Building AI for Creators | Luma & Phota Labs

I think that creativity is building a story. The tools alone aren't a story. Someone has to direct them.

It's not about mastering those tools. It's about directing an agent who can use those tools to achieve your creativity. Generated ad has become so good. You can be sort of authentic to the moment while getting a little bit creative of stuff. So I I just think a lot of photographers are having more fun post capturing than before.

How do you make something unique with the tools you have access to now? There has to something be more than just text. If you go to, say, a studio and you say, make me a ten second video about a dog jumping in the grass, they're never gonna take that deal. They're they're gonna want more specific, and I think AI tools are no different.

Something I heard from someone today earlier was they assume AI to be sloth. It's up to the humans to create something out of it. What are your thoughts?

I I feel like that's such a hard question.

Creative tools have always changed the way people make art. Photography changed painting. Digital software changed photography. And now AI is changing how images, videos, and entire creative workflows come together. The technology is improving at an incredible pace, but the most important ingredient in creative work may not be the model. It may still be the person behind it. In this episode, Yoko Li speaks with Matt Tensik of Luma and Zac Xie of PhotoLabs about AI generated imagery, creative workflows, personalization, and why they believe the future belongs not to the tools themselves, but to

Today we have Zac Xie, who is the founder and CTO of Photo Labs. He works on personalized AR and AI photography. We also have Matt Hensick, who is the head of applied research at Luma. He works on agentic systems, fundamental research, and he was also the co creator of NERF. Thanks for coming on the pod. So maybe let me start with this question. Matt, many years ago, maybe three years ago, you had this online talk about NERF. And how you started this online talk was you posed a really interesting question, which is what is the role of the artist and what is the role of technology? Now fast for

Yeah. So if I recall correctly, my answer at that point was that really the point of this AI technology is to act as a tool for artists to better execute on the creative vision that they have. And at the time, NERF was providing an ability for people to create three d assets in a way that didn't require tons and tons of manual effort. Right. Because when you're creating three d scenes, creating those assets isn't really where the creative part is. It's how do you put them all together? How do you build a story around it? And that's where those tools were helpful.

Right.