David Usher may be best known as a fixture on MuchMusic in the 90s, when he fronted iconic Canadian rock band Moist, or from the thoughtful tracks he penned on his solo records. But since 2018, Usher has embarked on a new creative journey: Reimagine AI, a venture studio that builds AI platforms and interactive avatars using house-made and existing tech.
BetaKit caught up with the Montréal-based musician and entrepreneur at Toronto Tech Week to discuss his company and the creative process—and learned that he reads the BetaKit Newsletter every week.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does the creative process usually work for you, in music and in tech?
A lot of my work has been around this idea of creative thinking methodology, which is the idea that creativity has a process and a flow to it.
If you take that methodology, you can extract that and divorce it from the genre or the vertical you’re working in. You can apply that same creative thinking to any vertical, and it’s the same process whether I’m making music or whether I’m running a tech startup.
Does the stroke of inspiration always start the same way for you?
My theory about creative work is that it’s work. So it is 98 percent grind. Part of my system is that I’m always working on many things at the same time.
Because the worst thing is that place where you don’t have something, you’re not working on anything, or you’re sort of lost in the ether.
There are lots of parts of creativity that are traumatic, just like building a company. It’s part fun and part trauma.
What is Reimagine AI building?
I started the company in 2018, so we’ve been working in AI for a long time, before LLMs, building these massive dialogue trees, trying to make things sound smart. And now they actually are smart.
We started out as a creative studio, and we’ve moved to be more of a venture studio, building platforms and companies and projects on this tech stack that we built or on different tech stacks that are now available.
Can you give me an example of a project?
One of our projects is Lucy AI. My friend from 30 years ago, Lucy, was, or is, this incredible dancer. And then about five years ago, she got stage four lung and brain cancer. For the last couple of years, we’ve been building the digital version of her mind.
From that, we’ve now built Ask Lucy, which is an online version, because her oncologist came to the New York exhibit and was thinking that this would be an amazing thing online for newly diagnosed cancer patients. To talk to somebody [who] has gone through the experience [who] they can really ask anything to.
We’re working on our own digital immortality platform called Second Echo, which is [based on] the idea that anyone can build their own version of their own mind, their thoughts, and memories saved forever.
Do you envision AI characters becoming more common in people’s social interactions?
These things are gonna be everywhere. And there’s a really big possibility that there’s gonna be a huge pushback coming soon. Human spaces are about to rise … both physically, but also online, people will only want human things.
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Some of these AI models are trained by scraping the internet. As an artist, does that give you any pause?
Do I think that artists should get paid? Absolutely. Is it going through the courts? Yes. And will I support it when it does? Absolutely.
But the reality is, just like every college student right now … these are the tools of the future, and you need to use the tools that exist.
Does your work in tech scratch the same itch for you as music creation?
It really does for me. It’s exactly the same thing … if I’m working with a large group of musicians in a room, I don’t play the cello, I don’t play the trumpet or the drums, but I understand the overview of what we’re trying to build, and I understand when a part is really good and how to draw the parts out of the right people.
It’s very much the same in technology, where you’re looking at a vision of what you’re trying to build. The one thing that’s different is the language.
One more thing. What musical project are you most proud of?
I’m going out on the road again this year, after three years off. The band is doing a bunch of outdoor festivals.
I guess I don’t know, because we haven’t played any of these songs in many years. Playing two hours of singles is really fun. It’s a blast.
BetaKit is the official media partner of Toronto Tech Week. Feature image by Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit.