Lex Fridman PodcastGavin Miller: Adobe Research | Lex Fridman Podcast #23
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
125 min read · 25,499 words- 0:00 – 1:08:01
Intro
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Gavin Miller. He's the head of Adobe Research. Adobe has empowered artists, designers, and creative minds from all professions, working in the digital medium for over 30 years with software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, InDesign, Audition, software that work with images, video, and audio. Adobe Research is working to define the future evolution of these products in a way that makes the life of creatives easier, automates the tedious tasks, and gives more and more time to operate in the idea space instead of pixel space. This is where the cutting edge, deep learning methods of the past decade can really shine more than perhaps any other application. Gavin is the embodiment of combining tech and creativity. Outside of Adobe Research, he writes poetry and builds robots, both things that are near and dear to my heart as well. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Gavin Miller. You're head of Adobe Research, leading a lot of innovative efforts in applications of AI, creating images, video, audio, language, but you're also yourself an artist, a poet, a writer, and even a roboticist. So while I promise to everyone listening that I will not spend the entire time we have together reading your poetry, which I love-
- GMGavin Miller
Oh. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... I have to sprinkle it in at least a little bit. So some of them are pretty deep and profound, and some are light and silly. Let's start with a few lines from the, uh, the silly variety. You write, uh, in, uh, Je ne regrette rien, a poem that beautifully parodies both, uh, Edith Piaf's Je Ne Regrette Rien and My Way by Frank Sinatra. So it opens with, "And now dessert is near. It's time to pay the final total. I've tried to slim all year, but my diets have been anecdotal." So where does that love for poetry come from for you? And if we dissect your mind-
- GMGavin Miller
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... how does it all fit together in the bigger puzzle of Dr. Gavin Miller?
- GMGavin Miller
Oh. Well, interesting you chose that one. That was a poem I wrote when I'd been to my doctor and he said, "You really need to lose some weight" and, "Go on a diet."
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GMGavin Miller
And whilst the rational part of my brain wanted to do that, uh, the irrational part of my brain was protesting and sort of embraced the opposite idea.
- LFLex Fridman
I regret nothing, hence...
- GMGavin Miller
Yes, exactly. Taken to an extreme, I thought it would be funny. Obviously, it's a serious topic for so- some people, but, um, uh... I think for me, I've always been interested in writing since I was in high school, as well as doing technology and invention. And sometimes the parallel strands in your life that carry on and, you know, one is more about your private life and one's more about your technological, um, career, and then at sort of happy moments along the way, sometimes the two things touch, one idea informs the other, and, um, we can talk about that, uh, as we go.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you think your writing, the art, the poetry contribute indirectly or directly to your research, to your work in Adobe?
- GMGavin Miller
Well, sometimes it does if I, say, imagine a future in a science fiction kind of way, and then once it exists on paper I think, "Well, why shouldn't I just build that?" There was an example where when realistic voice synthesis first started in the '90s at Apple where I worked in research, uh, it was done by a friend of mine, um, I sort of sat down and started writing a poem which each line I would enter into the voice synthesizer and see how it sounded-
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- GMGavin Miller
... and sort of wrote it for that voice. And at the time, the agents weren't very sophisticated, so they'd sort of add random intonation and I kind of made up the poem to sort of match the tone of the voice, and it sounded slightly sad and depressed, so I, I pretended it was a poem written by an intelligent agent, uh, sort of telling the user to go home and leave them alone, but at the same time, they were lonely and wanted to have company and learn from what the user was saying. And at the time, it was way beyond anything that AI could possibly do, but, you know, since then, it's becoming more within the bounds of possibility. And then at the same time, I had a project at home where I did sort of a smart home. Uh, this was probably '93, '94. And, uh, I had the talking voice who'd remind me when I walked in the door of what things I had to do. I had buttons on my washing machine 'cause I was a bachelor and I'd leave the clothes in there for three days and they'd go moldy, so as I got up in the morning, it would say, "Don't forget the washing," and so on. Um, I made photographic photo albums that used light sensors to know which page you were looking at, would send that over w- wireless radio to the agent who would then play sounds that matched the image you were looking at in the book. So I was kind of in love with this idea of magical realism and whether it was possible to do e- that with technology. So that was a case where the sort of the agent sort of intrigued me from a literary point of view and became a personality. I think more recently, I've also written plays, and when plays you write dialogue, and obviously you write a fixed set of dialogue that follows a linear narrative. But with modern agents, as you design a personality or a capability for conversation, you're sort of thinking of, "I kind of have imaginary dialogue in my head," and then I think, "What would it take not only to have that be real, but for it to really know what it's talking about?"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GMGavin Miller
So it's easy to fall into the uncanny valley with AI where it says something it doesn't really understand, but it sounds good to the person, but you rapidly realize that it's kind of just stimulus response. It doesn't really have real world knowledge about the thing it's describing. And so...... when you get to that point, it really needs to have multiple ways of talking about the same concept so it sounds as though it really understands it. Now, what really understanding means is in the eye-
- LFLex Fridman
That's right.
