Approximately Correct: An AI Podcast from Amii · 2026-03-17 · 45 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
55 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Kate Compton, a pioneer in procedural content generation and casual creativity, argues that creativity fundamentally depends on human intention and emotion, not algorithmic sophistication. Her work spans procedural systems (the language Tracery, Twitter bots), game design (Spore), and social creativity patterns - quilting bees, sticker installations, mixtapes - that lower the barrier to participation. The episode explores how remixing and curation are legitimate creative acts, why the shift toward closed, expensive AI systems has reduced the collaborative "weird little things" culture of 2014, and where grassroots creativity still thrives (Roblox, Mastodon communities). For B2B operators and creatives, Compton's framework on casual creativity, remix culture, and what makes communities tick offers insights into product design, community building, and the difference between tools that enable human creativity versus those that consolidate power. She advocates for staying "weird" - keeping accessible, small-scale, portable tools alive alongside the superhighway of generative AI.
Casual creativity refers to small everyday creative acts - doodling, making music, painting miniatures, knitting - done for enjoyment rather than to create the "next Mozart." It matters because it's deeply social, doesn't require expertise, and unlocks participation when people don't feel they have to perform or be good enough, such as in quilting bees or community art installations.
Compton argues computers lack the two things that matter for creativity: feelings and money. Creativity is fundamentally social and emotional - it's about feeling proud of what you've made or thinking about someone - not about the algorithmic process of mixing things together. The computer itself has no intention, relationship, or emotional investment.
In 2014-2020, people created 200,000 creative bots using Tracery (a simple language Compton wrote) and Cheapbots Done Quick, sending personalized weird mixtapes and odd poem ideas to friends and communities. When Elon Musk shut down Twitter's API, those bots died, but the community migrated to Mastodon and Bluesky because Tracery was open-source, portable, and simple enough for non-experts to run.
Remixing and mixtapes work by limiting choices to already-complete options rather than starting from a blank canvas. Instead of asking "Is my drawing good enough?" you're curating from existing songs or images, making smaller, less intimidating decisions that still result in something greater than the sum of its parts.
Roblox is a major site where kids create for each other through obstacle courses, birthday zones, and strange mini-worlds - described as "love letters" to friends and strangers. These abandoned Roblox builds represent the same small-scale, relational creativity that thrived in the bot community.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode contains a handful of genuinely interesting ideas - the Grok loop framework, the infrastructure-determines-community argument, and the PNG data-encoding trick - but they are padded by extended conversational filler, affirmations, and anecdotes that circle the same point repeatedly. The ideas arrive slowly and with limited density for a 45-minute runtime.
The term that I coined in my dissertation was the Grok loop, which is, um, how long it takes you from having an idea to trying it out, to understanding how well that went.
you have to have ease so that any doofus can make a terrible thing. Like the early web. Nobody closed their tags.
A few genuinely non-obvious framings appear: the claim that computer creativity is irrelevant because 'computers lack feelings and money,' the Grok loop as a design metric, and the argument that shareability and remixability are the core engine of creative communities - not the quality of output. These are fresher than typical AI-creativity takes, though the broader 'remixing is valid creativity' argument is not new.
computers lack two things that I care about. Feelings and money.
creativity isn't a thing. Creativity is a great thing socially. Uh, it's a great thing for Us to feel.
Kate Compton is a genuine practitioner - shipped work on Spore at Maxis, created Tracery (adopted into 16 languages and powering 200,000 bots), and did real academic work on procedural content generation before it was fashionable. She is not a career podcast guest. However, her domain is indie creative technology and games, not B2B operations, which limits direct relevance for the target audience.
I open sourced it, but, uh, kind of with the assumption that if anybody wanted to do anything with this, they're more than welcome to. And it got poured into 16 different languages
your characters on Spore were saved as a png, so you had your little image full of pixels. Uh, how do we save all the data with that? So you take all the transparent pixels around the border of it, and you use the color data of the transparent pixels to store all the data about your creature.
The episode features real named examples - Tracery, cheapbots.done.quick, Glyph, Spore, Yayoi Kusama's sticker installation, Darius Kazami's talk - and one concrete number (200,000 bots). However, hard metrics, timelines, and quantitative evidence are nearly absent, and most specifics are descriptive or anecdotal rather than analytical.
There were 200,000 bots of all time that had been created with this service. So 200 weird little messages sent between people, 200,000 weird little mixtapes from person to person.
we had professional creatives try to use the adventure creator and end up saying like, uh, ah, I guess I'm just no good at this. And then we would hack literal 6 year olds making Pixar armies
The hosts ask reasonable open questions and occasionally land a good follow-up ('So what are some of the patterns you noticed?', 'Does that change the feeling of ownership?'), but they consistently affirm rather than probe, let vague claims go unchallenged, and the post-interview segment is pure self-congratulatory filler with no analytical reflection.
What inspired you to give that talk?
So beyond just like, this is too hard. Are there other patterns you saw that make it.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
The latest episode of Approximately Correct, we're joined by Kate Compton. Kate is an expert in generative AI, an artist, and a self-described “weird futurist.” She’s long been fascinated by creativity, and how people use digital tools to express themselves. She joins Alona Fyshe and Scott Lilwall to talk about the time when AI was small, strange and shareable, and explains why we need to keep that energy going to allow people to use it as a creative tool.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Kate Compton: We had professional creatives try to use the adventure creator and end up saying like, uh, ah, I guess I'm just no good at this. And then we would hack literal 6 year olds making Pixar armies with. So it's like, okay, how did we go from totally winning it to totally losing it? With the same team, with the same tools, with the same everything.
Alana Fish: Hey, welcome back to Approximately Correct. I'm Alana Fish.
Scott Lowell: And I'm Scott Lowell.
Alana Fish: And this time on the pod, we have Kate Compton.
Scott Lowell: Yes.
