Intertwining AI and creativity with Sophie Deen

Sophie Deen is a multifaceted entrepreneur, children's author and dedicated advocate for the ethical use of AI. She runs Bright Little Labs, an award-winning kids media company that focuses on education in twenty-first century digital skills, such as computer science, coding and critical thinking. 

In this episode, host Matt Moseley talks to Sophie about creating stories to educate and empower children, her creative use of AI and why AI literacy is essential for all. 

Website: www.sophiedeen.com

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Transcript

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Matt: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Teach, Inspire, Create podcast. I'm your host, Matt Mosley, Chief Examiner for art and design at UAL Awarding Body. Each episode I speak to artists and creative [00:00:15] industry leaders about their experience of teaching and being taught, who or what inspires them and how they explore creativity in their work with the hope of showing you that there are infinite ways to be creative in the arts.

Today, my guest is Sophie [00:00:30] Deen. Sophie is a multifaceted entrepreneur, children's author and dedicated advocate for the ethical use of AI. She runs Bright Little Labs, an award-winning kids media company that focuses on education in twenty-first century digital [00:00:45] skills, such as computer science, coding and critical thinking. In this episode, I'm going to be talking to Sophie about creating stories to educate and empower children, her creative use of AI and why AI literacy is essential for all. 

[00:01:00] There is a transcript available for this episode. Please click the link in the episode description so you can read as you listen. 

Matt: Hello, Sophie.

Sophie: Hello. 

Matt: Thank you very much for joining us today on the Teach, Inspire, Create podcast. 

Sophie: Thank you [00:01:15] for having me.

Matt: All right. It's wonderful to have you here today. So, we always start the interview by taking our interviewee backwards in time to kind of where maybe an early sort of memory or experience that sort of started you on your [00:01:30] journey to where you are today. Is there something that sort of sticks out? 

Sophie: I mean, I really had a good time at school. I've got like mixed feelings about my school. I had fun. And so, I have lots of memories of sort of having fun, uh, with my friends and, you know, testing boundaries and being a kid, but [00:01:45] I wasn't particularly academic, or at least not in the way that the school sort of being academic. And I just didn't really fit into the, sort of, everyone needs to get straight A's. And I wanted to do art actually, so I wasn't naturally [00:02:00] good at anything or I'm not sure if I was, but within that system I definitely wasn't. It was a very sort of academically focused school and so they didn't let people take art unless you were guaranteed 10 A-star GCSEs or something, which wasn't that abnormal for my school, [00:02:15] but they were like, you're definitely notgetting that, you need to concentrate on something important. So, art was, from the get go, a sort of nice to have, not something that was valued. 

Matt: So it wasn't like, art wasn't. You had to sort of prove your ability to access art [00:02:30] through all these other academic subjects. 

Sophie: We did take art in primary, but when you had to pick your GCSEs, I guess I must have been 14. I don’t know, I'm not very good. I should tell you that I'm really dyslexic and everything I say to do with time might be wrong. 

Matt: That's fine. 

Sophie: Just take it all with a pinch of salt. But whenever we [00:02:45] had to choose GCSEs, I really wanted to do art. And again, like it was the only subject where I felt like I had something positive to contribute and that was a nice feeling but I wasn't allowed to take it. Which was such a shame because actually it's the only subject that I was showing any promise in I think. [00:03:00] Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah. That's a real missed opportunity on behalf of the school. So you kind of jettison out of school at the end of it and then what's next? Did you go on to a degree or? 

Sophie: Well when I got to 16, so my school had a sixth form, but when [00:03:15] I was 16, they asked if I wouldn't come back which was fine by me and again, like it's a really weird because I actually have a lot of fond memories of my school It wasn't that I had a bad time there, but I didn't I just didn't fit in with the sort of ethos. Don't ask questions put your head down [00:03:30] and do what we tell you to do. And I was like, but why should I do that?

Matt: Yeah.

Sophie: I went to a college next that was for sixth formers It was completely different you could wear whatever you want and everyone was free to do whatever they wanted and I loved it.

Matt: Yeah.

Sophie: It was like super fun. And then I went [00:03:45] to Uni I come from a family Where we're sort of, I think, third or fourth generation and me and my brother were the first people in our family to go to a higher education. And so there was a lot of sort of feeling that being a lawyer, a doctor or an accountant was the path. [00:04:00] And lawyer sort of suited me best, I think. I can't count and I can't stand other people's blood. I don't mind it that much. And alsoI'm not smart enough to be a doctor.

Matt: Yeah, you have two options and there's definitely less blood in lawyering, isn't there?

Sophie: And so I went down [00:04:15] that path and studied law at university. Which actually was, for me, really, really boring. And I don't think I knew then that you could take a subject that you were interested in.

Matt: Oh, okay. 