- GMGavin Miller
... of the beholder, right? But if it only has one way of referring to something, it feels like it's a canned response, but if it can reason about it or you can go at it from multiple angles and give a similar kind of response that people would, then it starts to seem more like there's something there that's sentient. Um-
- LFLex Fridman
It can say the same thing, multiple things from different perspectives. I mean, with the, the automatic image captioning that I've seen the work that you're doing.
- GMGavin Miller
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
There's elements of that, right? Being able to generate different kinds of-
- GMGavin Miller
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
... statements about the same picture.
- GMGavin Miller
So one, in my team, there's a lot of work on turning a medium from one form to another, whether it's auto-tagging imagery or making up full sentences about what's in the image, um, then changing the sentence, finding another image that matches the new sentence or vice versa. Um, and, uh, in the modern world of GANs, you sort of give it a description and it synthesizes, uh, an asset that matches the description, so. I've sort of gone on a journey. My early days in my career were about 3D computer graphics, the sort of pioneering work sort of before movies had special effects done with 3D graphics, and sort of w- rode that revolution in. That was very much like the Renaissance, where people would model light and color and shape and everything. And now we're kind of in another wave where it's more impressionistic and it's sort of the idea of something can be used to generate an image directly which is, um, sort of the new frontier in, uh, computer image generation using AI algorithms, so.
- LFLex Fridman
So the creative process is more in the space of ideas, or becoming more in the space of ideas versus in the raw pixels?
- GMGavin Miller
Well, it's interesting. It depends. I think at Adobe we really want to span the entire range from really, really good, what you might call low-level tools, by low level, as close to say analog workflows as possible, so. What we do there is we make up systems that do really realistic oil paint and watercolor simulations, so if you want every bristle to behave as it would in the real world and leave a beautiful analog trail of water and then flow after you've made the brushstroke, you can do that, and that's really important for people who want to create something really expressive or really novel, 'cause they have complete control. And then as certain other tasks become automated, it frees the artist up to focus on the inspiration and less of the perspiration, so, um, thinking about different ideas obviously. Once you've finished the design, there's a lot of work to say, do it for all the different aspect ratio of phones or websites and so on, and that used to take up an awful lot of time for artists. It still does for many, what we call content velocity. And one of the targets of AI is actually to reason about from the first example of what are the likely intent for these other formats, maybe if you change the language to German and the l- words are longer, how do you reflow everything so that it looks nicely artistic in that way? And so the person can focus on the really creative bit in the middle which is, what is the look and style and feel and what's the message and what's the story and the human element? So I think creativity is changing. So that's one way in which we're trying to just make it easier and faster and cheaper to do so that there can be more of it, more demand, 'cause it's less expensive, so everyone wants beautiful artwork for everything from a school website to Hollywood movie. On the other side is some of these things have automatic versions of them. People will possibly change role from being the hands-on artisan to being either the art director or the conceptual artist, and then the computer will be a partner to help create polished examples of the idea that they're exploring.
- LFLex Fridman
Let's talk about Adobe products for a second.
- GMGavin Miller
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
AI and Adobe products.
- GMGavin Miller
Yeah.
- 1:08:01 – 1:09:11
Poem - Cast My Ashes Wide and Far
- LFLex Fridman
- GMGavin Miller
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So, uh, l- let me end with, uh, my favorite poem, uh, the last few lines of my favorite poem of yours-
- GMGavin Miller
Go ahead.
- LFLex Fridman
... that ponders mortality, and in some sense immortality b- you know, as our ideas live through the ideas of others-
- GMGavin Miller
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
... through the work of others. It ends with, "Do not weep or mourn. It was enough the little atomies permitted just a single dance. Scatter them as deep as your eyes can see. I'm content they'll have another chance. Sweeping more centered parts along to join a jostling, lifting throng as others danced in me." Beautiful poem, beautiful way to end it. And Gavin, thank you so much for talking today. And thank you for inspiring and empowering millions of people s- like myself for creating amazing stuff.
- GMGavin Miller
Well, thank you. It was a great conversation.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
Episode duration: 1:09:11
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