AI in NYC with BrXnd

BrXnd Conference: NYC Inaugural Event

Last week I traveled down to NYC for BrXnd’s inaugural conference on AI in advertising and marketing.

Noah Brier and his team hosted BrXnd‘s inaugural event at NeueHouse, a quintessentially New York City venue; unsuspecting as most New York buildings appear to my suburbanite's eyes on the outside, and a very NYC particular kind of relaxed, boho chic, airy aesthetic on the inside. The name tags for BrXnd were unique and customized by way of AI art generation; each attendee had a matching badge to another attendee. The day's content preoccupied me, and I failed to search for my name tag doppelgänger.

Kudos to the BrXnd team for their streamlined processes throughout the day. The event appeared to be a full house; nevertheless, the coffee, registration, and restroom queue was always flowing, and the conversation flowed easily among attendees. With a collective excitement in the air, I found striking up conversations with fellow AI enthusiasts as easy as, dare I say it, conversing with Chat GPT4. 🥹

Living in Maine (beautiful but not tech-centric), NYC is a must-network destination, and I was caffeinated and ready to share LinkedIn profiles. Like a gaggle of excited school kids, the attendees chatted about our use cases with AI and hypothesized about directions unknown. Coffee and delicious treats were served, and time to enjoy the AI art on display was allotted before the opening talk.

TheTechMargin contributed artwork to the AI gallery with a multimedia (sound and video) submission with TheFaceOfAI as the muse. Watch the entire lineup of AI-involved creations on BrXnd’s gallery page here.

BrXnd Founder’s Opening Talk

Noah Brier, the founder of BrXnd, opened the event with his take on the state of AI through the lens of his experiments which he shares on the BrXnd SubStack (I highly recommend).

I have been following along with Noah’s experiments or “tinkerings”, and as a technical gal, the fact that A.I. systems have the ability to leverage “fuzzy interfaces” when called via API is astounding and I have to agree with his sentiment that the deeper we explore the capabilities around A.I., impact and trajectory become simultaneously less clear (or fuzzy?).

Regarding the experiments at BrXnd via Collabs, the results are strongest or most impactful and clearly associated with the original inputs when the brands used as prompts are “strong” brands themselves. The fact that AI systems seem to intuit the relative strength of one brand over another is emergent behavior and not simply due to a brand having a massive market share. Though the latter is also true, vis-a-vis, Nike appears via the canonical swoosh when almost any sneaker company is input as one of the prompts. One of the best comparisons to the real world and AI was made in the opening in comparison to quantum physics breaking the fabric of reality as AI is to our assumptions about reality and how computers are “supposed” to work.

Highlights & Notes (from a cool silver Rhodia)

As a voracious note-taker, I subscribe to the school of pocket-sized journals, and I purchased a special Rhodia silver notebook for the day. *not sponsored but open to it Rhodia (wink).

The excerpts that follow are only a fraction of the thought and care each speaker brought to their presentation. These are my highlights from said silver notebook:

Drew Neisser and Toni Clayton-Hine discussed the corporate landscape in their panel discussion on AI in B2B marketing. Large companies will strive to leverage AI as a medium to deliver hyper-personalized interactions to customers. The importance of “correctness” for incumbent organizations is a potential boon to scrappy startups and smaller teams who will have the freedom to iterate on AI solutions rapidly without the overhead concern of a mass-brand-reputation-casuality on the scale that a rogue AI implementation might deliver.

The pace of change is difficult to wrap collective minds around, and the larger the organization, change management overhead scales accordingly. The obsession with AI is becoming the new buzzword, eclipsing digital transformation as the must-have techno-overhaul. Perhaps yet another opportunity for AI to amplify is in the digital transformation space.

Stay tuned (subscribe) for more on this topic. TheFaceOfAI (TheTechMargin’s first product drop) will aim to bring inclusive AI to digital transformation projects across small and large enterprise applications.

Incredible demos touched on the potential that AI brings to the tech landscape. My favorite was the Dreamkeeper app, a collaboration with Atlassian to leverage AI and community interaction; definitely worth checking out.

The importance of diverse populations exploring AI collectively is not to be forgotten. I appreciate that the BrXnd team incorporated talks on bias and legal implications into the lineup. Technology and its use cases must be built and considered by a representative population of persons or end users (read society). We are a generation away from closing the gender and diversity gap (that is, if we are really aggressive about things). Extra care must be taken to ensure that more voices are heard. Basically, we need to seek out the underrepresented and make sure the conversation is democratized. Kudos to the BrXnd team for being leaders in this space.

The show wrapped with an AI AD Turing Test, a fantastic collaborative contest between design students and professional designers judging whether AI or humans created designs for a fictitious energy drink. Spoiler alert, the results (with crowd involvement voting from our phones) were near 50/50 split.

This is Only the Beginning

Noah and his team will be at it again in the fall and this time in San Francisco. The SF BrXnd conference will no doubt sell out, just like the NYC event. Follow the team on the event home, where you can add your email to get notified when tickets become available. By autumn, there will surely be more questions than answers by another exponential degree.

TheFaceOfAI is both the title of this piece and the name of the inaugural product we are building at TheTechMargin. We see AI as an infinitely capable teammate by which iteration, brainstorming, and collaboration are accelerated across disciplines. The following was made by iterating between AI tools and video editing tools. This iterative process is one which I have used for many years without AI. Adding AI into the iteration chain of creating video artwork was like adding a new kind of teammate that is more akin to an externalized brain than another human. The prompts were simple, my own pitch deck for TheFaceOfAI (the product), clips from my video pitch, and clips from video art I am currently working on. I was able to keep TheTechMargin branded colors by adjusting the strength of the input prompts as well as curating the most on brand results. The result is an artwork that combines branding, computer-rendered faces and bodies, and generated pseudo-words and letters as though one is reading inside of a dream.

Watch the entire lineup of AI-involved creations on BrXnd’s gallery page here.