Sophie: As an immigrant family, you sort of want to assimilate as quickly as possible. 

Matt: Right, yeah, yeah. 

Sophie: And those [00:04:30] sorts of jobs, I think, are, feel like fast tracks to assimilation and also to money. Like, they just pay well. And again, you come from a background where that's, that's a real worry. And so, yeah, I totally see why that was a path. But yeah, it wouldn't have occurred to me that [00:04:45] it was, that there was any point to take something interesting like philosophy. 

Matt: Yeah, that you're  passionate about and that you actually kind of want to really want to immerse yourself in for three years. 

Sophie: I took my LPC and then I worked at a law firm as a paralegal up until the point where I was going to start my training contract. But by [00:05:00] that point I'd been there for two years as a paralegal. Training contract would have been another two years and it was a really good and serious law firm. And I am, um, I'm not a good or serious person.

I really loved it there again, like I had [00:05:15] loads of fun and I learned so much. I was surrounded by really smart people and it was just good. It was interesting, but it was quite obvious, at least to me, that that wasn't what I wanted to do. So serious. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Sophie: Get that feeling like when you're in a library and you want to do something silly all day, [00:05:30] every day.

Matt: Yes. Yeah. I will. Yeah. It's a familiar feeling for me.

Sophie: I really cared about it. It sounds so. But I really cared [00:05:45] about having a positive impact on the world and I still do.

Matt: Yeah, sure. 

Sophie: And I don't know, I think I just realised that I wanted to work with kids. And at that point I was thinking, well how can I transfer maybe to be like a social worker or something like that. At which point I realized that my law degree was like super [00:06:00] useless.

Matt: Right.

Sophie: In my transition because you needed to, I think you needed to have taken, you know, A different sort of degree for it to have counted. So I was like, uh, my law degree and my LPC just didn't count towards that shift. And so I looked at retraining as [00:06:15] apsychotherapist. I was going to be funding this myself, so I needed to find something that could work around my working, and I could still earn money. And that route felt like it would open up doors into working, you know, with children in a meaningful way. I just wanted a job [00:06:30] that paid me the most money and had the flexibility for me to be studying part time, which was in a firm that aggregated the data of live sports.

Matt: All right. Okay. Interesting. [00:06:45] 

Sophie: In order to provide odds to gambling companies, it was a tech company. So this is, it was like my first introduction to tech. So they were a super technical company. 80 percent of the team were developers. I went from a [00:07:00] silver circle law firm, which was like super professional to an extremely fast growing tech startup. It was a great team and I learned so much. so much about technology and I immediately loved tech.

Matt: I mean, you know, it's super adaptable as well to go from [00:07:15] your school experience and not feeling as though you were one of the more academically strong, but then you go and do this incredibly academic thing and work in this very academic intellectual environment and then switch into tech, which is another incredibly [00:07:30] challenging industry, a lot of kind of adaptability and resilience going on. 

Sophie: Maybe. I went there to do company secretarial stuff, but as is the nature of a startup, which I now know you're there to do everything and more. I sort of love [00:07:45] that because you can take on responsibility that you might not otherwise be given. It was amazing and it's very creative. I think growing a company is extremely creative. It requires a lot of creative thinking. 

Matt: Well, it's problem solving on a massive scale, isn't it? Constantly, I guess you have [00:08:00] to, yeah, pre-empt and sort of critically analyse a whole tonne of different things and find solutions to those things in a really rapid way. So, did you complete your psychology course?

Sophie: Yeah. I [00:08:15] completed the first couple of years and then I needed to switch to more hours and went to another tech company again to work part time while I was working one day a week in a school in Wembley. And that tech company was again, [00:08:30] like fascinating, but a bit more in line with my values. So that tech company measured the performance of the internet for different regulators, which sounds super dry, but it really wasn't. So 

Matt: it must've been important though. 

Sophie: Yeah, exactly. If I don't know, if Sky [00:08:45] says you're getting X download speed, like how does anyone know if you are and who regulates whether the consumer's getting it?

And I was learning so fast about not just the infrastructure of the internet, which is interesting and important [00:09:00] because if you don't have access to the internet, then you're going to be at a disadvantage. 

Matt: Yeah, massively.

Sophie: But also sort of the skills that you need to be part of this hugely growing and interesting space.  So, seeing that the digital divides were exacerbating social divides, existing social [00:09:15] divides. And I was also seeing that I was just generally one of the few females that I ever came across in the industry. So I was going all over the world, working on strategy there and there just weren't any females in tech and I felt quite [00:09:30] strongly that it needed to be an inclusive industry and it's such a creative subject if I feel like nowadays that's a much more understandable message that to be able to code or just understand the digital world you live in is empowering and it means that you can create things [00:09:45] and be part of conversations at either things for yourself or create systems for your local community for your national for global like they're really important and creative skills.

