuss creative uses of AI, and tied it back to South by Southwest 2024, where giddy excitement mixed with some trepidation and outright hostility. Put all that together, and you've got a spicy cocktail for talking about the future of AI-powered creative work. https://lnkd.in/gHdn2ECN

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"The app can see three kinds of feeds: anything from ActivityPub, which means things like Mastodon and Threads and Pixelfed; anything from AT Protocol, which means Bluesky; and any RSS feed."

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I recently spoke with Gary Drenik at Forbes about the critical balance between AI innovation and regulation. At Storyblocks, we see firsthand how AI is transforming the creative industry — and the urgent need for thoughtful oversight to ensure we’re driving toward a future that values artists’ contributions and respects copyright as we explore new creative frontiers. A Prosper Insights & Analytics survey found that 88% of U.S. adults have privacy concerns about AI using their data. I’m not surprised, and that stat reinforces what I've long believed: this issue isn’t just about copyright, it's about the agency we have as humans over the data we create in our personal and professional lives. Today much of the discourse around ethical data sourcing is connected to generative models, but transformation in other industries is right around the corner.  If Responsible AI development is viewed as a business decision to be made, rather than an obligation, then we’ve all lost. While self-regulation by tech companies is important, it’s not enough. Think back to early social media platforms’ promises and the fallout that followed — the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for instance. We’ve seen the dire consequences of playing fast and loose with customer data and privacy. We need a more inclusive dialogue that brings all stakeholders to the table — from startups to established players and the artists whose work may serve as training material. When only tech giants shape AI policy, we run the risk of regulations that inadvertently create barriers for smaller innovators. But that’s not all. High standards for ethical data partnerships are key. As I told Gary, investing in ethical data sourcing allows companies to compete not just on the strength of their AI models but on the integrity of their data pipeline. Large brands are deeply risk averse when it comes to AI, and individuals are wary of the impact AI could have on their livelihood. It is both the right thing to do, and a better business decision, to start with an ethical data strategy than have to pivot down the line. Check out the full interview at the link in the comments, and let me know how is your organization approaching these challenges. #AI #Innovation #Ethics #Leadership #TechPolicy

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“Only the most short-term of business advantage can be found by drying up the river AI companies drink from. AI model developers standing on the letter of the law will find cold comfort in that if news and other sources of curated content are driven out of business.” This really is a must-read for anyone who despairs at the future of quality information in the age of AI It’s also the most practical roadmap I have seen for a sustainable knowledge economy, based on transparency and collaboration.

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The Irony of Massive Regurgitation On any given day I see a LI post that talks about how incredible the gloating author is for creating "324 blog posts in one hour" and how my "AI-produced 50,000 articles drove 5X volume in lead gen". (yep, actual examples) Posts like these show high repost behavior and emoji-laced enthusiasm, suggesting that this is the tip of the iceberg. While early innovators indeed "win", the impact of massive regurgitation of semi-intelligent content posts is mind-numbing. The conversion will predictably fall off, and we'll be left with no clear path to "engaging" with prospective customers via conventional content marketing. I suspect the ironic reality with be that - going forward - when a buyer wants to learn, they can have their own conversation with the engine you used to create that "insightful article or buyer's guide". Those conversations will have WAY more context about the buyer's needs than you have, obliterating your ability to gain their attention via content marketing.

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Google’s Gemini Ultra 1.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o are here! My newest blog highlights their benefits and how Gemini Ultra 1.5 offers more advanced language understanding and better scalability, while GPT-4o excels in text generation and multimodal capabilities. See how Gemini and ChatGPT can help transform your marketing efforts and streamline your workflow. https://lnkd.in/g4qxV4af #DigitalMarketing #AI #GoogleGemini #OpenAI #GPT4o

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The latest AI domino to fall: product rendering. Philip Lunn, CEO of Depix AI, showed me a demo of his company's generative AI rendering tools. They're pretty wild. "Revolutionary rendering is what I call it, and it's blowing people away," Lunn told me. One of Depix's tools, CADviz, creates a render from nothing more than a CAD screenshot. Another, SceneShift, can redo the background and lighting of a given render based on a text prompt (like "snowy mountain road"). Read my article about Depix's AI-based rendering on Engineering.com: https://lnkd.in/gwnBuEdY

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Games have become a big moneymaker for The New York Times, where it was recently reported that people spend more time on #games than #news, and now others are piling in. Hearst is doubling down on puzzles as it tries to replicate the Times' success with Puzzmo. Six months in, it has 8 games and 600K users — vs the Times' 1 million+ games #subscribers — and sees 100 games in its future. Read what differentiates its model and why it believes it's building a copycat-proof approach to games, in Business Insider: https://lnkd.in/eRJMStZ5

