4 ms·

AI generated videos are being used in more and more ads. To cut costs I’m sure. The result is that ads that were just annoying are now terrible and jarring. Wh

by chrsw 10mo ago

AI generated videos are being used in more and more ads. To cut costs I’m sure. The result is that ads that were just annoying are now terrible and jarring. When I hear talk about AI risks I mostly hear things like runaway super intelligence doing whatever it wants and leaving humanity in the lurch. But what about more realistic concerns, like accelerating the race to the bottom by cheaply and poorly ripping off other people’s work and forcing everyone else to do the same just to keep up?

waltbosz 10mo ago
Last night, I deliberately paid attention to an ad because it had the disclaimer "images generated with AI". I was curious to see what the advertisers did with the technology. The ad featured a bunch of animals of different species driving cars around a city. It clearly had that AI uncanny valley that high budget 3D modeled CGI animals doesn't have. I thought about what it would have cost for a effects team to 3D model and render all those animals, and also wondered how many rendering attempts with the AI did it take to get good footage for the ad. The ad felt sickening to look at, like a TV with smooth motion turned on. It's like my brain is rejecting the pictures that it sees because it doesn't match the patterns of motion that it has been trained to recognize. Or was it just regular motion sickness.
simianwords 10mo ago
i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
- belinder 10mo ago
  Maybe in the past. In todays world, when something becomes cheaper, the extra revenue goes straight to the executives. The consumer doesn't see it
- exhumet 10mo ago
  because the race to the bottom does not and will not benefit us, they will cut costs but whatever it is will still cost you the same or more.
- bentcorner 10mo ago
  I don't think AI reduces cost of marketing in any significant way. Everybody has access to these tools so at best it just allows marketing companies to employ fewer ad-creation teams to pump out the same amount of advertisements. Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot. I suspect the end state will be just-in-time rich ad creation (not bidding) tailored specifically to you.
  - toast0 10mo ago
    > Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot. For a superbowl ad, there's the high cost to air the spot, but most of them also have a high cost to produce the spot (maybe not for the the one from last year that was just a dvd logo esque bouncing qr code for a crypto scam); if your marketing budget was ~ $5M, maybe you spent $1M on production and $4M on airtime. If AI gives you a good enough result for approximately no money, maybe you spend all that budget on airtime, maybe you cut the budget and still spend $4.5M on airtime. Of course, if everybody is spending more on airtime, you might not get more airtime, but you could still reduce/eliminate the production part of the budget.
- djeastm 10mo ago
  >your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces. One could imagine that once every company in a market uses AI videos to reduce said costs they will then have to spend even more to stand out from the other marketers, leaving us all back where we started, but with a lot of crappy AI videos to wade through.
- dasil003 10mo ago
  They also get crappier though. I am generally okay with a lot of the tradeoffs to reduce the cost of construction and mass production. We definitely have more crappy stuff than we need—I'd prefer if we had a little less, higher quality stuff, but the balance is not too far out of whack. With media though, I feel it's a lot worse. It's already been trending that way for text with blogspam already diluting the value of the web even before AI. But with AI this is accelerating to video and audio as well. Not only does the AI slop drown out the best of human creativity, it also raises the floor on superficial production value so that if you don't use AI you fall behind on the initial attention-grabbing first impression. I acknowledge a big part of this is due to where we are in the hype cycle, and once we absorb the capabilities of the tools, we'll figure out how to use them more tastefully, and human creativity will shine through again. But no I don't think always making everything easier and more efficient is necessarily always a good thing a priori. Friction and effort sometimes leads to positive outcomes.