Matt: Yeah. 

Sophie: And it's a fundamental literacy. You learn to read and write not to become a writer, although [00:10:00] great if you want to. The same way that you need to learn digital skills, not to become a coder, great if you want to, but to just understand the world that you're in. 

Matt: And not be kind of like passive or vulnerable in that world.

Sophie: Yeah, yeah.

Matt: And do you think some of that, what you were [00:10:15] saying about the under representation in tech, has that informed your future work in terms of wanting to ensure access, equality, better representation. 

Sophie: Definitely. And it wasn't just women. There were very few black people [00:10:30] in the industry. Very few women, predominantly white men. I left that company to work at CodeClub, which was a charity that was helping to introduce the computing curriculum in the UK. It was run by an amazing woman called Claire Sutcliffe, who sort of recognized that there [00:10:45] was this massive gap. I joined CodeClub and it was at the time when the UK had introduced the computing curriculum ahead of most of the other countries in the world.

And all of the teachers were like, I hate my printer. And I hate you because you have made [00:11:00] me teach this curriculum and I'm like, super busy already. And what are you, why are you doing this to me? And so we wanted to help with that learning curve to say computing is really creative. It's not about sitting in front of a screen.

It's about understanding computational thinking, breaking problems down, [00:11:15] creative problem solving. You're already teaching this in your classroom to primary school kids. It's really important and critical sort of thinking sits underneath both computing, but essentially education. And so I felt really strongly [00:11:30] that children should have access to it.

And what we were seeing is even if schools adopted it, if it wasn't adopted in the home, then it was very hard for children to sort of develop that career path because you need support at home to sort of thrive in any particular subject [00:11:45] area. We were creating classes for kids, but you don't really need to be on the internet to learn computational thinking at that age, and so we started developing sort of playbooks, or I guess franchises, but we were a charity so that people could open up chapters in their own towns wherever they were in the world, and [00:12:00] it was just a growing movement. It was great to be part of it. It's like a maker community. 

Sophie: Because of the issue I was seeing at co club [00:12:15] around the homeschool divide. The training I was doing around, like, psychotherapy with children had given me this classroom experience for a year in Wembley where half of my kids were girls and about 80-90 percent of them were brown. And they were just [00:12:30] never in their stories.

They weren't in their own media. They weren't in their books. They're never the heroes of their stories. They're never the engineers. And my fundamental thoughts about the world is that the media conditions us, like we're being conditioned all of the time. [00:12:45] And we talk especially, I'm talking maybe 10 years ago now, like we were talking a lot about the importance of representation.

Talking, talking but actually, when you were looking at the stuff that was coming out on TV, in movies, in books. 

Matt: Oh yeah, the representation was, was not there at all. 

Sophie: You [00:13:00] can't say to a child, you can be anything, but also you don't exist at the same time, if that makes sense. Or you're invisible, you're less visible.

And so while I was working at the school, I was thinking about like, digital skills being actually an essential part of opportunities and [00:13:15] engaging in society and that these kids were never seeing themselves as coders ever. Or even just scientists, like in their stories, if you were to see a female scientist, she would be like uber geek, no friends but don't worry because she's really clever and she's got science. It wasn't [00:13:30] aspirational at all. And,so, I was thinking about what can I do about this homeschool divide. I'm getting frustrated because I was thinking, you know, if you gave Disney the job of telling all children everywhere that you can be a coder and coding is exciting, or you can have computational skills, and you gave the [00:13:45] Department for Education that same job, I feel like Disney would win.

Matt: Yes. No. Yeah, definitely. 

Sophie: And I'm not trying to throw shade at the Department of Education, but like, the format is so powerful. 

Matt: And I think there's a deeper understanding of how to communicate with a child in [00:14:00] a meaningful way. Disney is very good at that, in terms of, it's been successful over the years. 

Sophie: At telling these stories. Yeah. Teaching, as you guys know much better than me, is such a different skill to sort of, or it's such a different environment to going home and watching a [00:14:15] movie with your family and then sort of taking in the messages from those movies. So, at the same time as feeling quite frustrated with the messages coming out from mainstream Hollywood, I also felt like there was a huge opportunity there.

I was thinking about Spy Stories because it's sort of, I like the idea of being a spy. 

Matt: That's cool, isn't it? 

Sophie: Yeah. Yeah. So, I [00:14:30] mean say no more. Yeah. And it was based on a lot of the kids that I was working with in Wembley. And so, what if there was a young girl from Wembley who was a hacker and she got recruited to the children's spy agency who were fighting for justice and also to find out the truth because everyone's always telling you [00:14:45] some version of the truth. What is the truth? And through her hacking skills, she would be an aspirational, punchy, adventurous, courageous young girl doing cool stuff with coding. And so that's, I left Code Club to make those stories. [00:15:00] Yeah. 

