Transmuting AI Slop to AI Signal | Bitcoin 2026

This panel is called transmuting AI slop to AI signal. I don't see Bitcoin in the title, but it'll come up as it always does. Really quick, I would love an intro for everyone. We'll start at the far end with Michael. A quick introduction as to who you are, what you do, and how AI enhances or plays into what you do. >> What's up everybody? My name is Michael Sullivan. I'm a writer. I wrote the book Blood of the Bgeoisi, and I am also an engineer. Um, so I use AI constantly in my day-to-day and use it heavily when writing the book, which I'll definitely be talking about a bit today. >> Hi everybody. I'm Michael Oceans. I'm a content creator with Simply Bitcoin. Uh, also a filmmaker using AI in uh, my constant, you know, video pipeline and process. >> Hey, I'm Brian Hurstfield. Uh I was an actuary and a quant for 30 years and then I decided to write a book called Bitcoin for institutions. Now I'm using AI to create something called the magic internet math academy which is intended to teach math and upgrade upgrade our civilization in mathematics. >> Uh good afternoon. I'm Bruce Baron with CEO and founder of Brains Studios and we utilize AI in our design process. My son and I who 11year-old has created a design creative lab studio and we've launched it with all of our AI tools and uh AI is one of our foundational tools for all the work we do. >> Awesome. And my name is Julian Figureroa. I run a show called The Exit Manual on YouTube. Uh all about all about Bitcoin, all about living on Bitcoin and moving to a Bitcoin standard and trying to keep it fun. and I use AI to do all sorts of crazy visual effects in the show, create music for it, every little asset under the sun to kind of support the the journey of the show. So, so first question I'd love to open on with you. I think that a couple years ago the Silicon Valley phrase was ideas are cheap and execution is expensive. And I think we've all seen that AI really turns that on its head. There just seems to be infinite abundance in app creation. I know the Apple App Store is struggling with just how many new applications are coming live. We've all seen, you know, AI slop on our YouTube feeds. So, there's non-stop video creation, from animation to live action. There's been this inversion from the cost to execute now back to ideas. And so, one of the questions I'd love to start kind of asking everyone is, do you think AI has a place to help you in the ideation process or is it strictly an execution tool for the work that you do? Well, I I know for our our sake for using AI, the ideation process is uh critical. You know, one of the things that we're doing is we're creating original content, original IP. So, if you take a look at the art gallery over there, Brain Sprout Studios, you'll see that what we're doing is designing a mythology around Bitcoin and the time chain. So, our artistic work, our ideas, the philosophy, the creativity is all going through that process. and we're using AI as a tool. So the idea uh the ideas that we can create the brainstorming, you know, my background is architecture. So one of the things that I have always like to do is sketch and come up with those ideas before we even start the process. And so my son and I do that through the, you know, design process, sketching, drawing, and then bringing that into AI and using that. Um, one of the things that we've also noticed is that even the hallucinations through the um, design process can be useful. They can launch you into another idea because it's something that you may have not planned for but can give you a boost or a foundation into something new. So, we use it quite a bit. >> Yeah. I mean, I would say in the work that I do with the math academy, it's almost all ideiation. So like for example I will have a uh seinal work from Uklid which was over 2,000 years ago. I might have something from Gaus, these great thinkers, their seminar works. And then I would have all 500 and 500 plus uh of Satoshi's posts to the um Bitcoin talk forum and I will ask I will ask my AI to write a um you know write me a book connecting these three men and it'll it'll come up with something like well they were doing they're connected by proof as it turns out and um you know this isn't the kind of thing I would think of by myself to connect the ideas of great thinkers and who are standing on the shoulders of each other. But AI is really good at knowing things. So like you load it with knowledge and then on occasion you can ask it to put these disparate ideas together and it really does come up with banger ideas. I mean, yeah, as a content creator, I'm sure you know this, Julian, you have a certain kind of cadence that you have to feed into every single week and you have it's basically expected of you to produce. So, coming up with ideas is it it's absolutely like a burden that you have to be able to, you know, get out, get out, get out, get out. And what had it has done for me is it has cleaned up all of the the portions of of really deep sort of research that I have to do and trying to come up you know take today take today's topic and try and come up with something take today's um you know the field of what's going on in Bitcoin and try to try to come up with something that you know relates and what you end up doing is you you spit back you know a simple prompt and you'll get you know 30 ideas and suddenly you can you can finally just head into something as opposed to what I used to do which was scour the internet trying to just really crawl and find it all on my own and it's it's been a revolutionary you know tool for me >> in the writing domain and the engineering domain there's been a bit of an existential crisis because AI in general has been so quick to overtake uh pros generation it's everybody can just do it instantaneously basically now but I have personally found in a bunch other writers that I've associated with that using it during different parts of your process can be really advantageous. So specifically towards the end with editing is really obvious but the one that's