Alana Fish: Which we were so lucky to get her. And it was such a cool conversation.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. She was here for a conference on digital entertainment and artificial intelligence and we knew we wanted to talk to her because she's just fascinating.
Alana Fish: She's so engaging and also so excited about creativity.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. So, uh, she also, she lives in Denmark, so we did a virtual one for this one. Uh, very different time zones. We're coming with morning energy. She's got evening energy.
Alana Fish: She matched us though.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. I think she exceeded our energy.
Alana Fish: She made it there. Yeah.
Scott Lowell: But I mean, Kate is a person who didn't get her start in AI. She was working with video games and a lot of like creativity type stuff. But as things went on, she's become more in the space and she has some really interesting thoughts on creative culture, the importance of remixing, and how that is even more important now in the age of artificial intelligence and creativity.
Alana Fish: Yeah. She said that she's been working on the same thing, but things have been moving around her in different ways. So she's been thinking about creativity, how to get people to be creative, what are the things that unlock creativity. And as she's been doing that, things have changed and now AI is such a big part of our culture and of course that has intersected with what she's interested in.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. So it gives her a really interesting, unique perspective.
Alana Fish: Yeah. Here's our conversation with Kate Compton. Kate, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
Scott Lowell: Yeah, it's really great to have you here virtually.
Kate Compton: Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
Scott Lowell: You were visiting Edmonton last year and I, uh, was reading up on you and I'm like, oh, we need to talk to Kate. She sounds really interesting. So you work in a, in kind of a different. Most people may not think about it in kind of the tech space. Can you talk a little bit about what your work entails and, and why you find it so interesting?
Kate Compton: Sure. I've really taken a pretty, uh, to me it seems like I'm not moving at all, but the fields around me are kind of changing. So I've been in I guess kind of video games for a reasonably long time. So uh, I wrote my undergraduate um, dissertation on um, performative gender in video games. So how do you represent gender? Kind of from a procedural level, so actually in the simulation. Um, and then from there I went to grad school at Georgia Tech. And um, that was really the first kind of procedural content generation focused program which was um, my favorite definition of procedural content generation is make uh, stuff that makes stuff. So little programs that come alive and make strange things. This is like, well this is a solid 20 years before all of the uh, artificial intelligence genai stuff that we know now. So this is kind of an older fashioned version of it. Uh, but I really fell in love with you. Like, oh man. Like I can get computers to make weird, weird and strange things and then kind of show them to people. And from that I got an internship and a full time job at Maxis working on Spore, which was the first big kind of procedural content making stuff that makes stuff game.
Scott Lowell: Um, so when you say like computers make weird stuff, like what kind of weird? Show me the weird. What are we talking about?
Kate Compton: So this is a set of kind of patterns that I've used AI to make. I made this in about 2012, layering a bunch of repeated patterns and then repeating those patterns, ends up making a pattern that um, people have described as having eye feel. I feel, yeah, that was my m favorite description of it. When I first made these I made uh, 54 of them and I had them hanging up around in a circle in my apartment and it just kind of gave your eyes asmr being surrounded by all these delicate little slightly alien patterns.
Scott Lowell: So we mentioned a little bit that you were uh, here in Edmonton in November, you were talking at Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. Bit of a mouthful. And yeah, your talk I loved. I got to see it afterwards where you were talking about the way that people create and how remixing things is such an important part of creation. So what inspired you to give that talk?
Kate Compton: A lot of things. So one of them is kind of my past research is on casual creativity which um, is a term that I coined for. So a lot of academics will study creativity and they'll be like, ah, ah, how do you make the next Mozart? How do you make the next Steve Jobs? Kind of the big money, big history creativity. I'm really interested in uh, kind of small everyday creativity. So people just creating for fun, doing weird doodles, doing zentangles, doing Sketching, making terrible music, um, listening to wind chimes, um, all sorts of things where it's not that you're making the biggest, best thing, but you're enjoying making it. I'd spent a long time studying that. I was really interested in how often that kind of casual creativity ends up happening socially. You think about quitting quilting bees, but, um, here in Denmark, people are very club focused. And, uh, so there's clubs for painting miniatures, and there's clubs for knitting, and there's clubs for making tiny dollhouse furniture. So this kind of. All right, maybe if you're painting a warhammer mini, it's not that you're making the single greatest warhammer mini, but there's something about getting together with a group of buds and kind of talking about what paint colors you're using.
Scott Lowell: Yeah.
Kate Compton: So I'm really interested in, like, okay, that's wonderful. Like a really great form of, uh, kind of being together and being together in a way that you don't feel like you have to perform, which, um, I think stops a lot of people from wanting to be social is the feeling that you should be good enough. You need to come to this party to win. Um, you know, if you're going to make a TikTok channel, you have to like, like, be good enough to show off to others. Um, or at least extreme enough. Um, so really, how do you get people to overcome their fear of being social and of being creative at the same time? And so I'm really interested in kind of because it's been done before in some really great ways. Like both quilting bees and the early Internet show us that, yeah, people love to make weird little things together. Um, how can we start making that happen intentionally? And how can we kind of looking as broadly as possible across, again, technology, like the Internet, uh, social things like quilting bees, weird art installations that people have made, uh, games that unlock casual creativity. Uh, look across all of these and think, okay, are there common patterns that then if I said, oh, I want, uh, my local art space to have something that brings the community, to get the community together to be creative, Um, I could intentionally think, ah, these, ah, are the patterns that I'm going to use. I'm going to have a reasonable expectation that I can make, uh, casual community creativity happen.
Alana Fish: So what are some of the patterns that you noticed?
Kate Compton: Again, it's kind of this getting over the fear of not being good enough. Yeah, there's a thing that you can add as a community, um, but your, your individual contribution is quite small. Um, Together as a community. You're making a big happy pile. Uh, so there's a great one by Yayoi Kusama and I'm forgetting the name of it. I want to say, um, Abuishen piece. Um, but what it is, it's a big, a big blank gallery room. And then you have those little like round colorful stickers that you might put on at a tag sale.