Matt: Brilliant. So of all those kind of outlets for storytelling, you chose writing. 

Sophie: I didn't on purpose. I was like, I'm going to make a cartoon. 

Matt: Right. 

Sophie: I think there was a animation studio next to us in Code Club and I asked [00:15:15] about the cost of making a cartoon and they said something like, I can't remember if this is the right number because of my number problems, but it's £3,000 a minute. And I was like, what?

That's a lot of money. 

Matt: That is a  lot of money.

Sophie: What is a 27 minute cartoon? It's more money than I have. [00:15:30] And so, once I realised how expensive it is to make a cartoon, and I think 3, 000 a minute actually isnowhere near how much it actually costs to make a sort of a high-quality cartoon. I think they were talking about like a pilot just conveying an idea.[00:15:45] 

I thought I could never do it, but because I'd come from sort of start-ups, And I understood this concept of MVP, minimum viable product. So, it's the idea that you would never make anything beautiful first. You make the [00:16:00] worst possible version that's good enough. And then you release that and then you get feedback from your users and then you start iterating on it and that's how you create a good product.

But it's also how you figure out if there's product market fit. If you go to market and everyone's like I have zero interest in this, [00:16:15] then you haven't wasted all of your time and money. You try and find different avenues to achieve that goal. And it's the same in technology. There's something in development called the waterfall approach or the agile approach. Have you heard of these approaches? 

Matt: No, no. Please explain. 

Sophie: Waterfall is. Somebody says, this is what [00:16:30] we're building, right? You have a problem and you're building for it, whatever it is. And we're going to, this is the solution. This is what we're building. And everything sort of trickles down from that top of the waterfall and agile approaches.

This is the problem that we're trying to solve, and this is the first way that we're going to try [00:16:45] and solve it, and then we'll keep iterating on it, but the North Star is the problem that we're trying to solve, not the sort of technical solution. And so I was thinking, well I definitely can't make a cartoon, for loads of reasons, but predominantly money, and so I'll make a book because that seems much cheaper.

[00:17:00] 

Matt: Right.

Sophie: And I wasn't planning to write the book either because I don't consider myself to be someone who can write but again from my startup experience. I do know how to sort of like say this is what's gonna exist. It's gonna be cool. It's gonna have these outcomes. 

Matt: You can  create the [00:17:15] vision. Yeah, and the pitch as it were.

Sophie: Exactly I've made a lot of pitches in 15 years of startups Yeah And so I did that and I put it on Kickstarter and thought that's a great MVP, right because it's a limited You It's time and cost. They just need a few pictures to show what the product would look [00:17:30] like, and it's a book. And then I'll see if there's appetite for it.

There was appetite for it. People sort of, you know, I think I came up with a slogan, which again, like I regret because I feel like it's mean on the Kardashians and it wasn't me, it was my mum. But it was teach your [00:17:45] kids to be coders, not Kardashians. Yeah. Which, like, everybody loved. 

Matt: Look, hey, it's got, yeah, it's got the sell though.

Sophie: It's got the liberation. Yeah, 

Matt: Yeah, it's good. 

Sophie: But the Kardashians, I have a huge amount of respect for. 

Matt: Well, I mean, look, they're not doing badly for themselves, are they? They are very clever, yeah. 

Sophie: But [00:18:00] I think that there was a sort of general appreciation for a message that actually coding should be much more inclusive.

That we have a problem in our economy and in our technical industries that it is excluding underrepresented people. And that's going to create[00:18:15] products that weren't as good because the more diversity you have in the creation of your product, the better the product is going to be. And so I think people really resonated with the message and starting to see that coding was an important thing for their kids to learn.

And we're in this weird generation. I don't know how old you are, but I'm in a weird generation where we [00:18:30] didn't grow up as digital natives. Our kids are growing up with it. We want to help them navigate it and feel empowered in it, especially now when there's so many risks as well as opportunities, but we also just, this just wasn't how we grew up.

Matt: Yeah, I'll totally. What you're saying about [00:18:45] this iterative development of a product,  is really reassuring to people. I think sometimes students that I've worked with in the past and lots of people, that there's an anxiety about starting something because they want to just produce the perfect thing straight away. And that there's this sort of [00:19:00] anxiety about putting something out there that is imperfect, but is a starting point. 

Sophie: Yeah, I think it's the most freeing and amazing principle that I've taken with me from tech. And there's loads of expressions in tech like fail fast. Um, that you're [00:19:15] meant to fail if you're not failing all the time and therefore learning essentially if you're happy with your product and then you've shipped too late. Like you should not wait to be happy with your product to ship, that's a bad psychology. And getting into the habit as a creative person [00:19:30] of forcing your work to be out there not good enough or it's probably it's good enough – it's just not good enough by your own by my own standards. Yeah, it's quite freeing because there's a goal. I'm doing it for a very particular reason. 

