We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eric Burgess. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eric below.
Eric, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
Directly from my mother. She had an exceptional ability to turn pain into love, and cruelty into kindness. While she suffered from child abuse as a young girl, she became a staunch defender of her family and friends, always advocating for being a good person and treating the meek and poor with generosity and respect. She had a perfect partner in my father, a noble man who protected her and built a home and family that made them both proud.
When my father passed away, I became my mother’s protector and I felt the real joy of being entrusted with that job. I call that feeling Lydapathy, after my mother’s name (Lydia), because I could find no word in English for the positive emotion associated with knowing someone trusts you.
Lydapathy is what led me to found my business as a Public Benefit Corporation devoted to protecting creators in the Age of AI. Our larger goal is also about trust: How do we determine that information online is credible? Working with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, we’re sorting that out to help the AI space fight disinformation. All of that flows right back to making sure I keep up my mother’s tradition of turning something bad like AI theft into a positive business that protects people, not just companies, and helps strengthen the creative human spirit.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
My life has been all about making technology products and stories that enrich human lives. While I began my career making video games for Disney, most of my life has been spent building and marketing business software. That may sound boring, but I seek a sense of purpose in all I do. My ongoing goal was always to ensure that everything I make is doing some good in this world. Even sales apps can be positive if the product serves the customer well. Along the way, I have written hundreds of articles about marketing, technology, gamification, reviews, and more. I’ve even written a couple of novels. All of this led me to a place square in the middle of creativity and technology.
When I built my own company, Credtent, I started with the purpose instead. Credtent is founded on trust and it exists to solve a serious problem, not to just make money. Generative AI can be helpful, but it also threatens creative people all over the world if the content used to make train these systems is not ethically-sourced. BigTech has made trillions on the backs of content creators and it’s happening again now with AI training on ‘publicly available’ work. This is playing havoc with the open standards of the internet while also hurting creative people by eliminating their jobs, often with their own work as the template.
Thus, Credtent is empowering creators to take back control of their work, opting out of training or making money through licensing. We are now open for beta with our high-tech but low-cost solution to help creators. For $20 a year, they can opt out and we’ll even audit the companies to make sure they’re respecting creators’ rights. You can also read about our goals and the way we define Content Origin. With our Content Origin Badges, people will know that the book they’re reading, the album they’re hearing, or the art in the video game they are playing is truly human-created and not some ‘mystery meat’ content that was algorithmically created without paying the people whose work was used to generate it. Much like organic food, we believe people will prefer the quality of work from real people, not just robot content creators.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Remember that it’s not just what you do, it’s how you do it. Processes and habits will get you through the days when inspiration is MIA and drive is down. Keep it simple and productive, and you will achieve your goals.
2. Communication skills are the most important tool in the shed for leaders and managers. If you can listen effectively, speak clearly, and regularly check-in with people, you’re most of the way there.
3. Do not suffer through the pain of a job. If it’s painful, get a new job. Do not push when you are in pain. Self-care and wellness are important. I’d be a lot further along if I’d learned that earlier.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
I read a lot and widely. While there are a ton of individual books that have helped me, the bigger deal is to read both fiction and non-fiction and to try new things. I read a lot of books about psychology, neuroscience, and technology because these subjects help me understand people and how we can use technical solutions to solve their problems.
That said, without fiction to see the actual interactions of people in motion, it would be hard to imagine me understanding the world as well or feeling a connection to so many different people. Fiction fills in the gaps, explains the things that science won’t, and inspires so much of what I want to see in the world. We feel less alone, we feel warranted in our emotions, and we feel more ready to handle situations we’ve seen in happen other peoples’ lives. The biggest life-hack in the world is to learn from the mistakes of others.
But okay, here’s a list:
Non-fiction: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, 7 1/2 Lessons about the Brain by Lisa Feldstein, Class by Paul Fussell, Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal, The Dip by Seth Godin, Start With Why by Simon Sinek, so many more…
Fiction: Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Kindred and Bloodchild by Octavia Butler, Emma by Jane Austen, oh the list goes on and on. I’d be lost without my reading life.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.credtent.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/credtentofficial/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554185681148
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erburgess/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/credtent
- Other: https://medium.com/@erburgess_AI
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