Alana Fish: Right.
Kate Compton: And anyone could take one of those stickers or many of those stickers and start putting it all over the room. So you get a room that is covered in colorful stickers, um, and there's more of them at about like 3ft high because that's where kids can reach.
Alana Fish: Yeah.
Kate Compton: So you start seeing like this kind of like accumulated trail and you can always, you have a little bit of a choice, like, okay, what color do I want to put on? Um, but then, uh, not enough of a choice that you feel, you never feel like you were doing this room wrong.
Alana Fish: Right.
Kate Compton: Um, there's times where you, if somebody invited you to draw something in the SF MoMA, you would feel like, ah, uh, I'm on stage. But you don't feel like you have to perform here. So I think it's that I'm doing something together and I'm performing as a group.
Alana Fish: Right. And my contribution is something. But it's.
Scott Lowell: Mhm.
Alana Fish: Yeah. Maybe it's less scary because it's part of a bigger hole.
Kate Compton: You always know that you're enough.
Alana Fish: Yeah.
Kate Compton: I think of this like also like when you go to a big sports arena and you're wearing your team's color, you know, there's definitely guys who will strip down in midwinter with the full body paint and everything. Yeah, that's fine. You can like, you can go. Yes. And go higher up. Um, but you can. And also just like, hey, by coming here to watch my sports team and wearing blue, I'm doing enough. I'm a part of things. I'm enough. I'm participating and I'm helping out my team.
Alana Fish: Right. And I'm part of the whole. I'm like a participant.
Kate Compton: Yeah, yeah.
Alana Fish: So one of the things you talked about in that talk was the idea of these m of mixtapes and remixing things as a form of creativity. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about that?
Kate Compton: Yeah. So what mixtapes are for is, um, kind of like with the uh, sticker exhibition, um, a mixtape, the amount of choices that you have to make and kind of the heaviness of the choices, um, is a little lighter. So If I start with a blank piece of paper, um, it's like I could be drawing anything. There's too many choices here. But, um, if I'm like, okay, I'm going to make a mixtape for a friend, I kind of have a list of songs, and then it's like, okay, I'm just picking one from this and I'm putting it over there and I'm picking. Maybe I'll pick something that's like, a little funkier. Uh, or maybe I'll pick something that's like, a little weirder, but just kind of like picking from a list and then figuring out where it goes in that list. Um, I think that's. That's something that people feel very comfortable with. And that's why I often talk about mixtapes and collage in kind of the same breath. Because if you're doing collage likewise, it's not like, oh, what am I going to make? But, aha, ah, I found a cool picture. Um, I'm going to cut out that picture, I'm going to put it somewhere on my sheet, and then I'm going to look for other pictures that I think go with it. So each time you're making a much smaller choice, and you're choosing, uh, from a bunch of stuff that already feels complete in itself. So I'm not like, is my mark good enough? Am I drawing good enough on this? M kind of smushing together things that are already good enough to make something. That curation is a little bit more than the sum of its parts.
Alana Fish: So one of the things that students say when I ask them about whether or not AI is intelligent or whether or not AI could be creative is they say AI is just mixing things. AI is just choosing from what it has and putting it together. And that's not creative. But I think what you just said was taking things and putting them together is creative. So how do you. How do you figure those two out together?
Kate Compton: Right. Um, I generally don't think about computers as being creative or not being creative, because this was a long thing in a lot of the computational creativity community for the past 20 years. Is, can computers be creative? Is this algorithm being creative? When I made a bunch of particle systems that kind of drew the scarf, were they being creative? Um, and so my response was, um, computers lack two things that I care about. Feelings and money. And, uh, so I don't actually care about whether or not they feel creative. Um, creativity isn't a thing. Creativity is a great thing socially. Uh, it's a great thing for Us to feel. And especially when I'm talking about casual creativity. This is about me feeling proud of what I've made. Me, um, making something while I'm thinking about a friend. This kind of creativity while I'm thinking about you. Uh, it doesn't matter that I'm just putting things together. If I have that feeling of thinking about you and feeling proud of what I've made. Now the computer's not thinking about you. The computer's not proud of what it's made. Um, it's great that it's putting things together, and it can be a part of my casual creativity process. We've all had the awkward friend who sends us a computer generated poem and, uh, is very proud of it, or a computer generated image. And they're very proud of it. And often they'll have put something about us in there. It's like, hey, it's like, yeah, they're using the AI to make a mixtape for you. Um, but it's not that the computer made a mixtape for you, and it's not that. Is Lana Del Rey creative because she made the thing that is part of my mixtape.
Alana Fish: Right.
Kate Compton: Um, not really part of the question there.
Scott Lowell: Okay, so that intention is a big
Alana Fish: part of the intention.
Kate Compton: Yeah. Like creativity to create is a verb. Um, I like to think of art as a verb. So especially casual creativity is about the process rather than about, like, oh, if I make you a mixtape, should that mixtape be in a museum? No, because that mixtape, kind of divorced from our relationship, is not worth anything.
Scott Lowell: So you have kind of talked in the past. You kind of draw in a contrast between the AI systems that we have now, a lot of which are a bit more of a closed system. And then, I mean, earlier AI systems, smaller personal things that people there was a lot more. It seemed kind of like collaborative, making things, just putting them in the world, sharing them. Uh, so I guess, what. What was it like back in the old days to give us a sense for those who might have missed that sounds like a pretty wonderful time.
Kate Compton: Yeah. So let me take you to the magical world of 2014. You had a Twitter account and you felt good about it, right? Yeah.
Scott Lowell: Seems so long ago.