Matt: Yeah. Was it helpful when [00:19:45] you started to kind of consider your character and your pitch for this narrative to be working towards a greater goal than just the book itself? 

Sophie: Yeah, definitely, because I cared so much for the goal that I was sort of agnostic as to the route. And again, that's quite freeing. [00:20:00] Because I didn't see myself as a writer, I put an advert out on Indeed. com, which is like, the gum free of job sites, yeah. 

Matt: It’s a recruitment site.

Sophie: Yeah. And I was, and it was for an illustrator that would help me develop the Like the characters for the Kickstarter sort of pitch deck and a writer [00:20:15] that would help me come up with or develop the series.

And I met Nathan Hackett, an extraordinary, amazing illustrator who loved the vision of the characters in this book. And John Thornton, who is one of the best writers that I've ever worked with. I [00:20:30] got him fresh from a bingo hall. It was his first job. He'd just finished uni. And, um, I attracted a lot of people.

I just put the message out there and I attracted a lot of people that were aligned with this mission around media needs to change. We need more [00:20:45] representation in media. I never also wanted to write the books because my book is about a young girl called Asha Joshi. She's part of a British Indian family.

And so, I wanted it to be written with people or collaborating with people with [00:21:00] lived experience of that character in that world. And so, I wrote the book in committee with loads of people like we had and we had class, my friend Louise Kwas class would read the books And give us feedback every week on the designs Again, like this is not a normal publishing [00:21:15] route like publishing.

Matt: It's a business development like sort of approach, isn't it? As which obviously makes sense coming from your, your experience. 

Sophie: Yeah. Once we had a successful Kickstarter, I realised how hard it was to print and sell books [00:21:30] as in just even the distribution of it. And I didn't want to get into the business of sending out stuff. I still wanted to make the cartoon. So I thought I need a publisher. So I created like a secondary sort of PDF of this is the vision. This is the book. This is the size of the market. I've thought through an [00:21:45] investment deck, essentially, problem, solution, size of the market, teams to deliver it, how much it's going to cost, how much we're going to make. And again, I don't think that that's the most common approach in, in publishing, kids publishing. 

Matt: No, well, and I think it's something which [00:22:00] is a big barrier to lots of creatives out there. They have great ideas, but the idea of how to effectively bring an idea to market. 

Sophie: Yeah. 

Matt: It, those, those stages just feel so alien or they just don't have [00:22:15] that experience that they, they get stuck at the first hurdle, but obviously you'd come from a different direction. 

Sophie: And also I think that the whole industry is quite opaque. If you don't know anyone in publishing, which I didn't, then it's very hard to know how [00:22:30] to best send your manuscripts off and hope that somebody's going to read it. And I think that my approach was at the time just different and it caught people's attention.

And also I was just very lucky because the whole topic of sort of teaching kids [00:22:45] creative computing was becoming quite sort of interesting to publishers, but then when I worked with my publishers and they were amazing, they were editorially brilliant, like really helped me craft the book. This idea that there was like, it wasn't just me, there was like fifty[00:23:00] people working on the book created a much longer process of writing. Like I'm, I definitely wasn't a natural writer. I'm three books deep now and I feel a bit better about it. 

Matt: Yeah, yeah. You've got form in the, in the space. Yeah, yeah. 

Sophie: I’ve learned. It's long. I just did 28 versions of the [00:23:15] first one and I'm like a slow writer. But I guess I am a writer because I write. 

Matt: But you're also incredibly passionate about what you're trying to achieve with it. Sothere's a, there is, whilst it's, it's good to, to be working towards a bigger goal, but that bigger goal obviously does feel like a [00:23:30] responsibility because you're trying to get somewhere for the benefit of others. 

Sophie: Yeah, it does. But also I think I've come to accept that I have a strong imagination, and I don't need to be a thing, I don't need to be a writer, or a script [00:23:45] writer, or a, I don't know, an entrepreneur or whatever things that I've been called or could call myself. I think there's an increasing amount of need for generalists and creative generalists and I've heard different people call that [00:24:00] role, different things like a synthesis. I don't know if you've heard that. And especially again with AI, which I think about a lot, both positively and with sort of a mind of how are our kids growing up, what skills do they need in education, et cetera. There's so much more opportunity for people who are [00:24:15] naturally generalists who naturally like having breadth in their work and don't want to sort of just be the one thing. And I think that that's quite a creative trait. I don't know. You go. 

Matt: Yeah, no, I agree. I totally agree.[00:24:30] 

Sophie: AI can do a lot of legwork for me, which frees me up to spend more time doing [00:24:45] editorial and vision stuff and spending more time with the people that input. And then I guess, I think of it almost as what stage of the work is useful to give to AI to do. And it hasn't been useful to me in sort of trying to extract [00:25:00] value or create something in a collaborative way. But it is useful to me when I don't know how to write an email to a publisher and this is just in case anyone's listening.

