Alberta Tech on what AI gets right and where it still falls short for creators

Alberta Tech, welcome to Mashable's VidCon booth

Thank you so much for having me. Yes, I'm so excited that you're here. How's your VidCon been

Oh, it's been amazing, but in equal parts overwhelming. Yeah, there's a lot

How many times have you been to VidCon? Zero. Oh, so this is your first? My first time, yeah

Okay, so you're really taking it all in. I'm taking it all in. Oh, hey. Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your creator journey

Yeah. And I know that you've had a very successful career as a software engineer

previous to your creator career. What made you want to start making content

Yeah, so I started making content during COVID. I was just bored at home. Yeah, of course

And I was like, I want to be making jokes on TikTok because everybody I know is scrolling TikTok right now

and making jokes on TikTok. Yeah. And so I just started off making really silly jokes

about whatever would land. I'd make jokes about like living in a tiny New York apartment

during COVID, like anything I could. And then as time progressed, I found my community more and more through tech

through software developers specifically. and at that time I was working as a software engineer at Google and so that

was sort of like what my daily life was all about and it sort of grew from there

Yeah, so you kind of built your audience which is so important. I've been talking

to a lot of creators here at VidCon and it seems like building a community is

essential to really breaking through and it sounds like tech is what resonated

most. So how did you balance kind of your career at Google with being a

content creator? Yeah, well for a long time I was doing both until just a

couple months ago. So I loved working in my job. I was working specifically on YouTube

which obviously is very important to me now. And so I loved being able to build features for YouTube

But at a certain point, I also realized that to be able to take this really seriously and to be

able to make the kind of content, the high quality bar that I wanted to hit, I needed to do this

full time. Yeah. And what was that moment like for you? Were you a little nervous about going

full-time or? Totally. I was so nervous to tell my boss. She was like, are you sure about this

And I was like, I'm pretty sure I've been thinking about this for a long time. Yeah that amazing Do you think your career as an engineer kind of helped you build trust with your audience 100 Especially in the tech space Yeah I think it super important My audience now is like just over half software engineers developers

And so I think to speak to that group of people, you need to have some kind of credential behind you

You need to know what you're talking about. Now, I didn't talk about my career at Google specifically online almost ever because I didn't want to get fired mostly

That's a valid reason. Very valid. But I think the way I was talking about the topics and the things that I was referencing made my audience know that I truly did have a career in this

Yeah. So I know your videos often satirize AI, generative AI especially

And I know you've said, though, that you're kind of cautiously optimistic. Obviously, as your previous life as an engineer, it's probably pretty helpful

So what makes you feel that way? So I would say, you know, when generative AI first started becoming popular, I was so, so skeptical of it

I don't know if you've heard like the term stochastic parrot of just the idea that the LLM is just, you know, saying the next most plausible thing

Yes. I was like, everyone thinks these things are genius, but they're kind of spewing garbage

And in late 2022, they were kind of spewing garbage. Yeah. But I have been really impressed by the progress that I've seen, and I've seen AI used for actually very useful and good things

And now it's a part of a lot of my workflows. And so it has made me optimistic to what the future can bring

Obviously, it has evolved so much. And in many ways, I'm sure it can be very helpful for creators

I've sat in on a few panels this weekend. Every panel has mentioned AI and its usefulness, the tools that creators can use to help with their content

to help with their administrative tasks. So what do you think AI is good at for creators

and what is it kind of still terrible at? Yeah, I use AI a lot for researching

and I think that can be really useful because obviously you shouldn't be trusting facts blindly

that you get from AI, but it can show you which paths to go down

This happens to me all the time where I asking AI about a topic I want to cover and then I seeing I didn even know about this backstory and now I going to be able to go down a rabbit hole here I think that is amazing Where I still not 100 convinced is the creativity aspect of it I know people will

try all the time to write out a script using chat GPT. I have never had that work for me

I can have it give feedback and say this is not a good fact. This is spelled wrong

but whenever I say generate a funny script not not quite it's not quite there yet so I want to

talk to you about vibe coding because I feel like it is this big tech buzzword we've been

writing about it seeing it for years now but it's kind of evolved into like this real like

the internet's perception of it is like so not what it probably really is so I'd really want to

know like what's been your experience with my coding as an engineer who probably actually uses

it? Yeah. So it's interesting because for software engineers, the word vibe coding has become such a

dirty word. People really don't want to be called a vibe coder. Yeah. But the word, as you mentioned

has evolved a lot. So like when it first came out, it truly meant typing into Chachukati, Claude

whatever, like build me a website, don't look at it at all. And you just blindly trust that code

Now a lot of developers have tools that fit into their workflows. And so they can actually look at

that code, know what's going on, or give very specific instructions as to what they want

the AI to do. And so it has evolved a lot, not just blindly trusting that code, but becoming part of basically

every programmer, every software engineer's workflow. We don't have a great word to describe that process

I've heard agentic engineering used before, but it's not a very popular colloquial word

I will say. I know in New York, there's an event called VibeCon

Oh, I heard about this. Yeah, and I was like, okay, Vibecon. Sounds lit

It does sound lit. But probably, you know, to be there would be a different thing. Yeah

You know, I know you are now a full-time creator, but I would love to know how your past career

kind of helped you in your job as a creator, and also like maybe as how your job as a creator helped you as an engineer Ooh good question I would say my job as an engineer has definitely helped me as a creator in that I talking about technical

topics and I had six and a half years of experience, like really delving into those technical topics

And so I, I don't know every topic that comes up in the news, but I know how to look into those. I

know how to think about them, how to conceptualize them. Um, and then also in a, in a boring way

working in corporate for a long time helped me stay on top of emails, stay on top of my calendar

know how to do all those not so fun things, but very important things. I would say as a creator

what really helped me in my career as an engineer is being able to communicate and being able to

talk about these more technical topics in ways that are easy to understand. We talk about

authenticity a lot and it's become a little bit of a performance these days. You can perform

authenticity, but I feel like really being authentic to yourself as a creator is really

having intention behind what you're creating. Yeah. Right. Totally. So what excites you most

about tech right now? It could be actual tech. It could be trends. What's inspiring your content

lately? Oh, interesting. I think that like all of the new model releases, everything that's going

on with like Claude Fable and all of that stuff is uncomfortably exciting. As I, as I say, um

Because we are really on the precipice of like this really intelligent AI and everyone is paying attention

And these used to be topics that were so small and like only appealed to a small group of like very technical people

But it's now something that is in the news every day. Everyone is talking about it

What's your advice to creators who are maybe just starting or, you know, they're thinking about, oh, should I quit my job to go full time like you just did

Like, do you have any advice? Yeah. My advice to new creators is that in a lot of cases, your audience doesn't really care about you as a person

And so you kind of have to make them care about you. And I would say, like, until you can find that thing that makes them care about you

like the value that you're providing, the entertainment that, like, really hooks, you have to keep trying

Don't quit your job until you find that thing