Kate Compton: Yep. And so, all right, you had a Twitter account, um, and you, uh, wanted to make a, ah, weird little art bot for your friend. So you wanted, you know how in Wall E, um, the humans have left Wall E behind and he keeps cleaning up the trash long after all the humans have gone. So there's like a little helpful part of humanity that's still Trucking away, doing nice stuff for the world, uh, even though the world is not paying attention anymore. So I think I want to make a bot for a friend. Why do I want to make a bot for a friend? Um, one is that just the urge to make something that makes something is. I want to have something that comes up with new podcast ideas. Um, because after probably a few years of running a podcast, it's hard to think of new conversations. All right, I'm going to make a little bot that says, uh, I'm going to take InterestingPerson and ask them about topic. Um, so it's like, okay, I'm going to have my list of interesting people. Um, so all of your local Alberta celebrities and anybody who's coming in, and maybe a couple funny celebrities. So it's like, okay, I'm going to take Abraham Lincoln in and ask him about casual creativity. And I'm going to ask Lana Del Rey to come in, and I'm going to ask her about, uh, whether computers can be creative. And then it's like, okay, that's starting to make a bunch of weird little things that are sometimes funny. Or maybe I'll ask them about their favorite smoothies. Um, or I'll even add both. It's like, hashtag big topic and silly topic. So I'm going to ask Lana Del Rey about computational creativity and her favorite smoothies and what they have in common, right?
Alana Fish: And it's like when we have those mixtures, then the person is bringing the intent. The person sees the mixture and creates the intent. Intent that.
Kate Compton: Yeah, There's a fun academic term called computational reading, which is saying, I'm going to look at a field that I deeply love, and I'm going to figure out how to fit that into my little simulation. So if you deeply love podcasts, or you deeply love mixed, uh, hipster cocktails, or you deeply love Taylor Swift genre music, breaking that apart and saying, uh, ah, I think I see what this is really made out of is this, this, and this. And so then you make that for your friend. You put it online. Uh, you use a service called cheapbots. Done quick. Um, you write it in this language called tracery that I made, which is just like a very simple, um, kind of Mad Libs for computers, where it's like, okay, here's my list of people. Here's my list of silly topics. Here's my list of deep topics. If you sent this to a friend, maybe they're the only person that follows this bot. This bot only has two followers. The two of you but every morning you get to wake up and see what your bot has made for your friend. And maybe a couple of other people, like other podcasters start following it and they think it's funny. Um, this eventually led to, um, the runner of it, um, of cheap bots and Click V. Buckingham said that by the end of its life in 2000, what is it, 21, where Elon Musk turned off all the bots. There were 200,000 bots of all time that had been created with this service. So 200 weird little messages sent between people, 200,000 weird little mixtapes from person to person. Um, and that was really beautiful.
Scott Lowell: And I guess this seems like a question that we're asking all the time in 2026 about everything. But like, what changed? Yeah, where'd that go?
Alana Fish: Yeah, right. Things seem different now.
Kate Compton: Mhm. I mean, part of it is I get really into infrastructure, which is like, how so you know, you're a person who wants to make a little podcast bot for your friend. Um, you're probably not going to figure out how to run your own Twitter bot. And you're probably not going to figure out how to run your own Twitter. So when Twitter said, okay, no more bots, suddenly people started this wonderful big 200,000 person bot making community said, shoot, all of our bots died. Um, I miss my bot. Where should my bot go? I missed bot o'. Clock. The sound is so empty at 6pm with nothing having podcasting opinions. Um, except for humans.
Alana Fish: Right, Boring.
Kate Compton: So they started moving them to Mastodon because, um, the cheap Boston quick. So both Tracery and cheapbots done quick were small, simple and portable enough that kind of the most technical person in your friend group could figure out how to run their own. So somebody figured out how to run it on Mastodon. Somebody figured out how to run it on bluesky. So now there's a whole bunch of services kind of doing the same thing for other social networks. Um, and that was because, okay, Tracery, which was the language that ran these, was something that I wrote as somebody who had just learned JavaScript. So this was not a big complicated program. Um, I open sourced it, but, uh, kind of with the assumption that if anybody wanted to do anything with this, they're more than welcome to. And it got poured into 16 different languages and I used it to teach undergrads because if you've learned a little bit of JavaScript or a little bit of any language, you can, you can implement your own Tracery. It's like, okay, podcast inviting hashtag person to Talk about hashtag deep thing and hashtag not so deep thing. Many people can kind of break that apart and then like pick a random, uh, pick one of these random objects. So a lot of people could. A lot of people can pick this up and run it themselves. Um, so I think it's that. Pick it up and run it themselves is. And again, I often think about this as kind of. It's like music. Um, I've made something so small and so catchy that anybody feels like they can hum their own version.
Scott Lowell: So it hasn't completely disappeared. It's just maybe not as easy to find as it used to be.
Kate Compton: Yeah.
Alana Fish: Another thing I've noticed in the evolution that was 2014-2026 is that AI has also changed because it's mostly become a thing that requires a huge amount of money to train. The data is often closed, it's owned by these big companies. And so what kind of little creative person do these days? What can you make with AI? Has that also changed?
Kate Compton: It's less that anything else has vanished. So all these tools like Traceray is still available and all the weird little, um, weird smaller versions of AI that we used to mess around with beforehand, those all still exist. And in fact you can use big, uh, gen AI to talk you through how to use any of these.
Alana Fish: That's amazing.
Kate Compton: It's in fact more accessible than ever if you're like, hey, um, hey, LLM of my choice. Can you make me something that runs Tracery scripts on Tumblr? And, uh, will do you a passable job of it so you don't even have to kind of go through the lightweight technical lifting that we used to. So it's kind of like we used to have these lovely little walking paths, uh, and we walked everywhere and it was slow going, but we loved the scenery and somebody built a giant superhighway through. And now we have lots and lots and lots of people going on the superhighway, um, getting to where they're going mostly, uh, not looking at the scenery. Um, but that doesn't actually stop us from kind of continuing the side paths. It's that we're mostly regretting that there's so many people who are coming through so fast that they're not getting to experience the little side paths, they're not getting to experience the little gardens, they're just kind of like rushing through. Um, but it hasn't actually stopped all the little side paths from existing. It's mostly a wistfulness of gosh, I miss when mostly we were just little side paths and we didn't kind of hear the, the overwhelming rushing of the traffic going past us.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. And there was more people to run into on the side paths and have conversations with. How do you, how do you lure them back?