I would say to the AI something like you depend, let's say I was pitching a book. You're a commissioner of children's books. You've worked in the industry [00:25:15] for 70 years at all of the big publishing houses. You are quite critical in your approach and you don't hold your punches. Is that the right term?

Pull them, hold them. And you're now giving me advice. I'm a [00:25:30] creative and you're now going to give me advice of how to get my book published. I want to know everythingand I want to know who to approach, how to approach them, what's the best way to email, I want to discuss with you. I want you to be critical of my approach and just carry on having a conversation as though there was [00:25:45] a person there, so that can be really useful, especially if you just really don't know anyone, not even within the industry. I didn't know anyone in the industry, but I'm really lucky that I've got a lot of entrepreneurial thinkers around me and in my family, and so I am extremely grateful to my parents for teaching [00:26:00] me to think in the way that I do, which is sort of you just make your own opportunities.

I think that that is something that's probably one of the best things about coming from that immigrant background. So yeah, AI can be really good. And then once, or you can say, say, who should I try and speak to? And then I [00:26:15] cold messaged a lot of people saying, this is the goal that I have. Have you got five minutes to have a chat?

And the more, the more I spread my message, the more people would genuinely think about who could they introduce me to, and that's progress over perfection.

Matt: So you found that people were positive about [00:26:30] helping. 

Sophie: Yeah. 

Matt: Because I think, again, that's something that people worry about, isn't it? It's about kind of reaching out, there's a vulnerability in that, you know, what if someone doesn't like it?

What if someone Yeah, no one, no one's going to want to help me kind of thing. But your experience is that if you ask people generally 

Sophie: Absolutely. [00:26:45] I, like, more people say yes than no, and it doesn't matter if people say no. I actually know someone who wanted to get a book published and they made their goal to have a hundred no's and they were like, cause then I know that I've made the effort because I understand that it's an odds game and you need a lot of [00:27:00] no's.

Matt: And were they upset when they got to about 30 no's and got a yes and then the game was over?

Sophie: I hadn't, I think I was checking in with them at sort of in their twenties, but it was weird if they sort of flipped the psychology on it and every time they got a no, they felt like, yeah, like they were doing what they were meant to [00:27:15] do.

Um, so I think you can definitely reach out to people, just be honest. And you don't, I'm not saying reach out to an editor at a publishing house because that puts them probably in a bit of a weird position, but anybody sort of adjacent that you feel might be able to give you good advice in any direction that you want to go in.

And actually, [00:27:30] the more you build those networks and be yourself generous to people who want your help, I think the better off you're going to be in any career anyway. 

Matt: Having that network is fundamentally important. Having the skills to build a network, isn't it? But then also the sort of mentoring, [00:27:45] those kind of little gems of knowledge that you gleam from other people is priceless, isn’t it?

Sophie: Absolutely priceless. I raised money from Warner Brothers for my current business and I absolutely could not have done that without the advice of people I know but also people [00:28:00] who met me for half an hour and gave me just advice that genuinely formed sort of my strategy and also connections. So yeah, I think, I would encourage everybody to think doesn't matter if you don't [00:28:15] know anybody, you just go onto LinkedIn or go onto the internet and just try and get to a hundred notes.

Matt: Brilliant. Can we talk a little bit about how you use AI now in your professional work? 

Sophie: Yeah, sure. So I'm like a power user. 

Matt: Yeah. [00:28:30] 

Sophie: I should say that this does not mean that I am totally for AI or don't see any of the inherent problems with AI based in the sort of bias data sets it's built on or the risk that it [00:28:45] has to general humanity or people that are already oppressed or the fact that it scraped the internet for its data or that creatives are not being adequately compensated, etc.

However, on the flip side, I'm absolutely fascinated by it. I'm fascinated by it, I think, because it [00:29:00] confronts me with questions around consciousness and ethics. And the relativity of ethics and how do you programme a machine to go left and kill a dog or right and kill a cat is just fascinating to me, But also it's changing [00:29:15] our society at such a rate that I feel like there's an opportunity for us to rethink education, which is my deepest passion.

And I feel that we should be focusing on core skills and I've [00:29:30] always felt that, but,at the moment, it feels increasingly obvious that knowledge acquisition in education has a limited use. Whereas the core skills that we need to develop have a constant use. And I [00:29:45] think have been missing. 

Matt: Yeah. They've been totally overlooked. We refer to them, generally at UAL, we call them the creative attributes, but really they're that sort of idea of what we're talking about. Problem solving, collaboration, ideas development, [00:30:00] they're all those kind of things. Those core skills that are, you know, part of the sort of human condition as well, aren't they? The current models of learning at school just don't ask students to show competency or aptitude or application of [00:30:15] those skills in their rote learning.

