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SubscribeWe’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Erik Troy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Erik below.
Erik, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?
I’ve been fortunate to know many people working in data and computer science in the Boston area. From what I understand, there is a tendency to over-rely on data, and more importantly inaccurate data. Junk data is a very big problem in all industries, and companies aren’t capable of wading through it all.
People want to gather the broadest audience, and so they use the most commonly typed terms from social media without realizing that some small group could change Google’s analytical data to suggest ‘Biden’s Bombastic Burger’s and Beer’ when you type the letter B into Google’s search engine, and all it took was getting enough people to think it was a funny idea. Either that, or they programmed a set of computers to type the term in again and again until the president’s nonexistent burger restaurant was the most obvious choice.
Junk data is so frequent that data has been almost rendered useless and audiences subconsciously know it. When people go to see a movie, it’s because their trustworthy friend told them a movie was good.
Our greatest allies are good writing and ‘the cool factor’. Good writing is as simple as knowing your tropes, and how to play with the audience’s expectations. The ‘cool factor’ is just making things look cool. Both of these are self-explanatory, but only for a living creature. AI has a place in the creative process, but it’s more or less the same as it has always been (spell check, the ‘content aware’ tool on Photoshop, and things like that). A storyboard artist will understand the ‘cool factor’ when an AI just can’t. The same thing goes for a well-placed trope subversion, and this is backed by a science that we already know.
One of Michio Kaku’s many books on the future mentions a chess-playing robot that beat the world’s best chess player. The headline grabbed people’s attention, but it didn’t mean that AI was on the verge of conquering humankind like it portrayed. The AI was only capable of doing one task, and it wasn’t even aware of what that task was or what it was for. It merely did what it was programmed to do. In the same way the idea of ‘purpose’ wasn’t understood by the AI in the chess match, it wouldn’t understand emotional purpose in a creative decision. It makes AI preemptively obsolete in creative endeavors because it can’t understand joy, pain, humor, or sorrow on a cognisant level. You wouldn’t see an AI celebrate a job well done unless it’s programmed to do so. It doesn’t ask for anything in return because it doesn’t have the awareness to desire anything it isn’t programmed to gather.
The companies that are performing the best at this very moment are the ones who didn’t sink their teeth into a gamble called ‘data’. They didn’t abandon what already worked. They didn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel, and I see the signs of people doing the same thing with AI.
Erik, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I began writing stories in high school, although I was drawing scenes from my own stories for years before that. I began making films in college and started directing advertisements senior year / after graduating. I’ve published a novel titled “Icarus Dawns” and I’m in preproduction on a feature.
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
I really wish I knew about business and finance from an earlier age. It would have been nice if they told us about taxes and investing in high school. For those of you who want to know, look up books on investing and finance. Get audiobooks and listen to them while you cook, clean, or do any other chore like that.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Always be genuine in what you’re about. Don’t say you’re something you’re not, and don’t try to appeal to people who aren’t invested in exactly what you’re giving. People try to get followers for the sake of having followers, but you want quality followers who have A) real human beings behind the account and B) people who will buy whatever it is you’re selling. If you get robots and people interested in basket weaving, then you’re not going to get a sale from them if you’re selling power tools. You’re lessening your likelihood of being noticed by power tool enthusiasts too, because the algorithm thinks you like basket weaving and robots, not power tools. If you lose followers, then you’re refining your crowd to a more specific (more likely to buy) demographic. So don’t sweat that either.
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