Kate Compton: This is that sort of casual creativity. It's look for the places where people are doing weird little creative, like weird little creative things for each other. Um, one of the big ones is Roblox. Kids are making just extremely weird little love letters via, ah, strange obstacle courses to each other and to strangers. Um, this is great. One of my friends had a lovely birthday party where, uh, their birthday party, they took a bunch of friends into Roblox, um, and they would only visit abandoned uh, birthday sites from other Roblox users. And so it's just a tour of like welcome to Timmy's seventh birthday. And just kind of this frozen in time moment of some kid building for their friends exactly what they thought the ultimate birthday zone was and just kind of jumping from abandoned birthday party to abandoned birthday party.
Scott Lowell: Oh, like a weird Roblox anthropology tour.
Alana Fish: Yeah, People love to hate on Roblox, uh, in Minecraft. But I do see also the casual creativity that comes from that. Also that it's building there is pretty easy, much easier than creating something in the real world. Um, and so it does open up possibilities. And I've seen that in kids. Like you know, some of them are interested in playing the zombie game, but some of them are interested in creating a building and that's what they're excited about.
Scott Lowell: Yeah, I spend a lot of uh, time over Christmas, uh, playing Minecraft with my nephew and yeah, just like the creativity that he shows and like the weird, I mean he's a weird kid. I love he's a weird kid.
Alana Fish: I don't know where that comes from. It's weird that somebody in your family would be weird.
Scott Lowell: It's not genetic.
Kate Compton: All kids are weird little grandpas. I can probably say.
Alana Fish: I know. It's too bad we convinced them to stop being weird.
Scott Lowell: Yeah, it's a shame we lose that.
Alana Fish: Yeah.
Scott Lowell: Uh, so you mentioned weird little creations and uh, I did want to talk because one of the projects you talked on, you talked about it is you had worked on the uh, character creator for Spore. It's my understanding and I mean for people who aren't familiar, Spore was a video game about evolution, uh, and uh, creating new creatures and the creature. I mean I personally skipped a lot of classes in my first year of university playing with the creature creator in Spore. So I'd just love to hear about how you came to work on that project and what that was like creating this tool that other people could create things with.
Kate Compton: Just really amazing. That was what I did a lot of at, uh, Georgia Tech when I was there. Um, and then we had this cool speaker come in, Will Wright, who had this new video game that he was pitching called Spore, which was, hey, what if we use procedural content generation, which again, there was almost nobody doing at the time. Um, what if we use it for a whole video game that's funded by Electronic Arts?
Alana Fish: Ah.
Kate Compton: So I was really excited. Um, I managed to get an internship on it where I was doing special effects for generating, um, uh, Interstellar Nebula. So how could I make a little recipe for generating H2 nebula and stellar Nebula and all these kinds of different phenomena? Um, so then I went back for a full time gig. Um, I actually never worked on the creature creator itself. Uh, I worked on the planet generation.
Scott Lowell: Okay.
Kate Compton: Um, so I made a lot of planets. Uh, but I also saw a lot of the people using the creature creator. And that was, it was really interesting to see how much kind of pride and ease people felt making these creatures. We would often get wonderful situations where, um, a kid would come in wanting to make Pikachu. You come in wanting to make Pikachu. It does not make Pikachu. Well, but very soon you've got like, branching arms and you are making something very far away from Pikachu into the monsterverse. And you're really proud of it and share it with all your friends. And then you're like, okay, now I'm going to make Pikachu. And you're immediately back into the monster space. You never know where you're going to get to, but you're always happy you got there. Uh, and that was a really beautiful thing to watch kids and, uh, adults do. And we got some handwritten letters of people saying, hey, I'd written myself off creatively. Um, but this game, specifically the creature creator, made me feel creative again. So I thought that was really fascinating. Um, but a bunch of our, we had a whole lot of other editors in the game. So in our expansion you could edit the planets. Um, so using the same tools that I used to make the original planets, you could make games. Um, you could make spaceships, you could make all sorts of stuff, but people didn't feel the same intensity of, I'm proud of this. And in fact, our, our adventure creator, which should have been a smash hit, right? It's okay. Now I can use Now I can use all my weird little creatures and I can have them, I can make a video game around them. So very rudimentary Roblox kind of situation. Except that with the creatures, everything you made felt like a joyful, wonderful, perfect monster. In the game editor, everything you made was broken. So it's like, uh, oh, I'm falling through the landscape, I can't get to the exit. I like, I've spent an hour making this thing only to test it out and it's not even playable. So many people never even like play tested their, their levels.
Alana Fish: So it's like the zone of proximal development. Yeah, it's like you can't be too hard, but it can't be too easy. Like there has to be some challenge to it, but also not too hard that you fall through the, the level.
Kate Compton: Yeah, yeah. Like we were, we, we had a hard time even getting people to make levels that you could like walk through and get to the first if it was like walk through the level and pick up an object. That was often out of scope for most of the people who are making dozens of characters. Uh, so I found that just like fascinating. Like, oh my God, with the same team, how did we make something that was so different? It had such an effect on people that like we had professional creatives try to use the creature, uh, try to use the uh, adventure creator and end up saying like, uh, I guess I'm just no good at this. And then we would have these literal six year olds making Pixar armies. So it's like, okay, how did we go from totally winning it to totally losing it with the same team, with the same tools, with the same everything. And that was what I ended up trying to, uh, getting my dissertation on was, um, not only for those editors, but, uh, for every kind of casual creator trying to find the patterns of what makes some of them really great and what makes some of them really just dreadful.
Alana Fish: And so beyond just like, this is too hard. Are there other patterns you saw that make it.