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A new episode of Attention, Attention! covering two really interesting areas: 1 - I personally find the use of attention metrics within creative optimization fascinating. As someone who spent hundreds of hours in my first media job uploading creative assets into the ad-server, and then in my next role trading campaigns, the creative always felt an after thought from an optimization perspective. My blinkered view was that it was the media placement and audience data doing all the hard work. However, it is now widely known that the goal should be to triangulate media, creative and audience to drive outcomes (particularly in a world where data is less prominent), but that's been difficult due to disparate metrics used to measure each - attention metrics can be the anchor that brings them all together. Developing measurement frameworks which get all three to work together (usually underpinned my tech) is optimal activation. Enjoying getting to see the evolution of Realeyes - Vision AI product. 2 - In-app is a huge proportion of where we spend time consuming media (up to 80% of our time on mobile devices according to various research) but attention measurement has had a tough time measuring this (because javascript tags don't fire in app environments), so to see Integral Ad Science and others solve for this is great for buyers and sellers. Hope you enjoy the episode and as always please provide any feedback.

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𝗣𝘆𝗿𝗲𝘅 𝗢𝗯𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘃𝘀. 𝗔𝗜 𝗙𝗮𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗚𝗼𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗿 I’ll admit, my sister-in-law is 𝘰𝘣𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥 with Pyrex. She has a collection worth thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars. Who knew a casserole dish could be such a hot commodity? And look, I get it—Pyrex is 𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘭. But is it 𝘈𝘐-𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨-𝘵𝘩𝘦-𝘧𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 cool? Ehh, not quite. Now, what I do think is cool—scratch that, 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥-𝘣𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨—is Corning’s transformation from kitchen staple to AI powerhouse. You see, thanks to William Patalon III’s latest article, I found out that the company behind your grandma's favorite dishware is now positioning itself to ride the AI wave like a pro surfer. Yup, Corning has gone from 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗰𝗸 to 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗰𝗸, and the market hasn't even caught on yet. Turns out Corning’s been flexing its muscles in the optical fiber and display tech game for years. And with their new AI-driven 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗦𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱, they’re looking to add $3 billion in annual sales by 2026. That’s right—Corning is gearing up to power AI data centers and the Internet of Things, leaving casserole dishes in the dust. So while my sister-in-law is on the hunt for her next vintage Pyrex gem, I’ll be keeping an eye on Corning’s next-gen innovations—and maybe picking up some shares along the way. Catch William Patalon’s full breakdown of Corning’s AI game plan here: https://lnkd.in/gvCvny7h. #AIRevolution #TechStocks #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #Investing

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Some thoughts on the Meta Ray-ban glasses (not a user, but just from my first impressions seeing review videos) Totally get the capture the moment POV with the inbuilt camera. Would be a step function improvement over current smartphones. Get to live the moment and capture something. It would be excellent, if it had some AR type projection that Google Glass had like for: - facts - directions - translations - text messages / email notifications The Meta (LLama 3) integration would be next level. Siri be damned. If I could do voice memos to transcribed notes, it would be killer again. The pricing is also not too out of hand, starting at $299 Battery life is something that is a bit unknown. Would prefer the normal prescription glasses to sunglasses, because then I could use it more often.

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Are you ready to see films that Hollywood doesn't want you to see? Union, Sundance's breakout about Amazon workers' fight to unionize, is finding its audience through GATHR's (*launching today*) Partner TVOD after facing distribution challenges. When we developed Partner TVOD, each user group had specific, sometimes conflicting needs. Filmmakers wanted control over pricing, territories, and release windows; partners required seamless integration and monetization tools; and audiences expected an intuitive watching experience across platforms. Most products aim for a one-size-fits-all approach, but that wasn't an option here. We had to adapt to the specific demands of each group without becoming bloated. That’s where we found the sweet spot with Partner TVOD; allowing filmmakers to keep more of their revenue, partners to grow their reach, and audiences to access content that might otherwise be blocked by traditional platforms. It’s a win-win-win: creators control their rights and data, partners profit from extraordinary content, and audiences get a frictionless viewing experience.

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So much of what Rick Beato articulates in this video is equally true of other forms of media besides music — video, photography, books, software, and more. I’m not sure what the solution is other than individually finding the energy and discipline to invest in “radical attention”, dedicating yourself to truly investing in and paying attention to a limited set of great works. I’ve done it myself and can attest that it’s certainly worth the effort. https://lnkd.in/gXAHDeVV #attention #consumption #art

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