- yakattak 10mo ago
  Wake me up when my things get cheaper from cutting costs in the process.
- lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
  Yeah I don't care how cheap/expensive Coca-Cola is. I care how expensive ram and gpus are though and this ain't helping.
- Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago
  > your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces. Prices won't go down. Profits go up. The winners are the shareholders.
- Geee 9mo ago
  We once built pyramids, massive castles, temples and churches which took hundreds of years to build. We don't build those things any more. Same happened to music and art. There's this eternal sloppification of everything, although at the same time things get on average better and cheaper for more people to enjoy. Quantity beats quality, i.e. capitalism optimizes for scalability. The end game is quite sad, which will be some kind of neural device which just directly manipulates brain signals for happiness, and everything physical will be just gray goo. It's more scalable to make you think the world is beautiful, than to actually make it beautiful. We are almost there already, because we experience the world through a screen, which shows us happy things, while we care less and less about the real world around us.
AlexandrB 10mo ago
This is a weird complaint because ads have always been a curse on the world; they've always been "slop". The worst part about AI ads is that they're ads.
- YurgenJurgensen 10mo ago
  War predates human history, and the worst thing about chemical warfare is that it’s warfare; therefore there is no need to ban chemical weapons.
lapetitejort 10mo ago
A local window blinds company ran an ad before a movie. Clearly AI. Besides the obvious fake humans, how can I trust that the AI blinds in your ad match your real product?
- brendanfinan 10mo ago
  It's convenient! I know that they are cutting corners on the product, because they are cutting corners with their ads.
AStrangeMorrow 10mo ago
Yeah I am not an absolute GenAI hater. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and I think there are ways to be creative about it. However 95% of what we see online, especially in the Ads space, is bottom of the barrel quality. It is obvious basic AI generated images/video most of the time and for me is an instant “I’m not going to bother with that product” marker. One of the worst one was an allegedly “illustrated history” book. All Ads were of AI generated history book pages with tons of historical inconsistencies. Looked up the real book and it actually looked decent: hand drawn, well formatted etc. Why not use pictures of the actual book instead of whatever mess I was seeing. However I also keep getting Ads for this other historical book that drives me nuts: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vilno/the-codex-book https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vilno/the-codex-book I might be wrong but to me most of the art is looks AI generated, and the few pages they show just don’t make any historical sense. Yet they sell it as “hand drawn”. From the animations seems like some stuff was AI generated and then redrawn by hand? But the drawing themselves are plain weird: the nonsensical castle. The archers and scoped crossbow in a page about medieval crossbows, the silly submarine
jollyllama 10mo ago
I don't know if we're in the minority or not, insofar as we are able to look at these things and discern that they are fake. One problem going forward is that the proportion of us who are able to do so will grow smaller as individuals become habituated to the AI output, especially children.
wseqyrku 10mo ago
Right there, it's a distraction from the actual problem. They promote safety research as if they are fighting Skynet and it works.