Kate Compton: Um. Uh, the term that I coined in my dissertation was the Grok loop, which is, um, how long it takes you from having an idea to trying it out, to understanding how well that went. Um, this was before Grok had weirder conversations.
Alana Fish: Not named after Elon Musk's.
Kate Compton: Um, but the idea was that this is, um, if I'm, I'm a six year old using the creature creator. And so I start snapping on an arm. Okay, so I snap on an arm, I have an idea that it's Going to look good here. It doesn't. I move it, it looks better. I move it, it looks better. Move it. Looks better. I move it. Looks worse, looks better, looks worse. So I'm doing that probably 20 times per second. So 20 times per second I'm trying something out and getting feedback on it. And that lets you learn amazing things. So having a really fast grog loop where I'm trying something out and I'm immediately getting to understand whether that that was any good makes you master at things so fast. Uh, and makes you feel totally in control. Um, and it makes you feel very creatively freeze because I'm like, ah, uh, I'm going to put the arm on the head. No, that looked terrible. That was a zero cost risk. Um, you know, so people take wild creative risks without thinking twice about it. Now if I'm making a level and that level takes me 60 minutes to build, so I have to lay out all the things 60 minutes in, I start playing through it. And even the process of seeing whether or not it's any good is so grindingly slow. How long does it take to play test a game? Um, just aching amounts of time. So now you've gone from a 0.1 second Grok loop to a 2 hour Grok loop and nobody's even going to get around that. Once you feel you're uncertain. Uncertain, uncertainty. Oh, you screwed up. You screwed up. You screwed up. Oh, heck with this. I'm not going around for a second time.
Alana Fish: Exactly. You just spin right in.
Kate Compton: So nobody takes creative risks. Um, I think we're seeing on things like Roblox where they've managed to nail that much faster. Notice how many obstacle courses there are in Roblox. And uh, that's because an obstacle course is something that you kind of can't screw up. The default of an obstacle course is to be there's an entrance and an exit. Congratulations, you've won at game design. It's not a good game design, but you have a successful game design and then you could start like adding stuff, but you kind of go from valid to maybe better. Uh, and that turns out keeps people kind of in for a long time. I had a whole chapter on my dissertation of just how hard game editors are because of these slow Grokli problem.
Scott Lowell: Have there been other lessons that you've learned through your work in creating these kind of tools that tell you what types of things you should look for in a creative tool, like a creative AI tool? What elements will help people use it in creative ways?
Kate Compton: Yeah, I really Saw that expand out in kind of the social space. Um, like everyone else during the pandemic, I was really interested in how social stuff works, uh, how loneliness works, how do people create together? Um, so we were all trying to solve loneliness in our own way. Uh, so I think one of the things that made spore work really well was you could immediately share your creature.
Scott Lowell: Yeah, that seemed like a big part
Kate Compton: of it, I think. Yeah. The two major axes of how do you make a, uh, community creative scene is you have to have ease so that any doofus can make a terrible thing. Like the early web. Nobody closed their tags. Nobody is writing valid HTML in the early web. It's fine. Yeah, um, an HTML page, you can smash your face into the keyboard and you get. And it'll render as some key smash text. Like there is very little you can do to break a web page.
Scott Lowell: Dad dancing baby gif. And you're done, you're good to go.
Kate Compton: So anybody could make a web page that they felt was like enough that they wanted to show it off. And then, okay, on the early web we had a bunch of easy hosting services and we have, um, so we had GeoCities back then. There's sites like NeoCities now which are trying to do the same thing of. Anybody can post a weird little website. Um, but okay, I can make a doofus little thing. I can share my doofus little thing with my fellow doofuses. It's this kind of creativity as a connection between people. Uh, why am I making an NSYNC website? It's because my friends love NSync and I want to share it with them. Or I think that there's other people who need to know about NSync. So I'm going to make an NSYNC website and share it with them. So this sociability as a huge driver for why people create, uh, they really want to connect with other people. And it also has this wonderful thing of, okay, I see your NSync website, but I think that you really chose the wrong side, like the wrong song for your MIDI auto playing in 1997. And so I'm going to make my own NSYNC website with a better MIDI auto playing song or better pictures or pictures of the best boy in the band. So this kind of. Ah, yes. And so everybody has both an easy move to create, an easy move to share, an easy move to remix and to reshare. And then you get this wonderful engine where just people are building communities, people are trading back and forth. If one person discovers something Then flashes through, everybody else discovers something. We had a wonderful, um, we didn't ship with asymmetry on Spore, Uh, but somebody kind of tortured their creature enough that they managed to glitch it out and get an asymmetrical skeleton. They then shared that everybody else then immediately brought that into their creator. Uh, because we did this incredibly creative thing. And I really want to find out who on the team did this. But your characters on Spore were saved as a png, so you had your little image full of pixels. Uh, how do we save all the data with that? So you take all the transparent pixels around the border of it, and you use the color data of the transparent pixels to store all the data about your creature. That means that I can then have my creature in Spore, but then I can drag it out to my friend's forum, I can send it to my friend in an email, basically any place that you could put a png, then became a social network to share things back and forth. And that made that kind of engine go.
Scott Lowell: And I hadn't really thought about that. But when I'm thinking, like, AI tools that I have used, shareability doesn't really seem to be a, uh, consideration at all. Yeah, like, I can't think of any. I mean, like, you can always copy and paste. It's always, like, safe. But it seems like if it's there, it's an afterthought.
Kate Compton: Yeah.
Scott Lowell: Or like a workout.