a little bit more counterintuitive and I've seen a lot of people use intelligently is to do it with ideiation. So specifically having larger broader questions about your story or your problem and having it continue to ask you more uh detailed questions about that. So for example, one to give like something more practical like I'll literally walk on a treadmill. We'll have it ask me questions because some kind of motor movement is helpful for idea generations and it kind of allows you to more rapidly ideulate, more rapidly think through things and have it ask you questions that has proven just completely invaluable me personally. >> What one of the interesting ways that I've been using AI lately is I think a lot of us all know how sick of fantic it can be and you you give it an idea and it says, "Oh, you're a genius." Like that's the greatest idea since sliced bread. And I've I have a a section of claw that I've kind of called my devil's advocate section. And so when I do my writing, I I try and come up with an original thesis for something. And then I go on a voice chat and I ask it like poke holes in my argument. Like pretend you're the anti- Bitcoiner and have this conversation with me and I go back and forth with it and I have to basically steal man arguments. And this is the type of thing that you would generally do in a writer's room, right? you would have a writer room, you know, if you're doing a TV show with four or five people, you're going to have some guy that says, "Scrap the idea." And you debate and that's how you get to this really good product, which is the script. And now with AI, a lot of the time it's sick of it'll back down. But if you really train it over time, you can get this thing to basically be a stalwart on all your ideas. And eventually when it gets bad at debating you, and you'll know, you'll know that you actually probably have a good defensible thesis. When it can't come up with good counterpoints against you, you have a good thesis. But if it's if it's very easily like taking you down, then you got to work on your arguments. And I found it's such an inverse of how people normally use AI. And there is this big epidemic right now where people are using it for therapy and it's telling everyone like, "Oh yeah, you should have broken up with your ex and all this stuff, but you can use it in like a dark way as well, which is to make it push back on every single thing you have." And I I find it's really interesting in the in the writing process and the ideation process. Um, I'd love to ask you all, what is the most surprising application of AI that you've seen either in your own work or in another piece of content or media or app that you've seen online? What has surprised you in thinking, I thought this thing had limitations, but it's been able to do this thing instead. >> Just for us in terms of the type of work we're doing, I would say that the surprise really comes in with the quality of the work that you're producing. I think that it's very easy to say something is slop because it's AIdriven but there's no I think it's actually in intellectually dishonest because fundamentally the AI is the tool it is not the uh creator it is something that has all the systems and has been fed all this information that has been human created so one of the things that I think is really important is like the discernment and the being able to curate and understand what you're looking at. The difference between the, you know, the essentially it's garbage in garbage out. If you don't have a subtle understanding of what you're working in, you can continue the process and it still will produce slop. If you have a clear plan, a clear structure to the how you're going about something and how you want to see it eventually delivered. There's a much more um pragmatic approach to it as opposed to just hoping and praying something comes out really nicely. And that's essentially what you do in the initial iterations, but as you go over time, it's much more of a methodical approach, far more systematic, and that's where you get actual results. >> Yeah. I mean, I would say it's kind of like um in basketball you go on things called a heat check where if you made a couple of shots in a row, you start to you start to take much harder shots just to see if you can make it with that's been my experience with AI where I go on these heat checks. Um, I'll go so for the math academy, I'm making sort of UX for classes, websites, but then I'll have this idea like, can I make a can I make a good YouTube video that you know teaches high school algebra like a liberal art? And um, you know, you don't hit the button and have it come out, but you have this belief that you can do it and you're not really sure if you can do it and you spend this time. It is a really pleasant surprise when you get to the end of that process and you have the product even though it may have been a very painful road from the heat check to getting the result. But um you know I continually find these things surprising just what the the ideas that come into my head and just see hey can we do that? Yeah, I think for me the the big unlock that this you know tool has has caused us and for me personally is you can take it you had all this I have all these ideas back in the day. you know, you had so many things you wanted to do and so many sort of things you wrote down and all these jotss in these little pieces of paper and I just this all this stuff just stacks up and stacks up and stacks up and you just never you never are able to get to it and then so suddenly you have this this thing that you can communicate and it will actually do the work that you want it to do. So, if I have an an idea for something as simple as a a Pilates studio app, I can I could say, "Hey, Claude, just can you put together a Pilates studio app for me?" And boom, you know, 7 minutes later, I have a a full app and and I can like click on it and I can like upload videos to it and I could put, you know, music under it and I could schedule it and it could all work together and I don't have to do a