Sophie: Yeah. And resilience, self management. Yeah. So as a lover of technology, I'm also someone that would not let my child near it for as long as possible. Not as long as possible, but I think, you know, zero to three [00:30:30] years old, it doesn't have that much of a positive impact on their brain development. It can have a detrimental impact.

And then from three to 16, I don't think technology inherently is a problem, but social media, I see as a massive, massive problem. [00:30:45] I feel like it's like giving children cigarettes. I couldn't feel more strongly about it. 

Matt: Yeah, completely, yeah.

Sophie: And so. In this environment where you have these opportunities with AI to createsolutions to really big problems quite [00:31:00] quickly, but also you have a problem that we might be atrophying our ability to think and that we're not focusing on the right things in education because if you don't need knowledge acquisition, what do you really need for your future in 10, 20 years time? And you need these core skills.

And so I feel like it's a zeitgeist moment. I'm [00:31:15] very excited about AI. I said I was a power user is in, I use it to do as much of the work that I don't feel I need to be involved in as possible. I talk to it all the time. I'm more voice than typing sort of person. Okay. Yeah. Even when I write books, actually, my method is I sort of think of a [00:31:30] storyline, agree it with my editor and then once I've got all of the different chapters, I talk, I go to a coffee shop and spend the morning talking my story out loud. The other thing I've noticed as I started to use AI more is that I've developed a practice of if [00:31:45] there's a big question or a big problem or some creative work that I want to do, I will, intentionally get my pen and paper and think about it first.

Not for that long, but just to know what my thought is first, before I start having a conversation with AI.

Matt: That’s interesting.

Sophie: Because I [00:32:00] do see even in my own behavior, that over reliance is creeping in and that it might be my first instinct to ask AI. I really want to protect myself from that. It's so easy and alluring to just constantly outsource all my thinking.

I've really been intentional about that practice[00:32:15] of making sure I have times when I'm thinking without AI, but also that I know what my first responses are before I speak to AI. And I've also built a writing practice, just like journaling practice in the evening, that's pen and paper and so as I'm using AI more, I'm also trying to create the [00:32:30] equal and opposite opportunities.

Matt: Yeah, keep the analogue, raise the analogue level to then combat the digital level. 

Sophie: Yeah, just the thinking, just my own thoughts.

Matt: Prompting is a bit of an art form as well, isn't it? Yeah. Do you have advice about how to do that? 

Sophie: If you think of the If the way [00:32:45] that you would speak to someone who you know is extremely smart, but has no context and try and articulate to them what sort of help you want and how, then that's the best way to prompt an AI.

So you might say to the person, this is the goal, the general goal that I'm trying to [00:33:00] achieve. This is what I want you to do specifically. This is how I want you to do it. This is the context that I want you to take in. And then also giving the AI a role if you want it to have a particular expertise. So like I said earlier, you're a commissioner or you're a cook.

Matt: Yeah, that [00:33:15] was super interesting what you were saying about you're a publisher with 70 years experience in the industry and that, you know, giving it a scenario, a persona to kind of attach itself to and sort of think in that, that manner. That really helps then does it in terms of getting, getting [00:33:30] to your required information quicker?

Sophie: Yeah. Or if you want to bounce an idea, you can give it five or six roles and say, give me your perspective as a publisher, as a TV commissioner, as a naysayer, as someone that hates AI, or as someone that thinks that girl [00:33:45] shouldn't really write books or whatever it is. And you can get, and also if you struggle to create a prompt, you can just ask AI, I'm trying to come up with a good prompt. This is my goal. What questions do you have for me that I can answer to help us create that prompt? So just think of it [00:34:00] like a person, it's just how do you, when you have a conversation with someone, how do you get the most out of that conversation? [00:34:15] 

Matt: Are there particular AIs that you use regularly? 

Sophie: Yes, but it changes all the time because the technology changes all the time. So until about three weeks ago, I would have said that Claude was my favourite chatbot to [00:34:30] write with. But Claude is underperforming. It literally can change overnight. They can tweak their algorithm.

Matt: Yeah, of course.

Sophie: I use Perplexity.

Matt: Do you have to let Claude down gently? 

Sophie: I just haven't spoken to it for a while. I've ghosted Claude. [00:34:45] Yeah, Perplexity is a really good one. Perplexity sort of cites the sources that it uses. It's based fromscience. It doesn't hallucinate. So I think Perplexity is good for research. Google LLM Notebook is good for uploading all of your data.

Documents or [00:35:00] images or whatever and then interrogating your existing work. I use chat GPT conversation on the go. Yeah, I think that they're the main sort of. 

Matt: That's great. Yeah, it's a pretty comprehensive toolbox of. 