Kate Compton: I've got a good one that I like that's called, um, Glyphosate. And Glyph is, uh, for making pipelines. So, like, okay, I want to make something that captions, uh, images to make little memes. It's like, okay, take an image, have, um, the AI detect something about that image, make up a funny caption, paste it in so you can write your kind of little script, and it'll tell you how many tokens this takes. So, like, okay, I now have a really good image captioner, and you could upload that and then other people can, uh, then edit it. So now instead of sharing our Spore creatures, we're sharing our AI pipelines. And this has caused kind of a nice little micro community there, where you now have some really funny ones. There's a wonderful talk by Darius Kazami called Platform is Shitpost, where he makes the argument that the speed of posting determines, uh, whether or not you can shitpost on any platform. And to shitpost is to post something so quickly that it is still funny by the time you finish posting. It.
Scott Lowell: Yeah.
Kate Compton: So Infinite Scream was probably only funny for the five minutes that Nora Reed spent making it. But because they posted it that quickly, then Infinite Scream could kind of discover its life. Um, so one of the funniest ones on Glyph is somebody made, you know, like the Bayou tapestry memes, where it's like old timey medieval illustration and then there's like a medieval caption underneath it that's saying something funny about modern life.
Scott Lowell: Yes. Okay.
Alana Fish: Yeah, I think I know what you're talking about.
Kate Compton: There's a famous one that's like the hold the field where I sew my. It is barren.
Alana Fish: I've seen that one.
Scott Lowell: Yes. Now I know what you're talking about.
Kate Compton: Yeah, so somebody made one of those and it's like, okay, that's great, because that is not something that, like, OpenAI is not going to come up with. The, like, we've put a team of five PhDs on the biotapestry meme Generator, but somebody was able to shit post this. But now also because it's a social network, somebody can then say, oh, that's great. But you know what I love is like, 19th century French impressionist paintings. I want to do the French impressionist painting Meme Generator. And then you can copy that and then you can send it to a friend and be like, okay, you have to run. Like, we both love French impressionist paintings. You have to run the French impressionist meme generator. So again, it's that, like, ease of making, ease of sending, ease of remixing, and that starts the engine turning over.
Alana Fish: And I think it also comes back to intent getting in the way of intent. That, like, my intent can, like, last long enough to come back around the Grok loop. And then, like, sharing it is also, like, it's easy for me to share my intent with you, the intent behind the idea.
Scott Lowell: One thing I was kind of curious about is when you're. You're kind of using these tools and doing the remixing and things like that, does that change the feeling of ownership that somebody has over. Over what's created?
Kate Compton: That's a good question. I, um, think it's that there's so many different niches and so many different kinds of creativity that you let people self define their creativity. So if I make you a mixtape, I still feel ownership of that mixtape. It's a different ownership than if I had recorded you five terrible songs of my own. Um, but I still feel like when I give you the mixtape, I never say, Shania Twain made this. I say, I made this. For you. And there's always little moments of kind of ownership where I put my name and your name on it. I draw a little picture on the mixtape. These kinds of little like, okay, I'm declaring ownership by kind of marking this up in some way and putting a sticker on it. I, uh, think we see this a lot. Um, things, uh, like Pinterest boards. Um, I have not made anything on my Pinterest boards, but I feel like I've made my Pinterest boards. So this kind of curation, um, and I think we're seeing this a lot now, is these different. Another thing that makes these ecosystems work is having a curator role where somebody can say, ah, these are my top, uh, spore creatures. These are my top, um, glyph image captioning bots that I thought were really funny. These are my top Twitter bots. And so then I can start. Can you mixtape that? Uh, can somebody make an art gallery of it?
Scott Lowell: Yeah. Like, anybody could have done this with this tool, but I am the one who did it this specific way.
Kate Compton: You need vanishingly little interactivity, uh, for somebody to feel like they've made a creative choice. Sometimes it's just. Sometimes it's just being able to leave a caption on something like retweets as a form of creativity is important. If you can only retweet without a caption, people wouldn't feel like they owned it. But if you can put a caption on it, suddenly you feel like you've owned your retweet.
Alana Fish: Uh, that's my best Tweets are hilarious. Quote retweets. Right. That's some of the loveliness that comes out of social media.
Scott Lowell: Well, I mean, I think that's because. I mean, I think even if you look past technology, I mean, a lot of. I would say sometimes the best art that has been done has been our reaction to somebody else's.
Alana Fish: Um, a remix, if you will.
Scott Lowell: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Kate Compton: Yeah, I don't enjoy it, but the whole, like, TikTok genre of somebody, like, emotionally reacting to another TikTok.
Alana Fish: Right.
Scott Lowell: Yeah.
Kate Compton: They 100% feel like they've created that TikTok. That's just them making extreme faces at somebody else's TikTok.
Scott Lowell: Yeah, it obviously connects with something because, yeah, like, they. They do get watched. And.
Kate Compton: And again, it may be one of those things where this art on its own does, uh, nothing. This art, when it's made by your friend. Um, and you know what they're making a face about, because this is just like, your life Suddenly again, you've been given a mixtape and you found a pile of mixtapes in a thrift store, and you're like, I don't get what this genre was about.
Alana Fish: Right. But it hits different if it's from somebody and you have some sort of shared history and you're sort of making a comment about that history that nobody else would get. It's sort of like an exclusivity thing too.
Kate Compton: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I. If I took all of your discord reacts and put them in a gallery, probably, uh, most people would not find it very compelling. But I love.
Alana Fish: I would love it. Yeah, I would. I would walk through that for sure.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. It's been a great conversation, and I think we're kind of wrapping up here. But one thing I wanted to ask you is, like, are there any areas of creativity that you think are kind of unexplored with AI now that you think it might. Might have like, a really positive impact in the future?
Kate Compton: Yeah, that's a good question. Like, what could AI unlock? That's not. And again, I would come back to what's hard now that you would never share.
Alana Fish: Right. Uh, it's closing that grok loop.
Kate Compton: Yeah, yeah. What would I never make a mixtape for my friends of now that AI might make easy. Um, I think we're seeing a little bit of video. Although video is not as much fun as I think many people hoped it would be. Um, so we can send each other little generated video snippets, and yet we don't see ourselves doing that.
Scott Lowell: Yeah, sure.
