Nathan Adam
Demystifying AI and New Technology
Nathan Adam is an award-winning audio and video producer with a strong focus on music production. He is an assistant professor of cinema, television and emerging media at Belmont University, and he has worked with artists including Vince Gill, Paul Franklin, Bill Medley, and Collin Raye among others. Nathan has coordinated and taught audio engineering for more than 100 Grammy camps across the country. He’s also the co-founder of multi-platinum.com and co-owner of the Walnut House production complex in Murfreesboro.
What is the most common question you get about new technology?
Adam shares the fears most anyone in the marketing field is facing right now, “Are we still going to have jobs? Or is it going to kill us? Presuming it doesn’t, are we all still going to have things to do?”
How can people overcome fear of using new tools like AI?
Adam suggests a quick way to conquer these fears, urging marketers to sit down and play with these AI tools for a couple hours, or even watching a few Youtube videos. “You’’ll start to think, you know what, “I can do this too.”
How should we approach AI tools like ChatGPT as marketers or creators?
Tools like ChatGPT can be great as a ‘first draft generator’, simply to get past that blank page. He quickly warns however, “Anybody sending out the first draft is going to be quickly embarrassed, but boy, as a first draft generator, it can get you past the blank page so fast. Even if in my case, we all suffer from blank page syndrome, but I love editing, so I love looking at something and going, here’s how I can change that. So just having a first draft is like, you had the world’s best intern create a first draft, and as long as you know that there’s going to be things you need to fix, then you’re in a great place.”
What ethical considerations should we focus on with AI tools?
“If everybody is just looking at the new AI tools coming out with a golly G wide-eyed wonder, if we leave out the ethics part as a critical, almost required part of the conversation, then we’re going to find ourselves in a future where that hasn’t been baked into the cake… where you can instantly generate, and there will certainly be countries around the world, for example, that don’t pass the same kind of protections like we have in Tennessee here with the, I think it was the CARES Act or where they said you cannot use a deepfake essentially of somebody else’s voice without their permission or there’s fines and penalties. So there will be some countries that don’t do that in the same way as some countries that don’t honor copyright. So it’ll be interesting to see how that bakes out and that those countries probably won’t have a lot of creativity. It’ll just be infinitely generated AI junk.”
How do new tools impact creativity in audio and video production?
Adam’s career, he shares, started when audio and video production were strictly inside a computer but now, “I would not say we’ve gotten less creative in the last 20 years. I think we’re just maybe more aware of how many people are out there with creative minds that are using these tools to create new music, new videos, as we’ve seen on all the social platforms. So I don’t think it’s a loss of creativity, and the thing that make great artists great is they spend a lot of time and energy combined with unique talent and collaboration to create amazing art. AI tools will provide new ways to create art that we’ve never imagined before.”
What is the role of authenticity in brand marketing with AI?
“It reminds me, at the early part of my career, we were just starting to use a tool called Autotune and this software let anybody sing and then we could digitally pull their pitch into place. So all of these same debates happened around, well, is that really them? Are they really singing? If we can just go in and change it and stretch it. So AI is going to kind of have the same thing. There’s going to be people that are like, no, I just want a real authentic human voice. And there’s going to be people that say, no, this is fine. Give me some entertainment. We’re all looking for different things at different times. So Dove is trying to establish for their brand, like, Hey, we’re human, we’re authentic.”
What do marketers need to know for the next five years?
Simply put, Adam tells us, “AI tools provide new ways to create art we’ve never imagined before. They level the playing field, allowing anyone to make transformative work.”
Resources and Links
Nathan Adam LinkedIn
