The packed crowd at Mumbrella360’s Catalyst stage expected a formula for creativity, but walked away with a lesson in humility after Thinkerbell founder Adam Ferrier pulled an unexpected stunt.

Ferrier, on stage Thursday morning, asked the audience to take part in a thought experiment: imagine, or use an LLM to generate, a ballerina in a pink tutu standing in the spotlight. Twelve minutes later, Ferrier returned to the prompt, noting that audience results largely depicting a white, conventionally attractive dancer.

“Did anyone imagine this?” he asked, before showing a video in which the same prompt was entered into a different LLM, producing an image of a young girl with Down syndrome in a pink tutu.

Ferrier’s “mystery guest” was then revealed as Paul Nunnari PSM, Inclusively Made CEO, who gatecrashed the Catalyst stage with founder, Henry Smith’s, keynote audience in tow. Together, they announced a new tool, Inclusivelymade.ai.

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“Now, a few people have come in, not that many people,” Ferrier said as a second audience began to shuffle in. A group of around 20 joined the crowd of hundreds already there for Ferrier’s session.

Audience responses to the experiment were consistent (Mumbrella)

“We’ve created InclusivelyMade.ai, which is a tool that allows you to go in and sense check yourself and ask the absolute authority on all things to do with the representation of people with disability. How to cast, how to produce, and the various practical considerations you have to think about,” Ferrier said.

Using Inclusively Made’s existing work, the platform embeds “tokenism checks”, accessibility standards and inclusive checklists directly into the creative workflow.

“We’ve ingested everything from the Inclusively Made framework, built it into this tool, and that’s what we’re here to talk about today. To kind of remove the bias and create [something] extraordinary,” said Ferrier.

Paul Nunnari PSM said that existing unconscious biases had been replicated by LLMs.

“When you’re using LLMs to describe a dancer or whatever, what we’ve found quite fascinating when we started this project was, just by default, when you put that into an LLM, whether it’s ChatGPT or Gemini, disability, generally, is never included. It’s always omitted.”

He explained that one in five people report having a disability, whether that be physical, cognitive, or sensory.

“It’s not a minority. It’s definitely a significant proportion of the population, and it only gets bigger the older we become.”

“We have prompts through InclusivelyMade.com.au to consider that authentic representation and disability as part of the societal fabric, the tapestry of the everyday,” he said.

“We’re spotting the race issues, we’re spotting ageism, we’re spotting sexism, but we’re still not spotting ableism, and that’s what we’re really trying to address today.”

Ferrier said using the system will come with creative benefits.

“I see the end benefit of having a more interesting, creative, inclusive world for everybody, and that’s why I feel like listening to InclusivelyMade.ai will supercharge our creativity by being aware of our own biases and aware of our own limitations in how we are thinking about things.”

Ferrier then performed a live demo of the software (after accidentally flashing confidential documents on screen to the amused crowd). He explained that creatives can upload scripts, plans and put questions to the platform.

“It’ll give you the ethical and kind of moral considerations of what you’re doing. It’ll also then get into the practical advice of connecting you to the ecosystem of people who kind of removed ableism from their thinking.”

InclusivelyMade.ai is free for now (Adam Ferrier and Paul Nunnari PSM, Mumbrella)

The platform is currently free, although Ferrier said that a paid model would eventually be rolled out.

Nunnari closed the session with a reminder of the subject’s complexity: “Disability isn’t homogenised. Disability is also intersectionality. So, it impacts culture, gender, and as I said, at some point it ultimately impacts everyone.”

“So all of you in this room can be our inclusion change agent just by considering disability through the LLM’s you use and prompting more inclusively,” he said.

“You’re all more creative for being here,” Ferrier said.

The Inclusivelymade.ai platform was created with the team at Inclusively Made, Thinkerbell and Matt Kuperholz Consultancy.

Backers of Inclusively Made and its new platform include Nine, Bupa, Woolworths, Thinkerbell, Mastercard, Telstra, Atomic212, Entertainment Partners, Big W and KFC.