Eric Burgess Podcast Transcript
Eric Burgess joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Eric Burgess with a deep passion for writing, producing and marketing products that enrich lives. Eric Burgess has often worked at the intersection of technology and creativity leading to the founding of Credtent.org. This venture unites decades of experience to create an essential licensing and auditing utility for the AI space, enabling responsible AI companies to access credible, unbiased training data. Credtent empowers creators, artists, content creators, etc. to earn from AI with fair licensing, control over content usage, and tools for content exclusion from training.
With Credtent, creators can choose to allow their works to be used for training purposes, creating an ad upstream of revenue for them. Credtent. They can also choose to opt out as a public benefit corporation. Credtent is dedicated to compensating creatives while promoting ethical AI development. Currently Credtent’s AI solution for creators is live and open beta, setting a new standard, incredible AI data.
Well, good afternoon, Eric. Welcome to the show!
Eric Burgess: Thank you so much for having me!
Brian Thomas: I appreciate you jumping on and doing a podcast is something that always excites me and I can’t wait till we get into our conversation and talk a little bit about Credtent and some of the work that you’ve done.
So, Eric, jumping into your first question, what inspired you to establish Credent.org and how does it reflect your passion for integrating technology and creativity?
Eric Burgess: You bet. Well, simply put. I just really love making technology products that enrich human lives, and I, I’d say I love it as much as I love the process of writing both fiction and nonfiction.
You know, I’ve always been a writer, and I established Credtent to empower creators of all mediums to safeguard their work against the AI industry’s use of their content to teach their large language models like ChatGPT without a creator’s consent. I’ve been making software since the mid-90s with big companies like Walt Disney Company and insurance giant EBX to marketing technology platforms and worked on all kinds of projects for Microsoft and Oculus and a variety of startups.
And while some things never change in technology in the last decade, I’ve just become increasingly concerned. That if we don’t build products with a focus on people, rather than just the bottom line of a big tech firm, we’re going to lose our humanity amongst the pixels, the metadata, and the dollar signs.
And this danger manifests very much from information, both I think disinformation that are active efforts to sort of lie to people, as well as the sheer overload of data. People are just no longer able to grasp at all of that information they need to be able to make decisions in their lives. Which includes, will they or won’t they be part of bringing AI and creativity together?
So, I would say Credtent is an ambiguous name on purpose. Our twin focuses are credit for your content, making sure that content creators get paid, as well as credible content. And our goals are to protect the jobs of those creative people in the age of AI. While also helping AI companies determine what content they should, should be training on so that their models are not propagating disinformation and disaccredited work that can really hurt people.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And at the crux of it, the message came loud and clear was the fact that we’re focusing on the people and taking care of the people. And at the end of the day, The social capital is what makes the world go around, not the bottom line of these big tech companies, as you had mentioned. So, I appreciate that.
And you’re really focusing on helping and protecting basically their livelihood in a lot of cases. So, thank you. And Eric, how does Credtent licensing model enable artists and content creators to monetize their work through AI and what options do they have for controlling their content’s usage?
Eric Burgess: Well, basically we built Credtent’s creator dashboard with a focus on agency and choice for content creators.
Basically, they can register their content in all formats in one place for a single, low annual price. We know that modern content creators, they don’t just work in one medium, you know. If you’re a writer, you probably have a newsletter. If, you know, you may also make videos. Musicians will do a newsletter as well, you know.
They may make videos too, and we want to make sure that they can bring everything together. So, when they do, we do the work of opting them out of AI tools. If that’s what they prefer, most of these companies allow for that, but it’s an onerous process. And if they would choose to instead make money from it, then we find those licensing opportunities for them.
Now, when we started this company about a year ago, most AI companies, other than Adobe and a couple of this smaller open-source solutions, we’re still trying to claim that they could use the work of artists and writers and filmmakers, all the content on the internet. To train their large language models and ultimately make competitive products to the work of all these creative folks.
And that was somehow like, okay, but thankfully over the course of 2024, we’ve seen open AI and anthropic. Some of the biggest companies out there making large language models start to license content from the biggest media creators around. Film studios, publishers, lots of these companies are starting to cut deals, but Credtent’s goal is to make sure that rank and file creators get a chance to either gain similar payments for their work or exclude it from AI’s grasp without having to chase down thousands of large language models individually, because even though we hear about six or seven of them, there’s literally close to 10, 000 large language models out in space that you can get access to.
I like to think that in many ways, what we’re doing is acting as that orchestration layer to do what Apple did back in the early 2000’s that killed the MP3 theft market. Like Napster and LimeWire, you know, all they did was they set fair market pricing. They said, how about 99 cents a song? And let’s make an easy way for everybody to be able to pay and get access to the content that we love and that inspires us.
That’s what we’re doing here is making sure that all types of content. You know, can be licensed and people can be paid for it. They can register it very easily on credit and we’re going to make sure that they get their desire, how their content is going to be used. That’s going to be respected by the industry.
Brian Thomas: I really love that. And I’m glad that you’re at the forefront fighting this battle for creators. And you said rank and file, right? We’ve got a lot of creators, just amazing people doing great things, but they don’t have the budgets of these big, large corporations. So, I appreciate that. And Eric, beyond Credtent, how do your pursuits in writing, gamification design, and tech enabled marketing influence your approach to developing tools for creators?
Eric Burgess: Well, I always like to say I’m a multi hyphenate polymath, maybe. I do a lot of writing, I do, I, I’m a technology guy, and I also design games, because that’s one of my hobbies. And I’d say like my writing is all about making sure that we can engage people with storytelling and help them realize that AI and creativity can be great together if the technology is built with a focus on ethical sourcing of the content.
We don’t want to feel badly about using technology because we know it’s hurting other people. And so, for me, telling those stories, writing regularly and helping people realize the value of this, if we do it in the right way, is a great way for me to be able to engage the love I have for writing. I’d say my gamification background comes in because I believe there’s incredible value at the intersections when we learn from play how we can do things in work and how we learn how we can do things in work to be able to affect play and to affect education.
This is a really powerful way to do this. And so I built into cred tent. The goal is to make sure that it’s engaging. It’s easy to do. And I want to drive adoption from the very 1st moment when they register their content and keep it current. Put that information in there that makes sure that your licensing can actually be more effective.
If we understand the success metrics of your content, if we understand, you know, the value of your content, the uniqueness of your content. This is the stuff that’s going to actually benefit the large language models as well and help make sure that your work is recognized and compensated for. And then finally, I think on the marketing side of things, well, you know, seven years at Disney turned me into a marketer because everybody at Disney is in marketing.
I mean, the janitors in marketing at Disney, you know, so I just really believe in the value of content marketing. We want to provide value from the beginning and let people know that we’re on their side. And so part of what we’ve done to reach out to the world is to establish our content origin badges, which are just helping creators and rights owners disclose their use of AI in their work.
I think much like we prefer to know where the food came from, you know, and we’ll pay a little bit more for organic food. We want to know, and we want to pick out the art, the games, the music, the books. We want to know that those things came from a human. You know, we want to know the origin of them and or whether they were created by algorithmic creativity.
And I think letting readers, consumers, viewers know it’s going to bring a level of integrity that inspires greater trust and honestly, a deeper connection when someone’s creation resonates with us. I know this is the case with me and I think some of that, you know, that sense of productive struggle in the final piece helps us relate more human to human when we actually experience art.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Eric. I appreciate that and breaking all that down for us, especially your, your passions. But I did just want to highlight something you’d mentioned about, you know, people do learn more or more engaged when they’re having fun learning. And I think there’s ways we can do that at work, whether that’s gamification or coming up with different methodologies versus the traditional.
So, I appreciate that. And Eric, last question of the day, how do you envision the relationship between AI and human creativity evolving? And what role do you see Credtent playing in that future?
Eric Burgess: I think more than anything else Credtent’s goal is to help make sure that when the best AI solutions emerge and dominate in the space, which will definitely happen over time, I think we want to make sure that those ones are the ones that embrace actually not making again, people feel badly about the fact that there’s generations of content creators getting ripped off, you know, just so that they can write a more effective email.
You know, once we feel confident that the tools that we are using for what I like to call a collaborative, rhythmic creativity. They’re not hurting other people like ourselves, artists and makers. And, you know, I think we’re just going to feel better about working with these amazing systems that can be thought partners.
They can be editorial helpers. They can polish your work in a really powerful way. We’re going to just feel better about those becoming part of the creative process and creating work that inspires our world. If we know that it’s not hurting other people, I think artists are more sensitive to that maybe than anyone.
And then we can learn to find the synergies with these systems, see how they’re a partner to us and an integral part of our process rather than kind of like slacking off and letting them do our homework for us. That’s I don’t think anything that most creators are going to be very excited about because we need to remember that.
I think it was actually musician Nick Cave. I’m very fond of said recently that we lose something If we speed up the creative act just to get to the creative product, you know, quicker to being done is not always better. Maybe it’s great if you’re writing an email that you don’t want to write, but if you’re writing a novel, or you’re composing a song, or you’re making a film, or even just a short video like that struggle, You know That has value.
You know, there’s power in that iterative process that takes a little more time, and to bypass a lot of that effort, I think we lose the ability for artistic work to actually help us understand what we’re thinking, we lose the therapeutic value of creation that can help us, like, guide us through difficult times, and more than likely, we lose a little something of ourselves when we ask a machine to take the whole of historical work and, and produce something that’s just made to order, I think part of what makes art wonderful is just those gaps in our knowledge that lead to invention, the kind of the questions that we try to answer at a moment when, like, the emotional wave that we’re experiencing changes how our personality would suggest we’d respond.
And even that profound joy of remembering a long-forgotten experience. I mean, I think of Marcel Proust, you know, inspiring an epic seven novel series, you know, just from tasting a Madeline cookie, you know, after years of not experiencing one. I personally, as a writer, don’t want to lose those moments. And I think most creative people would generally feel the same way.
Thank you, Eric.
Brian Thomas: I appreciate that really do. And we got to create a symbiotic relationship between human and machine. It can’t be them versus us. And we’ve got to make it work for everybody. You’d mentioned about that relationship and right now AI can do a lot for us, but at the same time, we need to have those checks and balances in place, especially ethics.
As you know, that could be a whole another podcast in itself. So, Eric, I really do appreciate your time as a pleasure speaking with you. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Eric Burgess Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
