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When the camera was invented in 1826, many people thought painting would die. But it didnt. Instead, painters found new ways to express themselves. Painters reinvented expressionism, impressionism, and abstract art. Monet, Munch, and later Picasso, all thrived after the camera arrived. When personal computers became common in the 1980s, there was fear that creative thinking would become less valuable. But computers opened the door to digital design, animation, and new forms of storytelling. Studios like Pixar, founded in 1986, showed how technology could help artists create worlds that were impossible before. When Photoshop launched in 1988, photographers worried that editing tools would destroy the purity of photography. But Photoshop expanded what photographers and designers could do. It made visual creativity more accessible and helped build the modern creator economy. So why does AI, today, make so many creators feel threatened? History tells us one clear truth: New technology has never replaced creativity; it has always expanded it. Every time new technology arrives, progress follows. The AI Genie Cant Be Rebottled Artificial intelligence is simply the next chapter. It can help creators work faster, explore more ideas, and bring their imagination to life with fewer barriers. Human imagination cant be replicated by a machine. The spark that evokes tears in a storys readers or a swoon from a melodys listeners is innately humanthat intangible side of creativity: talent, taste, lived experience, a unique point of view, and the urge to express it. But turning those intangibles into something others can see, hear, or feel also requires tangibles: time, tools, access, and resources. Too often, thats where great creators get stuck. Not everyone can dream up and create a world worth caring about. But even those who can often lack the means to bring it to life in a way that others can enjoy as well. That’s where AI can help. It cant create soul, but it can remove barriers to entry by lowering the cost, time, skills, and resources needed to truly bring creative expression to life. In this sense, AI can be a force multiplier for creativity. Just as the smartphone made photography universal, AI can democratize storytelling itself. Collaboration, Not Replacement In my work building an audio storytelling platform, Ive seen how AI can help creators, not replace them. Our platform lets anyone write and publish serialized audio stories. To help them, we’ve built AI tools that act like creative partners. They dont write for the authorsthey assist them. They help a writer stay consistent across hundreds of episodes, suggest plotlines when inspiration stalls, and offer real-time feedback on pacing and dialogue. Other tools turn text into natural-sounding audio, add background sound, or generate artworkcapabilities once available only to professional studios. These tools dont take jobs from artists; they open doors for them. Many of our creators couldnt afford to hire professional narrators, sound designers, or illustrators. Without AI, their stories would never be heard. With it, they reach millions of listeners. Thats not replacing creators. Its expanding who gets to be one. Keeping Humans at the Center Great art doesnt come from pattern recognition or probability. It comes from emotion, contradiction, curiositythe things that make us human. AI can help a writer structure a story, but it cant feel heartbreak or hope. That’s why we must build creator systems that keep those human creators squarely at the center: ensuring transparency, maintaining creative ownership, and deeply valuing the originators of ideas. A New Chapter for Creativity Were at a pivotal moment in a long story. The history of art and technology has always followed the same arc: disruption, fear, adaptation and, ultimately, expansion. Steve Jobs once described the home computer (a technology that stirred up a frenzy of fear when it came to market) as a bicycle for the mind. He envisioned a tool that didnt replace our thinking but accelerated it, amplifying human imagination in the same way a bicycle amplifies human movement. This next chapter of creative innovation is ours to write. We can let AI reduce creativity to algorithms, or we can shape it into a bicycle for the creative mind, something that helps human talent travel farther and faster. The future of storytelling shouldnt be about machines replacing humans. It should be about more humans telling more stories, reaching more people, and inspiring more imagination (and tears and swoons) than ever before.
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E-Commerce
Legendary documentarian Ken Burns is set to release his long-awaited series after a decade in development. In the lead-up to the premiere of The American Revolution, Burns shares key lessons he gleaned from the founding of the United Statesand the parallels between the revolutionary era and today. He also reflects on his admiration for Lin-Manuel Mirandas Hamilton, and the obstacles he faces in his ongoing quest for truth. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You have a new, six-part series about the American Revolution premiering on November 16. Why were you drawn to this? And why now? I’ve been working on this for almost 10 years. . . . I said yes to this project in December of 2015. Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency. What drew me to the Civil War was organic and interior to my choices. I was looking at a map, a kind of 3D map, where I suddenly saw an arrow of British moving west through Long Island towards Brooklyn. This little, tiny town of Brooklyn, which is the largest battle in the entire revolution. While there are no photographs in newsreels, I felt being a lover of maps and a willingness, I think, to reexamine my usual disdain for reenactments, they’re not going to reenact that battle. They’re just being there to make you feel the weather, make you feel the heat, make you feel the cold, make you feel the location, the interiors of all of these actions, and at that point, I realized maybe we can do this. Of course, I went about three years into this project and said, “Wow. If we hit our marks, we’ll be in 2025, which is the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord.” Then, all of a sudden people would arrive and say, “Oh. You planned this so well.” Yes, yes. We didn’t. I’m glad that a very deep dive into the revolution is going to happen way in advance of the 4th of July of next year, which is, for many people, the 250th. Of course, it’s been going on for some time, and will go on if you want to follow it through to the end, until 2039, which is 250 years after our government officially got started and George Washington became the first President of the United States of America. There’s lots of things going on, but a lot of it will be focused next July, and there is that risk that it could become super-ficialized. The war itself is already encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. It is not bloodless or gallant. You do not want to die when a cannon takes off your head, a bayonet guts you, or a musket ball rips through you. There’s just a remarkable set of characters and remarkable interiors to the war, the details of the battles, a really long, six and a half year war from Lexington to Yorktown. We need to know about our origin story, particularly in a time when people are sort of ringing their hands. We’re so divided. Well, you just look back there, and we’re really divided back then, and that maybe reinvesting with our origin story helps us find out what’s real and what’s artificial in all of the stuff that’s going on right now. The current cultural story about the American Revolution that maybe is most prominent or most well known is Hamilton, is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s retelling in that. Did that impact the way you told the story at all? Look, let me give my props to Lin Manuel. Hamilton is the greatest cultural event of this new millennium, this new century. It is a phenomenal thing. I mean, I’ve got a teenage daughter who’s 15, a 20-year daughter and an almost 15-year-old granddaughter, and they can recite, sing the whole thing, two-and-a-half hours. And so, they know tensions between big and small states. They understand between a strong federal Hamiltonian system and a state’s rights Jefferson model. They know who Hercules Mulligan is. They know all this sort of stuff about the revolution, and they have a kind of great glee about it that must mean that history teachers of this period are just lying down and thanking God for Lin-Manuel Miranda. I mean, truth and fact are increasingly contested today, and we mentioned Hamilton. I mean, Lin-Manuel, the big picture is certainly there, but there’s a lot of artistic license in what he pulled together. When you look at this as a storyteller, and for our listeners who are business leaders and other leaders, the responsibility to promote strict accuracy, or like as long as we get the big picture right, it’s okay the details don’t matter as much. The people that are listening to this have to do the former, right? Strict accuracy, and so do I. There’s not a filmmaker in a world when a scene is working, you don’t want to touch it, but we’re always finding new and destabilizing information that are true and you need to incorporate them. Lin-Manuel can actually take the poetic license necessary to do a big, Broadway musical, and God bless him. I mean, there’s a guy that we know in our past who would take the histories and conflate characters, change countries, move these characters around. His name is William Shakespeare, and we don’t believe that there are any truths higher in fiction, which are sometimes more true than what’s real, but I can’t do that. I will sacrifice the art for the correct story. That makes it super complicated, but what’s interesting is when you do that, when you try to fit the round peg of the truth into the square hole of art, if you will, and you successfully negotiate it, it’s as good as anything. You’re right, we’re in an age where we’re supposed to be post-truth. No, we’re not. Are you post-truth? I’m not. I’m not. Right. Nor are the business leaders of the country. You’re going to fudge your figures? I don’t think so. We do know that large sections of where we supposedly get information are, themselves, unaccountable. They do not care, one way or the other. Whatever political persuasion, whatever it is, people are manipulating the truth all the time. Always has been. The problem is just the sheer size of the internet and its ability for a lie to get started before the truth can come back, but one and one is always going to be two. You can’t build an airplane, you can’t run a business, you can’t work the budget of a documentary film without one and one equaling two. You can’t just make it up, right? You cannot make it up. George Washington rides out on the battlefield at least three times, that I know of, risking his life at Kipp’s Bay in Manhattan, at Princeton, and at the Battle of Monmouth, and these are significant things. If he’s killed, it’s all over, because he is the only person that held us together as a historian, Annette Gordon Reed says, that there’s one person who was able to figure it out. I’m interested in him. He’s deeply flawed. He’s rash. Those movements potentialy sacrifice the whole thing, and he makes terrible battlefield mistakes. He leaves his left flank exposed in the Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American Revolution, and loses it and New York for seven years. It’s the British headquarters and the loyalist stronghold for the rest of the war. He does the same mistake at Brandywine in Pennsylvania, another huge, huge battle, where this time he leaves his right flank, but there’s nobody who knew how to inspire men in the dark of night, in the dead of cold, who could pick subordinate talent, that he wasn’t afraid of their skills or talent, who could defer to Congress and understand how they work, who could speak to a Georgian and a New Hampshireite and say, “You’re not that. You’re an American, this new thing.” Nobody. Nobody could do that. Does he have undertow? Yes. Does that make him any less heroic? No. Heroism is not perfection. Heroism is a negotiation within yourself between your strengths and your weaknesses. Has truth always been sort of fungible and selective in U.S. history, a kind of a matter of debate and perspective, or is this time we’re in now different? Human beings have always lied. People have been lying as long as there have been human beings.
Category:
E-Commerce
Frequent flyers and travel hackers who visited SeatGuru on October 31 were met with an unpleasant surprise: a shuttered website directing them to Tripadvisors homepage. After nearly a quarter-century in operation, the beloved website that helped fliers determine which seats to grab, and which to avoid, is gone. Heres why, and three SeatGuru alternatives to try now. What was SeatGuru? SeatGuru was a website highly regarded by frequent fliers. The site hosted seatmaps for thousands of airplanes and categorized every seat on each aircraft in order to help fliers figure out which to book and which to avoid. Good seats were those with qualities like the most legroom in their class, the deepest unobstructed recline, and amenities like power ports. Bad seats were those with limited recline, proximity to the toilets, or obstructed windows. Since airlines rarely made customers aware of the drawbacks of certain seats, and priced them similarly to preferable ones, there was always some risk involved when selecting your seat while booking. SeatGuru took that uncertainty away. By visiting the site, you could pull up the exact make and model of your airplane for a selected flight and click any seat to see whether it’s good, bad, or something in between. You could then use the data SeatGuru provided to choose the seat that works best for you. SeatGuru was founded in 2001 and was one of those websites that exemplified the promise of the early internet: that newly accessible data could help improve our lives in many small ways. In SeatGurus case, it meant frequent travelers could make more informed choices about which seats to select. SeatGuru became so popular that in 2007, travel website king Tripadvisor acquired it. But now, 18 years after the acquisition, and 24 years after its founding, SeatGuru is no more. What happened to SeatGuru? While once a reliable repository of seat data, SeatGuru began to take a turn for the worse when the Covid pandemic started. Around 2020, SeatGuru stopped producing content for its blog, delisted its smartphone apps from app stores, and fell behind in publishing the latest seat map data, leading the site’s data to become increasingly unreliable. Still, even until this year, provided the configuration of any planes seat did not change, SeatGuru remained a valuable resource for frequent travelers hoping to find the best seats on their flight. But then, on October 31, with no notice and no fanfare, Tripadvisor pulled the plug on SeatGuru. Now, visitors to the site are redirected to Tripadvisors homepage. As for why, a Tripadvisor spokesperson told me that the companys pivot to AI initiatives was a driving factor in SeatGurus decline. Tripadvisor has been evolving its business for its next era of growth, one that is centered on experiences and powered by AI, the spokesperson told me. We’ve been focusing strictly on optimizing our legacy offerings, and deprioritizing areas of the business as we shift resources towards our marketplace growth opportunities. SeatGuru was one of the areas the company felt should be deprioritized. 3 SeatGuru alternatives to try SeatGuru may be joining many of its fellow useful websites from the early 2000s in the internet graveyard, but there are other ways to learn about a seat before you book it. The first is SeatMap.com. The site was launched in 2022 and was founded by AMD and Microsoft veteran Djois Franklin and Fred Finn. Finn has the distinction of holding two travel-related Guinness World Records: most airmiles flown by a passenger and the person who has flown the most flights on the Concorde. SeatMap hosts seat maps for planes operated by more than 750 airlines worldwide and categorizes each seat by color, based on comfort and amenities. In an email, SeatMap CEO Djois Franklin told me that the site was seeing a sharp uptick in traffic across the globe after SeatGuru shut down. To use SeatMap, just enter your flight information, and youll be presented with an interactive diagram of your flights seatmap. A second website SeatGuru fans should try is AeroLOPA. The site, founded in 2021, doesnt have the interactivity of SeatGuru or SeatMap.com (meaning you cant click on an individual seat to learn more about it), but you can look up specifc planes in the fleets of nearly 200 airlines to find detailed cabin maps showing the relative positions of all seats along with general information about any cabins seat widths, recline, legroom, and more. Finally, those wanting more social feedback about the best and worst seats should give SeatLink.com a look. The site lets you look up your specific flight, as SeatGuru did, and shows an interactive map detailing the amenities of each seat. SeatLink also lets users post comments about individual seats, enabling crowdsourced reviews and other socially aggregated data.
Category:
E-Commerce
While Im happy to extol the powers of the written word, sometimes you need a little something extra to get your point across. Im not just referring to pictures, either, but also to annotations, flowcharts, and freeform drawings. These illustrative tools can be a powerful way to convey your message, whether by themselves or on top of an existing image. Allow me to (*ahem*) illustrate exactly what I mean, using a free tool that might end up being the image-editing, markup-magic-creating supplement you never knew you needed. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! The picture of productivity Next time you need to mark up an image or feel like rolling your own flowchart, remember this website: Excalidraw.com. Excalidraw is a web-based app that bills itself as a digital whiteboard, but it is actually much more than that. With Excalidraw, you can also import your own images and then insert arrows, boxes, lines, and textor create completely freeform drawingsall on top of them. Youll be ready to start drawing or annotating in just a few seconds. The site is free to use and doesnt require any logins. To start using Excalidraw, just pick one of the drawing tools at the top of the screen, then click and drag on the canvas to insert it. You can easily import any image into Excalidraw and then mark it up in all sorts of interesting ways. To add an image, either click the image icon orif youre using the site on a computer and the image is in your clipboardjust hit Ctrl+V or Cmd+V to paste it in. Use the Cursor tool to select items that you want to move or delete, and use the Hand tool to move around the canvas. Excalidraw lets you save works-in-progress as files on whatever device youre using. Once youre finished, you can copy the resulting image to your clipboard or export it as an image file. If youre an expert at editing photos on your phonethanks, perhaps, to my colleague JR Raphaels Android Photography Masterclassyou may wonder why youd need a separate app for annotating images. For one thing, Excalidraw works on any device, not just your phone or tablet. (Ive found it especially helpful when marking up screenshots for my own tech advice newsletters.) Excalidraw also supports illustrations without an image, so you can build a flowchart from scratch or doodle away on an infinite canvas. Lastly, Excalidraw has more powerful annotation features than your phones photo markup mode, with additional drawing tools and a Layers feature for moving elements to the foreground or background. Excalidraw’s annotation options are especially exceptional. Some extra tips to keep in mind when using Excalidraw (some of which will only make sense if youre using a device with a mouse or keyboard): Right-clicking on the canvas reveals some useful options, including a grid mode and a Zen mode that hides the toolbar. Right-clicking individual items is helpful as well, allowing you to duplicate, flip, or move items forward or backward in the scene. While drawing lines or arrows, you can connect them to the edges of a shape, and theyll stay connected even if you move the shape later. Use Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to quickly undo edits. If you ever want to start from scratch, click the menu button in the top-left corner, then select Reset the canvas. (But consider saving your work first.) To save your creation as an image file, click the menu button and select Export. Youll see a preview of what your image will look like along with some extra options. (Of note: Embed scene includes some data in the image file to allow for future editing in Excalidraw.) You can then save the file (as a PNG or .SVG) or copy it to your clipboard for easy sharing elsewhere. Excalidraw.com is entirely web based, though you can install it as a Progressive Web App if youd like. The site is free to use with no ads, including the ability to save project files to your local device and export images. An optional subscription for $6 per month lets you save files online and access extra features such as presentation mode and team management. Excalidraw requires no sign-in, doesnt ask for personal information, and advertises end-to-end encryption for drawings. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Category:
E-Commerce
Every fall, I anticipate the winter holidays with almost childlike joy. I look forward to familiar traditions with friends and family, eggnog in my coffee, and the sense that everyone is feeling a little lighter and more connected. At the same time, I feel anxious and annoyed by the manufactured sense of urgency around gift giving: the endless searching and second-guessing shaped by advertisers, retailers, and cultural expectations. Dont get me wrong, I mostly love givingand, yes, receivinggifts during the holidays. But as a researcher who studies consumer psychology, I see how those same forces, amplified by constant buying opportunities and frictionless online payments, make us especially vulnerable and often unwise this time of year. Buying behavior, including gift giving, doesnt just reflect needs and wants but also our values. Frequently, the values we talk about are more akin to aspirational ideals. Our actual values are revealed in the seemingly inconsequential choices we make day after dayincluding shopping. The cumulative effects of our spending behaviors carry enormous implications for society, the environment, and everyones well-beingfrom the purchaser and recipient to people working throughout the supply chain. This makes consumer behavior an especially important place to apply the emerging social science research on wisdom. While wisdom is defined in different ways, it can be understood as seeing decisions through a broader, values-informed perspective and acting in ways that promote well-being. Over the past decade, consumer psychology researcher David Mick and I have studied what that means when it comes to consumption. Consumer wisdom? you may wonder. Isnt that an oxymoron? But there are vast differences in how we consumeand as our research shows, this can lead to very different effects on individual well-being. Defining consumer wisdom Building on some of Davids earlier work, I began my own research on consumer wisdom in the summer of 2015, interviewing dozens of people across the U.S. whom others in their communities had identified as models of wisdom. Previous research guided me to settings where I could easily find people who represented different aspects of wisdom: practicality on farms in upstate New York; environmental stewardship in Portland, Oregon; and community values in Tidewater, Virginia. I didnt use the term wisdom, though. It can be intimidating, and people often define it narrowly. Instead, I spoke with people whose peers described them as exemplary decision-makerspeople leading lives that considered both the present and the future, and who balanced their needs with others needs. From those conversations, David and I developed a theory of consumer wisdom. With the help of a third coauthor, Kelly Haws, we validated this framework through national surveys with thousands of participants, creating the consumer wisdom scale. The scale shows how consumer wisdom is not some lofty ideal but a set of practical habits. Some are about managing money. Some are about goals and personal philosophy, and others are about broader impact. We have found that six dimensions capture the vast majority of what we would call consumer wisdom: Responsibility: managing resources to support a rewarding yet realistic lifestyle. Purpose: prioritizing spending that supports personal growth, health, and relationships. Perspective: drawing on past experiences and anticipating future consequences. Reasoning: seeking and applying reliable, relevant information; filtering out the noise of advertising and pop culture. Flexibility: being open to alternatives such as borrowing, renting, or buying used. Sustainability: spending in ways that support the buyers social or environmental goals and values. These are not abstract traits. They are everyday ways of aligning your spending with your goals, resources, and values. Importantly, people with higher scores on the scale report greater life satisfaction, as well as better health, financial security, and sense of meaning in life. These results hold even after accounting for known determinants of well-being, such as job satisfaction and supportive relationships. In other words, consumer wisdom makes a distinctive and underappreciated contribution to well-being. Putting it into practice These six dimensions offer a different lens on holiday normsone that can reframe how to think about gifts. Interestingly, the English word gift traces back to the Old Norse rune gyfu, which means generosity. Its a reminder that true giving is not about checking boxes on referral, revenue-generating gift guides or yielding to slick promotions or fads. Generosity is about focusing on another persons well-being and our relationship with them. From the perspective of consumer wisdom, that means asking what will genuinely contribute to the recipients life. One of the most important dimensions of consumer wisdom is purpose: the idea that thoughtful spending can nurture personal growth, health, enjoyment, and a sense of connection. Out with trendy gadgets, fast fashion, and clutter-creating décor or knickknacksthings that feel exciting in the moment but are quickly forgotten. In with quality headphones, a shared cooking class, a board game, and a workshop or tools to support a hobbygifts that can spark growth, joy and deeper connection. In my ongoing research, people have described wise gifts as those that define value from the recipients perspectivegifts that stay meaningful and useful over time. The wisest gifts, respondents say, also affirm the recipients identity, showing that the giver truly understands and values them. Wiser consumption is learnable, measurable, and consequential. By choosing gifts that reflect purpose and the original spirit of gyfutrue generositywe can make the holidays less stressful. More importantly, we can make them more meaningful: strengthening relationships in ways that bring joy long after. Michael Luchs is a JS Mack professor of business at William & Mary. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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