Sophie: I've got two more actually. 

Matt: Okay, go for it. 

Sophie: Otter. [00:35:15] ai I use to record. 

Matt: Oh, yeah, that's really good.

Sophie: I record myself all the time. That sounds really vain, but I just, I can't, I get almost stressed about having to remember things. And so if I record meetings with people's permission or I voice note myself all the time, especially if I'm in a creative flow. Yeah. Then I [00:35:30] can interrogate that later and speechify.

I use to listen to things rather than read them. Including my own work. And then when I'm listening to my own drafts of stories, I hear things differently. I noticed things and motion. ai to organize myself. 

Matt: And so any of [00:35:45] those image creation? 

Sophie: No, to be honest, I, for image creation, mid journey or Dawley. I, so I work with illustrators and image creation for me is the ability to sort of mood board or think through my own thoughts to get to the [00:36:00] stage where I can brief somebody. 

Matt: Yes. Can we talk just briefly about your current business that you mentioned? 

Sophie: Yeah. So it's called Bright Little Labs. It's a kids media company and we focus on twenty first century skills and inclusive role models. And that's any [00:36:15] format. SoAgent Asher, the book series that I've been talking about, which is also in development to be a cartoon, but we, we work on early stage development on creative ideas. And then we partner with people who have different expertise. So, studios and distributors [00:36:30] and more generally, as I take more of a creative role in that company and do less of the operational stuff, I think I'm spending most of my time thinking about the future of education and how can we reimagine education?

[00:36:45] And it feels like this is a great moment to reimagine education and almost at the same time try and reimagine community because I feel like community and education naturally go hand in hand and they've come apart. I'm also trying to think about how we raise children in a digital [00:37:00] age with all of the opportunities but also being cognizant of the growing mind of children and sort of what effect does tech have on their growing mind and their emotional development, but also their physical development.

Are we rewiring their brains literally through [00:37:15] over use of technology and social media? So that's the sort of, that's my area of interest in any direction creatively to work towards sort of maybe a reimagined education. 

Matt: Well, it's brilliant. And I think it's [00:37:30] incredibly timely and really importantbecause it feels like technology has had the head start and then gradually society is starting to realise but they're moving at such kind of speed. It's worrying isn't it? There are concerns in there about that. 

Sophie: It's massively worrying and I think [00:37:45] it's creating a huge, uh, problem with children's attention amongst many other problems that they're facing around sort of their own mental health struggles and that if we create a generation of kids that are used to sort of a dopamine hit every second, second, second.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. 

Sophie: They're not going to be able to focus [00:38:00] and if you can't focus, it's very hard to engage properly and meaningfully. 

Matt: Thankfully to people like yourselves and the business that you've made and the initiatives that you're undertaking, we'll learn more and hopefully we can evolve and adapt better to the future world.

So we always end the episode by [00:38:15] asking our interviewee for a creative provocation that they can set our listeners. So, is there anything in mind that you'd like to offer as a challenge or a thought? 

Sophie: I think the thing that I think about a lot, and that is my challenge to anybody [00:38:30] listening, is to not just accept the systems that we live in just because they're there.

And if you could for whatever reason, if you were able to reimagine any system that you live in, if it's literally your house or the street that you live in, or the school that you go to, or what [00:38:45] work looks like, what living looks like from scratch in the best possible way, how would you imagine it? And I think it's really important that we try and imagine what we want the world to be like, rather than just accept that it's the way that it is.

It's only the way that it is [00:39:00] because a lot of people are accepting it in that way, or that we perhaps don't realise that we could change it. And I know it sounds sort of dreamy, but Utopia as a method is the idea that if you start imagining best case scenarios, that's one of the steps towards creating it.

Because [00:39:15] if you never imagine it, you're not really going to know what you're working towards. So I just want to challenge everyone that the idea that these systems that we live in are there and that we can tweak them isn't true. It's not actually true, even though it feels very true. And so what [00:39:30] would we create if we were creating from scratch?

Matt: Brilliant. Yeah, well, it's so important to realise that you're not passive, that you have power in these situations and that you can imagine things to be a different way. Thank you ever so much, Sophie. That was amazing. 

Sophie: Thank you very much for [00:39:45] having me.

Matt: As ever, thank you for listening to this episode of Teach, Inspire, Create. Thank you to Sophie for telling her story, demystifying the world of business and creativity, [00:40:00] and teaching us about how to effectively use AI. If you want to know more about Sophie and her work, you can visit her website, sophiedeen.com. As always, we really hope you're enjoying the podcast. Please make sure you do subscribe. [00:40:15] And if you haven't yet, please do share with a friend or anyone else who might be interested. Make sure you rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts, as this always helps us to understand what you think of the show.

So finally, thanks for listening, and until next time, do take [00:40:30] care. Goodbye.