Designer, illustrator, and creative entrepreneur Pablo Stanley joins Cameron Adams, to explore how AI is transforming creativity. From vibe coding and cultivating taste to the rise of hyper-personalized content, they dive into how AI is reshaping the creative process.
Designer, illustrator, and creative entrepreneur Pablo Stanley joins Cameron Adams, to explore how AI is transforming creativity. From vibe coding and cultivating taste to the rise of hyper-personalized content, they dive into how AI is reshaping the creative process. Pablo shares his thoughts on the role of taste, the importance of friction and how he uses vibe coding to bring prototypes to life.
Cam’s notes on Substack: promptedwithcam.substack.com
Key Quotes:
“AI can do a lot of stuff. It can do volume and it can do it really quick and can give you all the different options, but taste will allow you to know what to ask from it.”
“We’re on the sidelines looking at the robot surf and saying like, no, you’re doing the surfing wrong, but the robot is doing the surfing. It’s the fun part, you know?”
“I wish sometimes that LLMs…potentially have a slider or something that’s the friction slider…at the moment, it feels like it’s all the way up and it’s always…just like a yes man, and it’s always saying, yes, you’re the best.”
“Taste is a skill that you have to develop. It’s a skill that comes with privilege too.”
Timestamps
00:44 Welcome + Intro to Pablo
02:03 The prompt - from Pablo’s head, to the page, to AI
05:47 From six-finger hands to stunning renders: how fast AI has improved
06:23 Low-risk projects and AI experimentation
08:50 Building Lummi & real team workflows (language, contracts, ops)
15:28 “AI makes volume, taste makes value” — the privilege of developing taste
18:56 Hyper-personalized feeds, Minority Report vibes, and brand content
23:03 Creative friction: do we need a “friction slider” for AI feedback?
27:44 Vibe coding: creating fast prototypes (+ Taco cameo 🐶)
35:07 All-Star Creative Team
37:41 Designer Reveal: Check out Alvin, Pablo and AI’s collaboration
39:45 Rapid-fire questions
Links:
Cam on LinkedIn
Pablo on LinkedIn
See Pablo’s sketch and Alvin, Pablo and AI’s creative collaboration
Subscribe to the Prompted Newsletter
Pablo Stanley: I brought my vibe-coding glasses
Cameron Adams: And now we're vibe-coding, yes.
Pablo Stanley: My creations are limited to my abilities, but now with AI can explore other things. AI can do a lot of stuff. Taste will allow you to know what to ask from it.
Cameron Adams: Welcome to Prompted. I am Cameron Adams and I'm fascinated with leaders who are actually using AI to be more creative than ever before, whether that's building better products, coaching teams, or using AI personally. In this show, we dig into the details of using AI that we all want to know.
And today, I am sitting with Pablo Stanley. If you're not familiar with Pablo, his work sits at the intersection of AI and design. And he's also the designer and co-founder of Lummi, a collection of thousands of images made by AI creators who were tired of boring, overused stock photos. And they were recently acquired by Udemy. He's also the co-founder of other AI and creativity companies, including Blush and Musho. And through his work, he has been exploring how emerging technologies can empower creativity. That means I'm incredibly excited to hear the lessons he has to share. Pablo, welcome to the show.
Pablo Stanley: Oh man, thank you for having me. This is so cool. This is so important that you're doing this kind of podcast and talking about these, the little robots as I like to call them. Do you also give it a personality to the AIs and the LLMs, or am I the only one on this?
Cameron Adams: My wife and I have had conversations about this and we decided to just start calling it Alex. So whenever we refer to Alex, my wife will be like, oh, I just chatted to Alex, and I'll be like, oh, what did Alex say?
Pablo Stanley: I love that. I love actually having a name and something between you, both of you know what you're talking about.
Cameron Adams: Exactly. So let's kick off with the prompt. This is the part of the show where we get an idea out of Pablo's head and onto the page. Then we get one of our designers here at Canva to take it even further with AI. So Pablo, I want to have you draw something from your childhood that inspired you while you tell us the story about it. You get 90 seconds to talk and draw. Do you think you can multitask?
Pablo Stanley: Oh my god, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool.
Cameron Adams: All right, so grab your marker, let's set the timer and go.
