Tommy Lee

Filmmaker | Award-winning Creative Director

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

You don’t really know your neighbourhood until you know the best route to walk home to maximize shade at any given time of day.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

@JohnathanBi Hahahahaha 😂

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

@KingDSky Looks absolutely phenomenal

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

The shift from a Casey Neistat gold standard to Mr. Beast really maps the eras of YouTube

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

@KingDSky Does Sinners cook?

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

Me reading a piece that's been on my list for a while and coming out the other side with 20 new essays to read.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

In a decade, our best schools could be the sci-fi equivalent of Hogwarts.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

Kinda crazy to think it wasn't possible to play a song on repeat until CD players in 1982.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

The frontier starts where the tutorials end.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

The next decade will be a golden age in concert visuals.

[Nicolas Neubert @iamneubert]

Welcome to a new frontier of generative storytelling.

Gen-4 is available now.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

Everytime I discover a band with new sound + discography of great albums I've never tapped into, I glimpse how steep the dopamine spike must've been for the archeologists who first excavated pyramids.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

This is the best description I've read of what is truly 'generative' in the creative process of AI visuals.

[Nick St. Pierre @nickfloats]

We need to shift from “prompting” as command to “prompting” as conversation, or better, as collaboration.

The goal isn’t “prompt adherence," it’s idea fidelity over time. And ideas don’t arrive fully formed.

They're fluid, layered, and often abstract until they’re not. So expecting a single line of text to contain that entire arc is reductive.

What we actually want is:
> a fluid visual sandbox, not a rigid prompt interpreter
> Tools that listen loosely, evolve quickly, and allow us to shape things in the moment
> multimodal control, where words, images, gestures, and sketches can all be inputs
> a system that prioritizes responsiveness and flexibility, not perfect single-shot generations

It’s no longer about writing the perfect prompt, it’s about building a creative workflow that invites exploration.

The real magic comes when you can combine:
> a rough idea
> visually driven style tuning
> a base image to inpaint/edit
> some words to nudge direction
> a bit of chaos to surprise you

…and iterate.

A text prompt becomes just one of many levers in a wider ecosystem of co-creation

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

All the “ChatGPT just destroyed Midjourney” chatter is starting to remind me of Drake before Kendrick detonated. Strongly believe v7 will be Not Like Us.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

Really lucked out having the upward curve of chores in my life align so beautifully with the golden era of podcasts.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

This might be the single most actionable + essential video @david_perell and I have made. Can't think of anyone in my life below age of retirement who wouldn't benefit from watching it.

[David Perell @david_perell]

I've spent hours and hours thinking about how AI is going to change writing. This is a 90-minute distillation of everything I've learned.

Some things I believe:

1. The combination of LLM-driven humor and image generation means that we're about to enter the golden age of memes.

2. The best writers will be fine. Robert Caro and Dostoevsky aren’t about to be disrupted by ChatGPT.

3. What are the different models like? ChatGPT is your friend who makes a lot of good points, but it’s kinda boring, Claude is your hippie friend who loves to get vulnerable but takes the whole “express yourself” thing a little too far, and Grok is your unhinged friend who leans a little too hard into tinfoil hat theories, but is always a trip to jam on ideas with.

4. People who say that AI writing is low-quality aren’t realizing that quality exists along two dimensions: (1) the absolute quality of the writing and (2) how tailored the writing is to your interests at the time.

5. I’ll tell you this: What writers are doing with AI behind closed doors is a long way ahead of what's publicly understood. I don't expect this to change anytime soon because of the social stigma associated with AI-enhanced writing. Because of that, if you want to see the cutting edge, you're gonna have to piece things together through private conversations and group chats.

6. If you want to follow what's happening in AI, remember this quote from William Gibson: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” You can get a glimpse of the future by looking at how a small percentage of writers are already using AI.

7. I’m bearish on writers who are currently using AI to write for them, and bullish on writers who are currently using AI to write with them.

8. What kinds of writing will continue to be written by humans? Ones that speak to our humanity. People are interested in people. Their stories, their struggles, their emotions, their drama.

9. Almost all utilitarian writing, where the goal is to convey information, not do it beautifully, will be written by AI.

10. In some ways, AI is the end of slop. So many Google search results are slop. LinkedIn posts are slop. The way Twitter got taken over by Threadbois in 2021 was also slop. AI-generated writing is already better than all of those things, so why would you read them now?

11. AI will be tougher on writers than readers. Readers will be exposed to some slop, but the Internet will be good about filtering it out. Writers, though, are now competing against ever-improving LLMs, which are getting better and better by the month.

12. Humans will contribute with unique data or perspectives. The famous Peter Thiel interview question doubles as a good writing prompt: “What very important truth do few people agree with you on?”

13. New technologies breed new kinds of art. Ever notice how flat 13th or 14th century Medieval art looks? And how different that art looks from the Renaissance art created in the 15th and 16th centuries? Technical innovations like the camera obscura and perspective grids are behind this. Similarly profound changes will come to the writing world because of AI (credit to @jmrphy for the idea here).

14. Satya Nadella says: “The new workflow for me is I think with AI and work with my colleagues.” When it comes to discovering ideas, I've also found that jamming with an LLM is more productive than doing it with most people I know (save for a few giga-brain conversationalists).

15. Thought experiment: Will AI-writing be more like music or chess? With music, we don't care how a song is made. We just want it to be good. With chess, there's a huge market for watching human beings play even though the computers are already better. I think non-fiction writing will go the way of music. People won’t care how it was made. They’ll just care that it’s good.

16. AI has flipped the rules of tech adoption. Seasoned managers usually drag their feet with adopting new technology, but the ones I know love AI, while frontline workers struggle to see the point. My theory is that AI matches how managers already operate. Management has always been a kind of prompt engineering: set a vision, delegate, give feedback, iterate. But LLMs remove the drama that used to come with having a team. No 1-on-1s. No emotional tangles. It's like management without the headache. For frontline employees, things are different. They aren't as accustomed to setting a vision and giving feedback, so LLM prompting is a daunting and unfamiliar kind of work for them.

17. AI editors are already quite good. Sure, they aren’t as good as the world’s best editors, but they’re a fraction of the cost, they’ll instantly give you 80th percentile feedback, and they work 24/7. As a novelist recently said to me: “Paying an editor to review my novel costs me $7,000 and a 4-6 week turnaround time, whereas Claude costs me $1.25 and gets me results a few minutes later.” The edits definitely aren’t as good, but there’s a virtue to speed (and this guy isn’t a chump writer).

18. The way AI-skeptics hate on LLMs while using old models is like driving a ‘92 Honda while hating on a self-driving Tesla.

19. AI-generated fiction makes people very upset. A friend insists it’s like having sex with a robot. Doesn’t matter how good it is. It ain’t human-generated, and there’s something uniquely repulsive about that.

I’ve shared the full conversation below. It’s a solo-episode of me riffing on what I’ve learned about AI for ~90 minutes. If you’d rather watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple or Spotify, I’ve shared the links in the reply tweets.

And if you have any questions, I’ll be extra active in the replies for this episode.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

2025 will do for instant personalized illustrations what the smartphone did for photography. We're entering the selfie era of design.

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

If the singularity actually happens in a good way, I reckon it'll feel something like this...

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

@SchrodingrsBrat What's better about it?

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

@nabeelqu @tylercowen 12/10 😂😂

[Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee]

Final frontier of AI is when I can prompt a meal and then 3D print it Spy Kids style.