single I don't have to do any of any of the brain work that was required to get to that point. I just had the idea and that was like the biggest surprise because now now you're thinking, oh, how many things can I build? you know how what what is the limit here and it's really just your own sort of imag imagination. >> I I felt as though my entire life is now moving at a slightly faster pace where I got really into writing novels because I love pulling on a thread seeing where an idea takes me and just like trying to pursue the full depth of that idea. Well, now I can do that on topics at a rate that I never could before. I can build systems as that my engineering interests like that would have taken me multiple years and I can spit them out in a couple months. see if there's actually something really interesting there. And I'm doing this on multiple different layers like the AI assisted therapy kind of thing. Like all these different things that I've personally used as tools and seen people use as tools. I do it so much more quickly now where I feel like I've had one of the higher growth periods in my entire life in the last six months or so because of just seeing how many creative ways I can jam these into my life and if there's any content that can be pulled out of it or creative ways to use it. Yeah, I found for me one of the most surprising things was how good the music generation is. I think we've all seen the text is like you can do great pros writing with it, but eventually you'll run into it'll say it's not X, it's Y or it's quietly doing this or that. There's cliches and you have to error correct a lot. And then with video, you have that too where you can get great video generations in one shot. There's a lot of error correction. The music AI generation is flawless. I don't know if maybe I don't have a greatly trained ear, but you can go in and generate full songs with lyrics. You can generate backing tracks. You can extend tracks. You can make lay motifs. All this stuff is instant with like very little modification needed. And it's completely changed the game for me because I don't know if a lot of people here watch movies and they know the term lay motif, but it's sort of in Star Wars when you hear like there's just little songs that come up and they do little remixes and it it creates that sense of connection with a character or an idea. And traditionally that was something that only giant studios could access or if you were able to afford a composer, you could do it. And now anybody can do this tried andrue film technique in YouTube videos and it makes everything like you can just connect with people emotionally on a much deeper level which is something that I want to get into for the next question. I think a lot of people think AI is tripping away. I think a lot of people look at AI and they they see it as pulling us further away from our humanity. We're seeing all these AI generated images. Social media feels like a little sloppy because you don't know what's real and what's not anymore and you got to fact check everything. Do you feel there is a side to AI that is bringing us closer to humanity? How how do you see that? >> Well, I I definitely, you know, play off a few things that you had said because uh not only do I think it's bringing me closer to humanity, well, whether or not it's that, it's more of like the the recognition of the quality, the level of craftsmanship that we can create at at this time now is really amazing. like the the Hollywood stu studio level, the expenses that would go into the amount of design work that we've done for our Brain Sprout studios. Uh I I would I would challenge anyone to see if that is as a comp to Pixar or anything with Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings. The it really brings you through that threshold and gives you an opportunity to take something that's truly great and be able to build on that as well. And that plays into our, you know, our design process, the mythology that we're creating with our with our characters and our stories, but also just the the whole thing uh is gorgeous. We we are designing things with fine art. It it is uh renaissance-based. It's highly visual architectural and uh you know, it's amazing to see and like you know, you're blown away by it. And essentially when my son and I started doing these things, this was essentially just for us to enjoy. And as we've become stronger and more capable with it, it's it's um exploded. So I think it's quite quite a quite an awesome thing. >> Yeah. So there is this um there is this quality of the human condition where you know your sense of self is something that is it dissipates in the world you know like it's very hard to maintain your sense of self in general. It's the kind of thing that if it's out in the world and you're not actively holding it up it just kind of dissolves. And so look, we live in this world where we have a lot of AI is one such um like I don't know a property or it's something that's definitely coming at us that probably does accelerate that dissipation and um the way the way you hold up your sense of self the way you prevent that for me is being a builder you know being a aggressive builder is the only thing I would say for me that really keeps me grounded to my sense of self and sort of prevents that from from dissipating out. So I think like yes there are these people you know using AI for therapy I guess and like that's a good example we can pull on but like the re it's more of that if you're not building whatever it is you're doing if you're not building you're probably not maintaining a solid frame and you very well may lose yourself and you know there's just a lot of content coming at us now so I think we just have you have to work harder to defend yourself. >> Yeah. I don't know if it um connects people as much. Maybe I mean maybe it connects humanity much more. I mean people are building things to connect with each other far more faster. But the the AI slop for me, I mean, if you're if you're a child, you know, you start with your crayons and you're