You've had a front-row seat to best-in-class design and product over the past decade or two, across Behance, Adobe, and your personal work. I want to start with a broad question. At the intersection of AI and human creativity, where are we right now? What inning are we in?

In terms of innings, I would say we're certainly still early, because a lot of folks have been doing things the way they've been doing them for a very long time. They haven't started to play, tinker, and optimize their process with this new technology yet. So in some ways, we're in the early innings.

But there are always very creative people who adopt new technology quickly and start to play and find interesting use cases, and we're starting to see that already. During my time at Adobe, it was clear that some brands were ahead of others, and some types of people on teams were ahead of others in finding the novelty and the play, which always leads to the utility of new technologies. And if creativity is ultimately a mistake of the eye, or the ability to explore edges that may someday become the center, what better way to do that than through these new tools that let you explore your imagination in real time?

Let's talk about that for a second. You mentioned the ability to explore the edge. One thing I've been thinking about is whether AI will be a full-stack creator for us or a copilot alongside us. Maybe the answer changes over time, and in the short term it's a copilot while in the long term it's a full-stack creator. How do you think about where we're heading, based on what you're seeing so far?

Historically, I've never seen a creator take two hours to do something they could achieve in two minutes. There's always been a desire to offload the mundane, repetitive work involved in taking an idea, fleshing it out, and exploring variations. Of course, the ideas, and the choice of which ones to flesh out, are very human disciplines. I don't personally see those being done by AI anytime soon, because there's all sorts of logic, psychology, and unique human experience applied to decisions like that.

Some people call that taste, and we talk a lot these days about how taste is becoming more important than skill. But in truth, it's always been the case that as technology gets better, creatives use it to accelerate their process. That's nothing new. I just think it's about to happen at multiples, given all the new tech hitting the market.

When everyone has access to the same tools and can create high-quality work, how do you think about taste? Does it matter, and how does it matter in this new paradigm?

It's interesting to start with a consumer lens. When anything becomes commoditized, whether it's clothes, cars, handbags, shoes, or liquor, we end up seeking a scarcer, more meaning-infused version of that thing through branded versions of it. Companies like LVMH have made a living owning and operating commoditized things infused with higher levels of meaning and brand.

Now content is becoming commoditized too, because anyone can make anything, at least to some degree. So there will be a version of content that is more infused with meaning and humanity, more scarce and branded, and that will signal higher-quality experiences. I think that's happening now. I don't think the ubiquity and commoditization of content is going to make people undervalue content. It's just going to make people seek more valuable content. That's what has always happened with anything that became commoditized before, so why would this be any different? As I see tools that lower the floor and let more people make content, I also see just as many features and tools that raise the ceiling and let people do things that are far more amazing than ever before.

Will we be able to detect that? Will there be a stamp that says this is LLM-generated writing, versus something that's authentic from a human?

Last week I was speaking at the Content Authenticity Summit, which grew out of an initiative I helped get off the ground at Adobe six or seven years ago. It's a movement to insert content credentials, which are cryptographic metadata, into assets that are taken with cameras, modified in tools like Photoshop, or generated with AI models. One use of that metadata is to tell the end viewer whether something was made by someone they can trust. That's an important use case in a world where anyone can generate Trump saying anything.

But I also think it's almost like an artist's signature on content, and I think that signature will indicate and drive value, much like going to a gallery and seeing a beautiful piece on the wall. Whether that piece is worth $10, $10,000, or $10 million is based on the signature and the story behind the artist. I think we're going to consume content and stories the same way, and the person behind it, the signature, the process, and the humanity that went into it will make us love it even more. These aren't new ideas. That's been the case in the non-digital world for a long time. I just think it's becoming far more important in the digital world.

Take an individual artist as an example. How can they build a brand or a name for themselves in a way that feels authentic, when some form of AI could build or write something comparable in the same amount of time or less? If somebody is just getting started today, how do they build their own brand while competing against a sea of AI entrants?

The short answer is the story behind the work. I would imagine behind-the-scenes footage is going to be 100x more important in the future than it was in the past. People are going to want to know how something was made, because it will help them determine how much they should value it. So if you're building your brand as a content creator, or any form of brand for that matter, in a world where we can no longer believe our eyes and anything digital can be replicated instantly or generated on demand, then distinguish it as human by sharing the damn story. Show how it was made, show why, and tell the story behind the story.

This is why, when I listen to music from a generated music service versus music from an artist whose career and story I've followed, it's night and day. There's some enjoyable music, just like there will be some enjoyable footage generated by these AI tools. But I think the story differentiates music more than ever these days, and I think that will carry over to other formats.

How do you think about the creative life cycle writ large? There's no doubt AI compresses it. Is that good or bad? And in a world with orders of magnitude more creative work out there, how does somebody punch through the noise?

I spent the last decade of my career in the creative industry watching creative professionals work, and it's striking how much of their time and energy in the earlier part of that period went into actually doing the work: the drafting, the pixel pushing, making the rounded corners and drop shadows. The core production work was the majority of it.

Since then, tools have refactored the production process. They automated rounded corners and radial design, and design libraries gave people components instead of having to build every component and icon on the fly. So many things, with and without AI, have refactored production. What happens is that people end up spending more time deciding what they actually want to make. Knowing the production will be shorter, they spend far more time in the early stages. Instead of exploring two variants, they'll explore five, or they'll have a longer mood-boarding process, or they'll do a few more mock-ups before they choose a direction.

That exploratory work has gone up because of new technology, and it enables better creative choices. So my thesis about the future of creativity is that energy and time will shift away from that later period of pixel pushing, the minute, repetitive, hard-labor work, and up the funnel toward discovery, exploration, ideation, and experimentation, which should ultimately yield better outcomes.

That's a really positive view, and probably a good note to leave today's conversation on. If we look at the world through that lens, people abstract away the most minute, process-oriented parts of their jobs and focus on higher-order work. Maybe that means in five or 10 years we're able to design and produce things we might never have otherwise been able to. If that's the case, it's a pretty special outcome, both for AI and for what society is able to do writ large. Scott, thanks so much for joining. It's great to see you, as always.

That's the hope, and that's my bet.