by chrsw 10mo ago

waltbosz 10mo ago

Last night, I deliberately paid attention to an ad because it had the disclaimer "images generated with AI". I was curious to see what the advertisers did with the technology. The ad featured a bunch of animals of different species driving cars around a city. It clearly had that AI uncanny valley that high budget 3D modeled CGI animals doesn't have. I thought about what it would have cost for a effects team to 3D model and render all those animals, and also wondered how many rendering attempts with the AI did it take to get good footage for the ad. The ad felt sickening to look at, like a TV with smooth motion turned on. It's like my brain is rejecting the pictures that it sees because it doesn't match the patterns of motion that it has been trained to recognize. Or was it just regular motion sickness.

simianwords 10mo ago

i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.

belinder 10mo ago
Maybe in the past. In todays world, when something becomes cheaper, the extra revenue goes straight to the executives. The consumer doesn't see it
exhumet 10mo ago
because the race to the bottom does not and will not benefit us, they will cut costs but whatever it is will still cost you the same or more.
bentcorner 10mo ago
I don't think AI reduces cost of marketing in any significant way. Everybody has access to these tools so at best it just allows marketing companies to employ fewer ad-creation teams to pump out the same amount of advertisements. Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot. I suspect the end state will be just-in-time rich ad creation (not bidding) tailored specifically to you.
- toast0 10mo ago
  > Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot. For a superbowl ad, there's the high cost to air the spot, but most of them also have a high cost to produce the spot (maybe not for the the one from last year that was just a dvd logo esque bouncing qr code for a crypto scam); if your marketing budget was ~ $5M, maybe you spent $1M on production and $4M on airtime. If AI gives you a good enough result for approximately no money, maybe you spend all that budget on airtime, maybe you cut the budget and still spend $4.5M on airtime. Of course, if everybody is spending more on airtime, you might not get more airtime, but you could still reduce/eliminate the production part of the budget.
djeastm 10mo ago
>your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces. One could imagine that once every company in a market uses AI videos to reduce said costs they will then have to spend even more to stand out from the other marketers, leaving us all back where we started, but with a lot of crappy AI videos to wade through.
dasil003 10mo ago
They also get crappier though. I am generally okay with a lot of the tradeoffs to reduce the cost of construction and mass production. We definitely have more crappy stuff than we need—I'd prefer if we had a little less, higher quality stuff, but the balance is not too far out of whack. With media though, I feel it's a lot worse. It's already been trending that way for text with blogspam already diluting the value of the web even before AI. But with AI this is accelerating to video and audio as well. Not only does the AI slop drown out the best of human creativity, it also raises the floor on superficial production value so that if you don't use AI you fall behind on the initial attention-grabbing first impression. I acknowledge a big part of this is due to where we are in the hype cycle, and once we absorb the capabilities of the tools, we'll figure out how to use them more tastefully, and human creativity will shine through again. But no I don't think always making everything easier and more efficient is necessarily always a good thing a priori. Friction and effort sometimes leads to positive outcomes.
yakattak 10mo ago
Wake me up when my things get cheaper from cutting costs in the process.
lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
Yeah I don't care how cheap/expensive Coca-Cola is. I care how expensive ram and gpus are though and this ain't helping.
Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago
> your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces. Prices won't go down. Profits go up. The winners are the shareholders.
Geee 9mo ago
We once built pyramids, massive castles, temples and churches which took hundreds of years to build. We don't build those things any more. Same happened to music and art. There's this eternal sloppification of everything, although at the same time things get on average better and cheaper for more people to enjoy. Quantity beats quality, i.e. capitalism optimizes for scalability. The end game is quite sad, which will be some kind of neural device which just directly manipulates brain signals for happiness, and everything physical will be just gray goo. It's more scalable to make you think the world is beautiful, than to actually make it beautiful. We are almost there already, because we experience the world through a screen, which shows us happy things, while we care less and less about the real world around us.

AlexandrB 10mo ago

This is a weird complaint because ads have always been a curse on the world; they've always been "slop". The worst part about AI ads is that they're ads.

YurgenJurgensen 10mo ago
War predates human history, and the worst thing about chemical warfare is that it’s warfare; therefore there is no need to ban chemical weapons.

lapetitejort 10mo ago

A local window blinds company ran an ad before a movie. Clearly AI. Besides the obvious fake humans, how can I trust that the AI blinds in your ad match your real product?

brendanfinan 10mo ago
It's convenient! I know that they are cutting corners on the product, because they are cutting corners with their ads.

AStrangeMorrow 10mo ago

Yeah I am not an absolute GenAI hater. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and I think there are ways to be creative about it. However 95% of what we see online, especially in the Ads space, is bottom of the barrel quality. It is obvious basic AI generated images/video most of the time and for me is an instant “I’m not going to bother with that product” marker. One of the worst one was an allegedly “illustrated history” book. All Ads were of AI generated history book pages with tons of historical inconsistencies. Looked up the real book and it actually looked decent: hand drawn, well formatted etc. Why not use pictures of the actual book instead of whatever mess I was seeing. However I also keep getting Ads for this other historical book that drives me nuts: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vilno/the-codex-book https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vilno/the-codex-book I might be wrong but to me most of the art is looks AI generated, and the few pages they show just don’t make any historical sense. Yet they sell it as “hand drawn”. From the animations seems like some stuff was AI generated and then redrawn by hand? But the drawing themselves are plain weird: the nonsensical castle. The archers and scoped crossbow in a page about medieval crossbows, the silly submarine

jollyllama 10mo ago

I don't know if we're in the minority or not, insofar as we are able to look at these things and discern that they are fake. One problem going forward is that the proportion of us who are able to do so will grow smaller as individuals become habituated to the AI output, especially children.

wseqyrku 10mo ago

Right there, it's a distraction from the actual problem. They promote safety research as if they are fighting Skynet and it works.