Pablo Stanley: Okay, so I'm talking about the little robots. I was just talking about calling AI that, and I think it's because I grew in the age of seeing robots as the coolest thing ever. In the movies, in the cartoons, popular culture was just infested with different versions of robots. And even before AI, the idea of having machines that have a personality, are they alive or are they not? They themselves questioning that and us as humans also that. And as a kid, I think, I don't know if I was able to actually question that, those stuff, but now a little bit older, I realize how that influenced me and a lot of things, in my drawings, in my doodling and everything. I remember the Jetsons and also RoboCop and Blade Runner, the idea that also that robots were not accepted and there was this dystopia.
We're there. Okay.
Cameron Adams: I know you're an amazing doodler, Pablo, so I'm so keen to see what you have drawn. I hope it's less Blade Runner and more Jetsons.
Pablo Stanley: Yeah, it's a little bit more Jetsons. It's this little robot, happy little robot. I think I'm very inspired by robots with the square kind of things and metal. We used to think that robots will be like that, like bulky machines. Let's go back to that idea of what we thought robots were going to be back in the '60s.
Cameron Adams: I would definitely back any startup that has you as the chief robot creator, Pablo, so please help me fund it.
Pablo Stanley: Okay, let's do it.
Cameron Adams: That is an amazing looking sketch. I'm not sure that AI is going to make it any better. But we're going to send that picture to Alvin, our designer in residence, who is going to team up with AI to whip it into something new. We'll reveal Pablo, Alvin and AI's creation at the end of this episode, so stay tuned for it.
While Alvin works though, let's go deep on AI with you, Pablo. You ready?
Pablo Stanley: Yes.
Cameron Adams: So AI continues to be a hot topic for professional creatives, but you have not shied away from it. What would your elevator pitch be to creatives who are hesitant about using AI or maybe just haven't taken the time to embrace it?
Pablo Stanley: I think this comes from fear of the unknown and comes from also what you see out there, what people are saying. Some people, I think they make their decision about using AI or giving it a try before they even try it. And also I think it's because the first iterations of what AI was making were pretty bad, so it was pretty easy to just laugh at that and say like, oh, okay, this is horrible.
Cameron Adams: I think that's one of the key things, is that it moves so fast and the quality has changed even in the space of three months, that you need to reuse these things and check out what the latest is in order to really understand what's going on.
Pablo Stanley: Yeah, a year ago, we were laughing about just hands that had six fingers or had weird limbs or things that were not there. So it was really easy to say like, oh, just dismiss it because of those faults, and we got to that point where that is not an issue anymore. It's about curiosity and trying to bring it on something, it's not only with AI, any technology, try to use it in something, usually I say something dumb, like something that is low risk, dumb project, just a silly idea. And then you're going to get to test it out and then you're going to start seeing what it can actually do and how it could actually connect to real work.
Cameron Adams: I think low risk is a really good phrase, because it gives you that space and the safety net to try it out and spotting those low risk moments I think is really critical. Raises the question though, everything is moving so fast, new tools come out, improvements happen to existing tools, how do you stay on top of it while still getting your everyday work done? Because you could spend all day just investigating AI tools and trying out new things without actually producing what you need to.
Pablo Stanley: Yeah, it gets to a point where you have to make a decision. And they all cost money. Dude, do you remember there used to be the browser wars, and one browser would do one thing and then the other browser would copy and then also implement that feature. And we as users we're benefiting from that competition. And I feel a lot of these tools are looking at each other too, and they're competing. And they're also suddenly, if the competition has a feature that people are finding really useful, it's very possible that they're looking at that and they're going to implement something similar.
So I would also say that as a user, a lot of our decisions were based on FOMO, on like, oh, I don't want to miss out on this feature that this other tool has. They all have very similar features now. So even if you select one and you stick to one, you're still going to get good results and you're not going to be missing out a lot.
Cameron Adams: Yeah. As an AI product company, it's really interesting times, because you are seeing common patterns emerge and how people interact with it, but it's still frontier lands. There's an amazing amount to explore and help people interact with AI in very different ways, particularly in the visual realm. So it's still a pretty cool time when you are creating these products and coming up with new ways for people to interact with them.
Speaking of which, you have started multiple AI-based businesses, so I'm really eager to hear how AI is transforming the experience that you have of being an entrepreneur and a leader. So what unique problem were you trying to solve with your business, Lummi?
Pablo Stanley: It started just with the basic stuff. I remember we used to say, oh, let AI do the boring stuff, the things that you don't want to do. I still believe that, but sometimes I do wonder if we're actually delegating to AI the cooler stuff. I worry about that. Actually, we humans are doing the boring stuff. Just say, yes, keep going. No, don't do that. Instead of actually doing the thing, instead of being the one surfing where we're on the sidelines looking at the robot surf and saying, no, you're doing the surfing wrong. But the robot is doing the surfing, it's the fun part. So sometimes I worry about that.
By the way, I don't surf. I don't know why I use that analogy.
Cameron Adams: So what did Lummi do that was trying to counteract that?
Pablo Stanley: It's that ideation part where you're iterating and you're feeling like you are collaborating with, again, I'm going to keep using the little robots thing, or Alex, as you call it, working with the robot in a way that it doesn't feel that it's doing all of the work for you and you're actually collaborating, you're iterating. I like that. And seeing LLMs, diffusion models, all of these tools in a way where I feel like I still have some kind of the control and it's more of a collaboration between the human and the machine.
So in Lummi, we try to bring that in. And that is in offering different options and then allowing you to iterate on those or having things that other humans have made with AI too, and use those as a starting points too, and then adapt them to your brand, to your needs. I think that's where it gets really interesting, where AI is not just doing everything, but it's more used as any other tool.
Cameron Adams: So for those who don't know, Lummi is a huge collection of AI-generated images and also tools for creating those images as well. How did you see the interaction between the creators you had that were creating stuff with AI but was destined for people to look at it and see it and use it, versus the actual experience of people creating their own imagery on Lummi?
Pablo Stanley: I'm surprised at the output and the stuff that they ask from the AI to generate things. I mean in Canva, you must see this all the time. You see your tool that maybe you are thinking, oh, we created this tool to do this stuff, but then you see people hacking it to do other things. And I think when you see that from your users, it feels just like magic, because you create something, you create a tool and you create it for a specific problem. And maybe, yeah, you can broaden those problems in your imagination and you say like, oh, it can also do that, this and this other thing. But it's not until you put it in the hands of people where you see using a hammer to do crazy stuff, where no, hold on. That hammer is just for nails. No, no, no, no, no. We can use it for all these other things.
And when you see people asking from the diffusion models, from our generators to create things that are weird, and you start seeing the flow that they go through where they start with something simple, but then it starts getting weird and then suddenly the end result is very different from where it started. And for me it's just like, wow, it's just this tool that allows creativity to grow, which is something also that I'm sure that you see every day in Canva. Just like people, hey, here's a canvas and here's the tools, here's a text and a rectangle and basic tools, and then people create crazy stuff, right?
Cameron Adams: That is exactly right. I've been creating creative tools for 25 years now, and the reason that I've stayed so energized over those 25 years is exactly that. When you create this tool that's simple enough for people to access, but really powerful enough for them to express themselves in a way that they couldn't before, it fuels this massive explosion of creativity. And I see the exact same thing with AI. It is this simple tool, but it is incredibly powerful and people can shape it in their own unique way and get outputs that they couldn't imagine and other people couldn't imagine. And that's really what drives us to keep creating better and better products every single day.
Pablo Stanley: With AI, it feels like that creative process sometimes, it feels like on steroids, it accelerates. And a lot of things that for me, for example, as a creative, sometimes my creations are limited to my abilities. And the things that I have lazily tried and I'm like, okay, sometimes when people say like, oh, now you have your style. No, I'm just lazy and I never develop another style. That's also the one answer that question.
But now with AI, I can explore other things that I thought I wouldn't be able to ever even explore. It unlocks different things that number one, that I didn't want to do also, it's like understanding contracts and all the little details, but AI can help me understand all those things and all that language, so great. And suddenly that also unlocks me time to do the things that I really like. And not only that, but also those things that I really love, like amplify them.
Cameron Adams: There's this great quote that I heard you say on another podcast actually, and you said that AI makes volume, taste makes value. And I think that is such a powerful line. What is one tip that you would give to those looking to cultivate taste in an AI-first workflow?
Pablo Stanley: Taste is a skill that you have to develop. It's a skill that comes with privilege too, because it's a skill that comes from traveling and being able to go to a museum and have time to do those things and reading. And suddenly your worldview starts developing and you start seeing things in a different way, not just in a very small worldview, but you start expanding. You start realizing that there are other things and you start seeing the connections between things. And that develops that eye that we call sometimes, oh, that person has the eye. But sometimes when they say, hey, they have the eye, that means they can distinguish something that stands out. And they can distinguish from a lot of things, things that they feel better.
And that is something that you could say that is also subjective, but it's really something that when you see it, you feel it and it feels good. And having the ability to detect that is something that is dead will help anyone who is using AI, because AI can do a lot of stuff. It could do volume and it can do it really quick and can give you all these different options, but taste will allow you to know what to ask from it. Even if you just read a couple of books, suddenly you're going to start referencing things that you read there or I don't know, like an exhibition that you saw or an artist that you like or something from pop culture. You start telling those things to the AI and it's seeing the connections of what is good and what is maybe not as good. And then you're able to select and pull from all the, sometimes slop, the AI slop, pull the better thing. And not only that, but iterate and make it better too, also with the AI.
Cameron Adams: I love that you called out the privilege of taste, because taste is so much about experience and opportunity and the ability to try new things, which I think we're both fortunate to be able to do and to be able to experience different styles and different mediums and different artistic expression. But I think it is important to equalize that opportunity as well and give people who mightn't be able to develop their taste, the opportunity and the ability to do that through both products that we build, the ways that we think about the world and also the way that we interact with other people.
Pablo Stanley: Totally.
Cameron Adams: Following on from that question about taste, if AI makes volume, how do you think AI generated content will change things like social media or brand content?
Pablo Stanley: Well, yes, they create volume, but you can also train them or guide them to create very specific things and create very personalized stuff. It can also be a little bit dangerous, because suddenly if you get hyper personalized content that is just for you, that the little robots, since they have all the information about you, they have all this context that is you on the things that you like that make you click, that make you stay a little bit longer on the post, it could feel that your feed, your social media is crafted specifically for you. And that could be that maybe it's actually done that way. It's not just selection, but actually creation. I can totally see a future in which some of the content is, you're the only person seeing that content. Or the original content is being adapted in real time for your taste, for what you like, for your preferences, maybe even for your goals, for what you're looking for in the moment.
I would say that for right now, it might be very costly to do that, but with how things are evolving, it might be that we get to that point where suddenly your feed is not just a selection from a lot of things that are just specific for you, but actually they are iterated to be for you, generated potentially even from scratch, just to be something that is for you. So that is a feature that see that.
And also brand, I can totally see an ad talking to you and talking to you in your language and the things that you understand that are important to you, which is I say it is also kind of scary that suddenly, I don't know if you remember, I think it was Minority Report, that suddenly the ads will actually tell their name.
Cameron Adams: Yeah, walking through the perfume aisle and it's talking exactly to you about the scent that you want.
Pablo Stanley: Exactly, exactly. And it's just like very hyper personalized ad knows your name, detects your face. I mean, in that movie, it was kind of a dystopia thing.
But I think there are positives about that too. I can see hyper personalized content that is for you on education, the things that are interesting to you and that are important to you, you want to learn this skill. But also you have an interest in something that maybe is not, that you think that is not related to that skill, but we know that knowledge is better, I don't know, gets impregnated in our brain when you start making connections between things.
So if some of that content that you're trying to learn, Python, let's say, learning Python is hard, but you really love, I don't know, baseball. So I'm pretty sure that AI could make a relationship between those two interests that you have, one that is maybe more on the professional side and maybe another one that is more on the just personal hobby thing, and then make the connection between those things and now you're going to be able to learn Python better because of that. And potentially also see baseball in a different way too and see the patterns and the systems.
Cameron Adams: There is massive opportunity in learning with AI and this hyper personalization that you're talking about, but what you're talking stirred something for me. I mean taste is about experience, but it's also about experiences that you might necessarily enjoy. Yes, you should try out things that you love, but taste is also about experiencing things that make you think, that might confront you. And part of that is about friction. So if AI is serving us everything we like all the time and AI creation is about removing friction from our processes through automation, how does this affect the creative process? Because the creative process often involves friction, competing ideas, different points of view, different personalities and opinions coming together. You get constructive criticism about ideas that you put forward. How are we going to do this in the age of AI?
Pablo Stanley: Right now, we're in this stage in which the LLMs, all these things, they're trying really hard to please us. It's almost like they never give you that friction that you're talking about. If you have a bad idea, it would still tell you it's a good idea. Even if it's a crap idea, it's just like, wow, that is an amazing idea. Let's just develop it.
And you're right, when you are with other people, if you have a bad idea, if they're really good friends, they will tell you, that's a crap idea. That's not a good idea, stop it. But usually that friction makes you think, it's like, oh, you know what? Yeah, it is, but then what about this or what about that? So I wish sometimes that LLMs or other models were made in a way that potentially have a slider or something, that's the friction slider or the sycophant slider. Like going into a design review, at least it used to be you'll fear going into a design review because they'll tell you, this is horrible.
But also that helps you learn. If you had a good mentor and someone to tell you, yeah, that's horrible, but tell you why it's horrible, then you understand it's like, okay, well my feelings are hurt, but you know what? I think I'm a better designer now. I'm a better creative now because of your feedback, and it feels sometimes that AI doesn't do that.
Cameron Adams: At the moment, it feels like AI interactions are concentrating, so you tend to go to ChatGPT or you'll tend to go to Claude or you might go to Copilot and that's your primary means of interaction. But what you're saying makes me think that maybe there's space for different AI bots in your life, ones that have different personalities, that tackle problems in different ways. And you go to them when you want to tackle a visual problem or you want to tackle something that's more personal or more professional and we'll go to different places to get different things.
Pablo Stanley: Actually, we created this, we never launched it, but we had a portfolio reviewer. It was an AI thing and we put it for an event, but we never put it out there. We should have. But something we did is that it was kind of a, I don't know if in Australia you have something like this, like America's Got Talent or shows like that?
Cameron Adams: Yes, we do.
Pablo Stanley: Where there's the judges and each judge has a different personality. And one of them will be the really nice one, ah, that you tried that is good, and then one of them will be the more not so nice. So you have those personalities and sometimes it is good to have that one that is really honest and it's raw and it's blunt and tells you, no, that sucks. What are you doing? Get out of here. You have no talent. But even when we asked it to be that way, it was still blunt, but still kind of nice. It was like, no, no, just be an A-hole. It's okay.
Cameron Adams: Which one were you training, Pablo? Were you the nice one or the nasty one?
Pablo Stanley: Whenever I've been design reviews for something, I always volunteer to be the Simon Cowell one. I don't know if necessarily you have a Simon Cowell character.
Cameron Adams: We used to have a Simon Cowell. We've actually kind softened our talent shows, they're mostly positive. But I do remember a distinctly Simon Cowell personality.
Pablo Stanley: Yeah, exactly. So I would always volunteer. You need drama in this, so I will volunteer to be that A-hole.
Cameron Adams: You've just started a new role as a senior product designer, or I can't remember your title, it's very lofty, but designer at Vercel for AI products. And it focuses a lot on vibe coding, which so many people are talking about now. What's been your experience with vibe coding as a creative and as a designer, and where do you think it's going?
Pablo Stanley: First of all, I brought my vibe coding glasses.
Cameron Adams: And now we're vibe coding, yes.
Pablo Stanley: I didn't bought them. They just appear on your desk when you become a professional vibe coder. They just appear and it's like, oh, I'm a vibe coder now. And then you put them on and then you just-
Cameron Adams: Okay, you need to wear these for the rest of the show.
Pablo Stanley: So before it was even called vibe coding, I was doing it, but I was doing it more in what I knew. My skill level has always been on coding, just like HTML, vanilla JavaScript and CSS, not so great in modern tech stacks. That's what I knew. So I would usually go with tools like ChatGPT and I would do a lot of copy pasting from that to my code pan and stuff. So it would be like prototypes and I would show them to, I would use them as design artifacts to tell my idea, where it's like, hey, I have this idea, and you know what? Here's the idea in a way that you can click it, that goes beyond just a static design. It feels good to actually do the animation and do the timing and all those little details that really, until you're actually doing it with code, you start understanding all the edge cases too. So as a designer, suddenly I had the ability to have those design artifacts tell my story or tell what I thought we should do with this thing where you could actually try it.
So started like that, but by now, these things have gotten so good that now I am a contributor to Lummi in the actual code. Not a prototype anymore, but I have built two different features and I have pushed them. Well with the help of developers, by the way. Real developers have helped me and reviewed my PRs. A lot of it is just they can see all the AI slop, all the spaghetti code that sometimes comes from vibe coding. So if you're doing that, you need real engineers to help you actually clean up the stuff, but they have helped me to actually push stuff. And it's really good because again, a lot of little details that you wish sometimes to do, and as a designer it's hard to describe them and it's hard to prototype them in a static design tool, because it's all about clicking and dragging.
I was doing one that is a gradient tool, but I wanted to add key modifiers, key modifiers that are with click and drag, which would be super hard to simulate that, but doing it with code, that allowed me to actually test it in a way that I could see the animations and see the interaction and feel it and deploy it and ship it. And so it has been a great unlock for me that I feel proud of myself, even though most of the code was done by the robot. I felt that I have actually learned a ton.
One thing is, vibe coding tells you, oh, always accept. Whatever it says it's going to do, just say yes. I would say, no, don't do that. Actually ask the LLM always to first plan what it's going to do, read the plan and then okay, do it, or iterate and tell it what not to do. As the code was happening, I have a new idea. I was like, oh, it would be great to have this. Oh, it should be this. So I was already in doing a to-do list of the things that I will want to ask it.
Cameron Adams: Special guest on the podcast.
Pablo Stanley: A special guest here, Taco.
Cameron Adams: Who is this, Pablo?
Pablo Stanley: This is Taco. Come over here.
Cameron Adams: Ola Taco.
Pablo Stanley: Taco wants to vibe code too. I think that's what's happening. He wants to be part the show.
Cameron Adams: That's the future, vibe coding dogs.
Pablo Stanley: That is the future. I think their results is going to be even better.
Cameron Adams: It's interesting your observation of making that to-do list. It's this AI driven vibe coding process has actually opened up time for us to think. So while it's generating the code, you are now sitting back and thinking more deeply about the problem and coming up with new things that you want to add in. And I think that's a really fascinating insight into what this new world looks like. We're asking more questions, we are thinking more deeply about things and then enabling exploration of them through the AI.
Pablo Stanley: Yeah. And also you don't get married to a solution, because since you can try multiple things, then suddenly when you invest a lot of time doing something, then it's hard for you to say, what if we do it this other way? Because you have already invested a lot of time on coding something. So you say like, ah, it's okay. Let's just keep it this way. Now with AI, we can have that thinking as you were saying and be like, what if we try it with a different layout, or what if we try with a different flow or whatever? And now with the help of the little robots, you can also try other things and not get married to one solution.
Cameron Adams: Taco might be able to help you with this very last tiny, but big question, what is the future of creativity look like? In 5 years time, 10 years time? What does creativity mean?
Pablo Stanley: I see two things, that it could be the positive and the utopia version of this, and also the dystopia version of this. The dystopia version is like hey, we just delegate all creative tasks to the robot, which will be very sad. And I don't think that's going to happen. Actually, no, I do see it as more of that utopia part where it's like, hey, now we're going to be collaborating. And it's going to allow us to do more of what you were saying, of thinking and expanding the ideas that we had and allowing us to diverge from the original thing and try multiple things.
So I believe that we were on to something. I want to think that it's going to be more of that, that AI unlocks a lot of things that we want to try and is not going to be more of, oh, AI is replacing creativity in us or the creative process in us humans. I don't want that to be. I don't think it's going to be that.
Cameron Adams: All right, let's change pace a little. I would love to know who you would have on your all-star creative team. So you get four seats. You can pick anyone from any era, any universe, dead or alive, build your dream creative team. Who is it?
Pablo Stanley: Oh my God, this is such a cool question. Here's the thing, the names that come to mind, I feel like they would be big egos and maybe they will not work really well as a team.
Cameron Adams: Simon Cowell? Is Simon Cowell on your creative team?
Pablo Stanley: No, I mean I see Picasso. I see Pablo Picasso. I can see him maybe that being such a very good team player. Maybe I'm wrong about his personality. But I would say, hey, let's bring Pablo Picasso. Let's give him a seminar on how to be a teammate. All of them separately maybe. I would say also, I love Saul Bass. He's a great designer.
Cameron Adams: Amazing.
Pablo Stanley: I think he's someone who inspired us all. It's incredible to see his work and the stuff that they were able to do and know that they were not doing it with digital tools. It's like, how do you do that? So Saul Bass.
I would say also a filmmaker, I will bring Paul Thomas Anderson. He seems like someone is a director, but also he loves music and he seems to be working with other graphic artists and he's just always creating really cool stuff. So Paul Thomas Anderson. And I will bring Pee Wee Herman, Pee Wee Herman in character. Yeah, he will make it fun. And also, I don't know, I think he will bring the vibe closer to a fun state. Maybe Pablo Picasso will not like Pee Wee Herman, but I think it will make for a good reality show too, like Pee Wee Herman and Pablo Picasso not getting along.
