Cautious Optimism in the Valley of Despair 

For the past few years, I’ve been holding two beliefs that don’t sit comfortably together.

Let’s go back to the start.

I grew up on the outskirts of Sydney, from Vietnamese parents who were fortunate enough to come to Australia just before the end of the war, both ending up in IT or computing roles. The sight of half-built PCs dotting the house was normal for me growing up. I’d often stand around, bored, while my dad dragged me along to hardware swap meets, chatting excitedly about new motherboards, graphics cards, CD-ROM drives. I played LAN games against my sister. We were tech ahead. We had the internet when it was useless. We had Geocities websites and a separate phone line for the ‘information superhighway’.

After early computer nerd days, I started my career in the arts and design (magazines, photography, branding, campaigns and a turn in environmental signage), it makes sense I ended up somewhere in the middle: product design, finding a hole the right shape for my amorphous brain and skill set at Streamtime in 2018. It is a wonderful place to work: a somewhat motley crew of smart people across many domains: people smart, analytics smart, design smart.

And now comes AI (does she even go here?).

The advent of LLMs and the speed of development has rocketed through both the industry I work in (software) and the one which we serve (the creative world). Generative AI is mind-blowing technology, but one that holds heavy ethical quandaries and environmental costs. Coming from the creative world, I’ve seen the craft, joy, blood, sweat and tears that go into making something tasteful. The simplest outcomes are often the most difficult, and I feel a type of grief about an industry that’s fought for decades to show and communicate its value has to keep fighting. Now fighting against the avalanche of slop and brain rot that now pollutes our digital spaces as well as the human perception of what it takes to make something sing.

And yet… for someone with a brain like mine, where nodes of interest might spark a connection completely elsewhere, or small notes live in a pile of papers on my desk, moments of clarity come in the middle of the night or mid-conversation, it’s hard to understate the power that AI holds in synthesising parts of my work. From drawing themes across multiple conversations, to helping restructure the shape of a project with both design and development constraints to consider, to remind me to do things or make it easier for me to do them, to showing me a point I might have missed on my first go-round. In the design realm, the ability to show rather than tell, in prototyping far more quickly.

I’m not alone. Our software is for the creative industry, but our tool isn’t to help them create or generate. Rather, we help manage around the creation: build their business, perform the day to day tasks, surface signals for leaders to look after profit and people. So that everyone in the business can focus on the creative work. Many tedious tasks exist and can be made easier. At heart, Streamtime’s opportunity has always been to free up time for creativity. AI can help with that.

So that leaves me, like I said, holding two truths at the same time.

One: that like many, I have concerns about the impact on the environment, the livelihoods of designers, creatives and artists, the ethics of the leaders of the companies making these products. The slow erosion of human creativity. The devaluing of taste, craft and slow thinking. The future for our children.

Two: that AI can sit beside this and help remove some of the barriers to harnessing that creativity in businesses, that we can smooth the edges of the thousand cuts that we all eventually die from, and that used carefully, can elevate the way we work.

And … okay, I can’t count. There’s a third. That all my life, keeping pace with technology, being able to understand it, was a huge part of my identity. The uncertainty and rate of change of this is a weight. I mention this because the attitudes I see are so polarised: Doomsday and Societal Collapse vs Productivity Porn to the Power of Claude. There are specialists across the economy whose deep craft has been honed over years of practice, thinking, and getting it wrong so they can get it right. Some of the commentary misses the cognitive whiplash of having this at threat: not entirely from the technology but also the emotional impact of feeling the professional rug unravel beneath you.

I’ll describe my position as Cautious Optimism in the Valley of Despair. I know a little. There’s a lot I don’t. There’s a lot we all don’t. At heart, I’ll always believe in the deep abiding goodness and irreplaceability of being human. For now, I believe there are ways that AI can safely and ethically help, not hinder, the best parts of our work and life, and I’m willing to explore them. It won’t be as a bolt-on AI for AI’s sake. It won’t be a full pivot. It won’t forget the people we’re actually trying to help.

The obligatory ask: Are you interested in chatting to tell us about how you’d like to use AI with Streamtime? We’re actively working on some new features, including a public MCP server, to help you. Get in touch at help@streamtime.net.

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