On Wednesday June 24, Google DeepMind CEO and Co-Founder Demis Hassabis took the stage at the Palais des Festivals at Cannes Lions alongside Bloomberg journalist Francine Lacqua and Scott Belsky, Partner at A24 and founder of A24 Labs, to discuss the future of creative expression. From technical milestones like long-term reasoning to his philosophy on partnering with creative powerhouses like A24, the discussion highlighted Demis’s vision for frontier AI as a collaborative partner in storytelling, drawing on his background in game design to explore interactive, multimodal experiences.  The session followed Google DeepMind’s Grand Prix win in Digital Craft on Tuesday.

DEMIS HASSABIS QUOTES:

The intersection of human creativity and technology

“I’m a huge believer in human ingenuity, human creativity. I think we’re an unbelievably adaptable species. If you think about what we’ve built — modern civilisation with basically hunter-gatherer brains. It’s kind of amazing how quickly we adapt to new technologies: iPads and iPhones and computers. And I’m quite sure we and the next generation will adapt to work out how to best use these technologies to express even more human creativity”.

“I think it will allow creators to more quickly iterate and brainstorm things they’ve thought of so far and then get to those ideas that are at the edge of what humans can imagine, and then push them forward. But at least for the foreseeable future, I think the craft and the soul of the creative piece still has to come from the humans. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, and I imagine that’s what audiences want too”.

How Google DeepMind approaches partnership

“What we love to do, whether it’s science or creative work, is find people who are world-class in that domain or the best in the world in that domain and then go and partner with them to understand what do they need from the tools, but also what kinds of problems are they trying to address — the really deep problems”.

AI, science and creativity

I think it’s actually creativity that separates the great scientists from the good scientists. And what I’m hoping is that these technologies will help assist the best scientists in the world and we’ll almost enter a new kind of golden age of scientific discovery.

Creativity and the film industry

“I have the deepest respect for the creative process, which I learned from the games industry, and I’ve always loved the film industry. I love the arts in general — it’s the main thing I love doing in my spare time, engaging with filmmakers and watching films”.

On Tuesday June 23, Demis Hassabis spoke on the Google Beach in Cannes in a fireside conversation with Reed Albergotti, Technology Editor, Semafor.

DEMIS HASSABIS QUOTES

 Safety and responsibility

“We need to deal with misinformation and deep fakes. That’s something we were cognisant of when we first started building these generative models. We foresaw that we would be in a world where these systems would be really good and they’d eventually be almost photorealistic. Therefore, we’d need a digital watermarking system, which we created and called SynthID, that was robust, unhackable and would be embedded imperceptibly in an image so that anyone could detect if that image was generated by an AI or not. All of our models that generate anything from music, to images, to videos, come with SynthID embedded. We’ve also opensourced it and given it to the rest of the industry to use so a lot of our industry colleagues have now adopted that standard – OpenAI, Nvidia and many other big ones . . . If you’re creating generative media, it should come with provenance detection”.

How AI can democratise creativity

“AI will democratise creative tools, so more people try out their ideas, relatively quickly and easily. That’s double-edged though, because it also produces a lot more things that maybe are not very creatively valuable. But also, a lot more people can break into those industries. There’s a lower bar to entry, less gatekeeping. That will probably mean that more new, professional creators will find a path, wherever they are in the world, through using these tools”

Empowering the next generation of creative professionals

“We work with many professional directors and amazing collaborators. We talk to them to design our tools to help enhance and empower their creative process. I think it’s going to be incredible, they can do 10x more things than they used to be able to do, try out more extreme ideas, [and] iterate faster. These [AI] tools allow them to try out things in relatively inexpensive and quicker ways. With any new tool, if you use it the wrong way, it takes away from the creative process. If you use it in an innovative way, it should add to the creative process”.