Cameron Adams: So you got Pablo yourself, you've got Pablo Picasso, you've got Pee Wee, you've got Paul, that's like four P's there. Saul is going to feel like he's left out.
Pablo Stanley: Oh my God, I hadn't realized that. Wow. Yes, there you go.
Cameron Adams: Okay, I think Alvin has had enough time to feed your sketch into AI and work with it just a tiny bit. So let's bring him back to see the final results of this AI human collaboration. Alvin, show us what you got.
Alvin: So I created a short animation as a tribute to your [inaudible 00:38:04] Pablo, and your robot sketch really reminds me of Adventure Time BMO. And I was also inspired by when you mentioned the Jetsons. So I just wanted to imagine how cartoon artists back then would design a robot character, Alex, waking up in the morning and getting ready for hard day work. So please enjoy this short animation.
Cameron Adams: Oh my God, I'm so excited, Alvin. You've incorporated everything.
Pablo Stanley: So it wasn't just another image. He made an animation. Wow.
Cameron Adams: [inaudible 00:38:42] the countdown.
Pablo Stanley: You see the clouds?
Cameron Adams: You've got Alex in there, you've got the robot. It's fully moving.
Pablo Stanley: I love it. Good work.
Cameron Adams: Oh my God. And a soundtrack. Couldn't get any better. Amazing, Alvin. I don't know how you did that.
Pablo Stanley: Thank you so much. That was so cool, Alvin, that you made that. It's such a short time. Wow.
Alvin: I'm really glad you both liked it.
Cameron Adams: Audio listeners, if you want to see this creation, and you definitely should just click the link in the show notes and you'll be able to watch it there.
All right, we've got very few minutes left, Pablo, so we need to close it out with some rapid fire questions. All right, let's go. What's one prompt you over use?
Pablo Stanley: Thoughts.
Cameron Adams: Just thoughts? Okay.
Pablo Stanley: Thoughts. Yeah, like, hey, here's all my stuff, and then at the end, thoughts?
Cameron Adams: Perfect. What's the first thing you built with AI?
Pablo Stanley: Oh, actually a game, a little game for a project that we had. It was more of a prototype, but yeah.
Cameron Adams: Love it. Favorite underrated AI tool.
Pablo Stanley: Okay, I don't know if it's underrated, but it's one of my favorites and I don't see a lot of people mention it, but TScript.
Cameron Adams: Nice
Pablo Stanley: For video stuff, it's been helping me a lot, and it's been amazing to also see their evolution as a tool.
Cameron Adams: Yeah, it's an amazing one. Sum up AI in just one word.
Pablo Stanley: Oh, man. I don't know why, but this is the only word that comes to mind, scary.
Cameron Adams: All right, we'll take it. You and AI are making an album. What's the genre?
Pablo Stanley: Punk rock.
Cameron Adams: Nice. Pick a movie to remake with AI.
Pablo Stanley: The Room.
Cameron Adams: Brilliant. Brilliant answer. What's one job AI should never do?
Pablo Stanley: Politics.
Cameron Adams: What is a creative project you've had in the back of your mind for ages that you just want to jumpstart with AI?
Pablo Stanley: Well, I'm doing it now. Is that okay if I'm already starting?
Cameron Adams: That's fine. You're living the dream, Pablo.
Pablo Stanley: A card deck game.
Cameron Adams: Card deck game. All right. Very last one, finish this sentence. A surprising thing AI taught me about myself is?
Pablo Stanley: I depend on it.
Cameron Adams: Codependent relationship. All right, we'll take that. And that's it, that is all we have time for. Thank you so much for diving deep with me on AI and creativity, Pablo. It has been an absolute pleasure to chat with you.
Pablo Stanley: Thank you so much, man. Yeah, this was awesome.
Cameron Adams: That was such a fun conversation with Pablo Stanley and his vibe-coding dog Taco. What I loved most was his reminder that curiosity beats fear when it comes to all things, but particularly AI. To foster that curiosity, start small, try things, and you'll see how quickly the tools have evolved. He also nailed it with the idea that AI makes volume, but taste makes value. At the end of the day, it's our human eye and judgment that will elevate our work no matter what tools we're using. And maybe most importantly, creativity isn't always about ease. Sometimes friction, feedback and even a bit of pushback are what help us shape the best ideas.
Thanks again to Pablo for joining us, and thank you for listening to Prompted. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and as always, keep creating.