By Aiden Dancey and Maya Smith
Matthew Blakemore, an AI business specialist and speaker, has built a career out of a technology that
was, until recently, the stuff of sci-fi movies. Reliable and consumer-friendly AI tools only entered the
mainstream a few years ago, but Blakemore is already an expert.
He’s also a prolific speaker on AI and creativity, which is what brought him to London Metropolitan University’s “AI: Hope or Hype?” panel event, sponsored by London Met Journalism.
Though Blakemore attended the University of Hertfordshire for business, his career has been diverse.
His background is in media, and includes a stint on the British Board of Film Classification, which provides age ratings for films.
He has developed multiple AI tools useful in the media and related industries, including a program that
identified the age-appropriateness of films. In collaboration with Amazon and the University of Bath, he
helped create a similar tool for video analysis.
“In terms of recognizing issues in content, I think there’s a lot of opportunity in the user-generated
content space to provide better tools for platforms like YouTube,” Blakemore said on the AI and tech
podcast Outgrow in 2024.
Blakemore has now set his sights on the fashion industry, which he sees as ripe for AI
innovation. He developed the app ‘Looks Good On Me’, which helps improve apparel shoppers’
satisfaction and decrease return rates.
Now, he is the CEO of consulting company AI Caramba!, which develops custom AI tools for corporate use. These tools include content analysis programs and specialized generative AI for image creation.
“I’ve worked with lots of different organizations, with governments to optimize their use of AI, and also
educate them about how to use AI responsibly,” Blakemore said in an interview.
His work is wide-ranging, since so many companies and governments want to hop on the AI
trend. He has specifically consulted with governments of Nordic countries, which he views as having
realistic regulations around AI use.
Far from being a tool which mostly helps wealthy companies who can afford big servers, he believes that generative AI has the potential to democratize the business and design process.
“I think the technology, or artificial intelligence in general, is a vehicle for many companies… or
entrepreneurs who potentially are from poorer socio-economic backgrounds to really build successful
companies that can compete with some of the larger businesses,” he said, adding that large and established companies may view AI tools as ‘a bit of a threat’.
One of the major ethical concerns surrounding generative AI is that the models may have unintentional
bias. Since they are trained mostly on human-generated text and images, they also learn human biases
and can copy human bigotry. For example, an image generating AI, when told to generate images of a
doctor versus a nurse, is far more likely to show male doctors and female nurses.
“One of the big challenges we have right now is many businesses are building on top of open source
models, such as Llama, [an open source large language model created by Meta] and we don’t really
know what biases exist within those models.”
He acknowledged that companies using AI needed to set up programs and safeguards to protect against prejudice. “There are, you know, historical issues that have been there for quite some time, but I say they are more amplified with generative AI.”
Still, he is confident and optimistic that generative AI and older machine learning
models will make work more efficient, from fashion design to governing. “Now, you can simply use
tools… to perfect your ideas and then potentially to start building successful companies.”
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