you're making your little scribbles and it goes on a piece of paper and then it gets thrown away. But that, you know, that little movement, that little slop that you're you're doing is you can't you can't progress any further in your own self without doing the slop first. I mean, that's pretty obvious. We all have to work through the thing. It's the proof of work. So yeah, we all get these like AI slop images and stuff and but if you if you eventually what what it's allowing us to do is like let us see our vision finally. So you can keep on scribbling and scribbling until you make that, you know, rabbit or you make that cow and you finally can, you know, bring the vision and the image and like how how amazing it is for a child to be able to write a letter and understand a letter, you know, but they they started with just nothing. It's just circles and and nothing and they and they're able to formulate their their thoughts together. So, I think that's going to do for humanity similar to what the crayon does for a child. I guess >> I love that. I AI is a new thing currently, but in some worlds it's been out there for a long time. I'm a big fan of chess and in 1980 I believe Gary Kasparov played Deep Blue and since that date computers have been beating humans and one of the initial opinions about that was that humans were going to stop playing chess completely because the like humans had been conquered and what actually happened was almost the complete inverse where humans continue to play chess and now even though there are these novel crazy techniques that are being used by the fanciest new chess engines humans have found a different way to engage with chess where their focus more on uh like a lot of chess streaming is becoming much more prominent and finding other ways to creatively look at the game and it's really counterintuitive but it actually found this new layer of creativity that humans engage with a game of chess and this happened a long time ago and like it's really not even a recent thing and I I think we're going to see similar patterns happen here it's not a direct analog because the way AI and LMS work currently is a little bit more in the creative realm but I do think that those tools have brought out more layers of uh humanity Ready? >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits. Predict where everything is a market. Yeah, I think for me, I know as an artist, one of the things that you have to get used to very early on is is dealing with failure. Pouring your heart into something and then watching the reception of it be just awful. And some artists just do not care what people think. Like there's these great painters and everyone thought their stuff was crap and then they die and then everyone loves it. But by and large, it's I think most of us care what people's reception is to our creations. And the thing with AI is now that the length of time has gotten so short, it it forces us in a way to create faster. And I found like I used to do these documentaries on my YouTube channel and you know, get bases produce these documentaries. We would spend 3 to 6 months working on one video. And I have nothing against documentary filmmakers, but that process of failure, success, failure, failure, failure, success when you're creating content, that feedback loop is so integral to improving. And now with AI, because the production process is so small, the the selfawareness can be so acted upon so quickly with AI and production that I think it it really will get us closer to our work in the end. Hopefully a lot of people that are used to creating stuff that takes 3 months now only spend a month on it. And so now they can get out three times as much and it's exhausting, but now you know a little bit more about what works and what people love and what really connects with people. And it allows you to think a little bit more about the humanity in your work versus the grand scope of production. Um, I want to bounce off this point a little bit because this is a Bitcoin conference. I know for probably a lot of people in this crowd, learning and going through that journey of being orange pill was a big ego check. We thought the world worked one way and we really had to unlearn it to understand Bitcoin. Everything about money, everything about economics, politics, red versus blue, the state versus you. Do you see a similar transformation in your journey learning how to work with these AI tools and how that affects your own ego? >> Definitely. Definitely. It it really humbles you. I think Bitcoin is a is a humbling experience in the initial learning how much you don't know and then going through that process and becoming obsessed with it. I think we all seem to follow a similar journey. uh I think that in terms of for what we're doing it's very important to the process and as we learn AI as we go through it go through the stages of it it's um something that will we will refine over time but I do think that it's very important very >> yeah it's really interesting I mean I so my career I was an actuary and a financial engineer and I thought I really mastered financial markets I took a lot of pride in that then one day I saw the financial markets including Bitcoin and realized uh okay it's a total redo because I now have to rebuild my complete understanding with this with this thing in the world now and that was a really long process the reason I you know the reason I bring that up is because you know here we are going along thinking what's possible with humanity what's possible um you know what are we really capable of and now all of a sudden this tool this very powerful tool sort of drops in our laps and we really do have to rethink what we're all capable of. It really changes the map for me of how I view the world. Um yeah. Yeah, I second that for sure. When you get into Bitcoin, you have a certain view, you know, a certain perspective of life and it seems to transmute, you know, it seems to change you completely as you take that that journey. And similarly with you know with AI the more you sort of touch it the more it sort of you know exposes because because AI when you're when you're responding when you're back and forth with AI it's like a it's a mirror you know it's just simply feeding back at you the things that you know you gave it but it has a it has a way of um just showing you basically like you know my AI always responds to me very nicely other aside aside from like being uh you know if I tell it to hey don't respond like this but it's very nice and it's very kind and it sort of feeds into my ego and you have to sort of check yourself like okay that's the thing that um that's the thing that I like what like that's the thing that I'm responding to why why am I so it makes me start to question like who I am you know internally my own ego like what why why do I why am I like uh so infatuated with receiving good you know feedback like so I have to to think that's how I kind of think about it and in the same way Bitcoin Bitcoin did this did this as well like you start to think about Bitcoin when you first get in like you're going to you you're going to get 0.1 Bitcoin and you're going to make it and you know and it's it's going to be the best thing and then as you you go through cycle after cycle after cycle you realize like oh it's not a it's not about that at all it's not about getting rich really quick it's not it's about the work it takes like the longer you're in Bitcoin you you know the the I guess if you can hold on to it the richer you become you know I would say in your soul as well. >> One of the biggest commonalities for me between Bitcoin and AI was that it really explored and revealed the depths of my own stupidity. I was forced to confront that I had been wrong repeatedly and had to uh re-evaluate my opinion with Bitcoin as everybody pretty much does when they first get exposed to it. But then with AI I told myself all these stories like it's not going to write this part better than me. it's not going to have this thing. And over time, I've continually had to walk back my position. The same thing in engineering where like, oh, no, I need to be the architect of this area of the code or I need to own this or my taste is what matters here. I think there's an element of truth there, but like I keep hearing myself walk these things back over and over and over again. And with every step backwards, I feel like my ego has been slightly disillusioned. And overall, I think it's been a net positive for me. And I see that a lot with people that are really embedded into building things with AI where you have you're forced to be a little bit more uh open to the fact that you're wrong and you don't know where this thing is heading and just kind of being open to what this thing is. And I think a lot of the elements of Bitcoin um seeing how much a technology could bring hope and a little bit more optimism into my life was also a very good starting point or seed that lent the same viewpoint with AI where it's like I really have seen like there's a lot of negatives, there's a lot of positives these technologies, but in aggregate I think it's a massive boon to humanity and I definitely still feel that way about both of these technologies. >> Yeah, Michael, I would I would agree with you. I think it's very easy for us to similar to to Bitcoin where when you're a Bitcoin skeptic, you're always judging it for the here and now. Oh, I can't use it to buy a coffee or this or that. And people only judge it on, you know, the one year it's existed or everything beyond its past. And and it's like people use this phrase with AI. AI, the worst AI is ever going to be is today and it only gets better. And there's some people that doubt that because they think synthetic data is going to make it kind of disillusioned, but it's the same with Bitcoin where like Bitcoin is at its worst spot for adoption right now. The adoption number is not going to go down. It's only going to go up. And so you see all these people and they they judge Bitcoin. Oh, it's only, you know, I can't spend it anywhere. I can't buy a house with it. And then you look at people make the same arguments with AI. Oh, it can't do this. It can't do that. I think the cool thing that is interesting about AI is uh Bitcoin is very much like an oified thing. We don't want it to change. We want AI to get better and there is a collective interest I think among the people using it that we want these tools to get more intelligent. We want them to be less sickopantic. Um and the thing that's a little bit hard with AI is because it's so gatekept all these things that we want from it. We have to ask these AI overlord masters to put in and they have all these like broken incentives. But to me, it really reflects back how beautiful open source is because the the top tier AI models right now, you have to depend on these intermediaries to kind of craft them or let you do what you want to do. Use IP, use certain swear words when you're writing and all that stuff. And Bitcoin, it's it's no one can change the rules of Bitcoin, but that process is open for all of us to discuss and debate and to work on. And I'm hoping as AI progresses, there are better open source models. I don't know. We only got 40 seconds here, but I'm kind of curious, what model does everyone use? What tools are people using? Maybe really quick and then we'll wrap this up. Maybe the audience can dabble with them. >> Well, just real quickly, my the models we use Mid Journey, uh, Claude, Nano Banana, and Gemini, and then, uh, we're using Grock heavily. We've, uh, uh, transitioned into that and creating great stuff with that. >> Nice. I use cloud code with opus and uh frequently like openclaw or hermes also. >> I use cloud code with opus and cling a lot of cling. >> Yeah, >> I use whatever works best to solve my problem. >> Nice. I use cloud code for writing uh well not cla but claude and then Higsfield for video generation. It's amazing. Awesome. Thank you everyone. Really appreciate it. Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year, the stage gets bigger. Sound money, center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.