Kate Compton: It's like, okay, there's something that is not, I don't know, acoustic enough about this, uh, for lack of a better word, like, there's something that, like, putting a sticker on top of a meme is enough. And yet making a lavishly rendered 22nd Star wars video is not. Um, I'd love to see, like, also people who aren't cool teens. So, you know, I loved Pokemon Go. Um, Pokemon Go was super fun. It made me, like, walk around towns, find different art that I had never explored before. Because you open up Pokemon Go, and it'll show you all the different, um, locations that people have tagged.
Scott Lowell: Yeah.
Kate Compton: But I always wanted, like, it's like, okay, you know, I don't actually have any connection to the franchise. Um, there are these little monsters. But mostly what I. What I want to do is, like, walk around and see civic art. Um, so could somebody make this for, like, you know, elderly folks who don't get out much, um, to get them to you know, they know their town, they know what interesting stuff there is. Granddad really wants to tell you a story about this tree. Could you have something such that Granddad could shitpost something interesting about this part of his town? And everyone in the town gets to see what that is, and then maybe somebody else riffs off of it and Granddad sees that, ah, uh, not only did he get engaged at this tree, but these are all the other people who also got engaged at that tree or all the other moments that, you know, that this had. So what are the things that everyday people, kind of having everyday life experiences, wouldn't be able to share about their world? Is there any way that AI can help us connect with that and then get the heck out of the way? So it's not an experience about AI, it's just a tool to help you to help Granddad shitpost about trees.
Scott Lowell: Wonderful. Yeah. I wish that I had, uh, had spent more time hearing my grandfather shit post about trees. Thank you very much for joining us. It was. It was fantastic talking to you and getting a real. A real different perspective on all kinds of stuff. Creativity, shareability.
Alana Fish: Yeah. I think it's been really energizing too, and makes me want to go out and do some more creative things. So I hope that our audience also feels that. Yeah, I hope they feel the intent.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. And if they do, I hope they share. Let us know. Like, yeah, right. Does this conversation inspire you? And you're like, I'm gonna go make this bot.
Alana Fish: Right.
Scott Lowell: We'd love to see them.
Alana Fish: Yeah.
Kate Compton: The best advice I ever got was to, uh, is for a video game jam. It was to make a game as a love letter to another person. So.
Scott Lowell: Oh, uh, don't.
Kate Compton: Don't pick a weird thing that you're going to make. Pick a person and then figure out what you would use to send the strangest love letter to them.
Scott Lowell: M. Okay. Wow. That's a great way.
Alana Fish: Okay, I'm going to take that away.
Scott Lowell: Well, thank you very much, Kate. Uh, it's been great talking to you.
Kate Compton: Likewise. Thank you so much.
Alana Fish: I'm so glad we can make this work. I was so inspired by talking to Kate, and I want to go out and be more creative. It's actually one of my New year's resolutions for 2026 is to try to get some creativity in my life to create with my kids. They're so full of creative, kooky energy and capturing that and making art together is one of the things I want to do this year. So this was really invigorating yeah.
Scott Lowell: She's one of those people that when you talk to her, you're just like, I want to get me a paintbrush. And I just want to go, yeah.
Alana Fish: Or like, yeah, just the. The love of kooky, creative. Whatever you. Whatever you got is what I want. I love that energy.
Kate Compton: Yeah.
Scott Lowell: If you out there were also inspired.
Alana Fish: Yeah.
Scott Lowell: I mean, let us know. Like, uh, did you create something after this conversation? What was it? Share it with us. You could find us on. On social media. You can send us an email.
Alana Fish: Put in the comments.
Scott Lowell: Put in the comments. We would absolutely love to see what you're creating.
Alana Fish: And, you know, I bet Kate would, too. I bet she'll drop into the comments if. If there's some cool creative ideas.
Scott Lowell: Oh, yeah, we'll definitely let her know.
Alana Fish: Yeah. Or it turns out she's on Blue sky, so hit her up over there. Yeah.
Scott Lowell: Yeah. And, uh, you know, if you want to see more about what we're doing here on the podcast, the best way to do that is to subscribe. You can find us on Spotify, you can find us on Apple podcasts, or we also have a video of every episode up on YouTube.
Alana Fish: Yeah. And if you're on YouTube, hit. Hit the like. And also leave us some comments. As we said, we love to hear what you think of our episodes in the Absol. So with that, I'm Alana Fish.
Scott Lowell: I'm Scott Lilwall.
Alana Fish: And this has been approximately correct.
Other episodes covering the same guests and topics, from across The B2B Podcast Index.
NICOLE PIKE - YOU GOV, Global Head of Sport. The data behind the world of sports; the evolution of video games research; valuing the e-sports audience; using AI without smearing data provenanceInsights, Marketing & Data · on Roblox86 / 100
Why the Future of Video Games is Moving Back to the Dinner TableThis Week in Startups · on Roblox75 / 100
Why Giving Your Product Away for Free Can Skyrocket Your Business From Zero to 2 MillionsFounders Podcast · on Procedural Content Generation67 / 100
Stock Talk Podcast Episode 339KeyStone’s Stock Talk · on Roblox60 / 100
What Fortnite taught Fortune 100 CEOs about their global customersIn Other Words · on Roblox59 / 100
The US banned Anthropic's Fable 5 release, but the numbers don't seem to careEquity · on Roblox56 / 100
What AI can teach us about how our brains map our world, with Quinn Lee and Marlos C. Machado | Approximately Correct Podcast86 / 100AI and Economics: Twins Separated at Birth? with Kevin Leyton-Brown (Live from Upper Bound 2026)79 / 100Behind the Scenes of Upper Bound With Stephanie Enders | Approximately Correct Podcast47 / 100Should AI be your Study Buddy? with Kowalchuk | Approximately Correct Podcast77 / 100Amii Rewind: Can AI Predict Survival? With Russ Greiner - Dec. 2024