I know this new tool looks to be for static graphics; but I do think the same thing applies. Not using AI-generated polished graphics will become a differentiator.
That said, I think video generation is at the point where someone will probably develop a product that fakes the kinds of videos you're talking about in the near future.
I know personally that if I recognized some kitchen apparatus or product is redundant, and a something I already own such as a rag will do, I couldn't in good conscious perpetuate what I see as needless consumerism just to put another dollar in my wallet.
Basically, if I couldn't get on tiktok and make an earnest video about why what I'm selling is useful and worth existing, and why it personally matters to me, I don't think I could sell that product in good conscience. Even if the customer truly thinks it's a great product, if I recognize the inherent waste and redundancy, I just can't buy into it.
I just always think about the chapter in Fight Club when the narrator's house blows up:
"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.
We set all our servers to listen on port 4443, and walk away from the whole sorry mess.
Make it all again from scratch. Block whole swathes of IP ranges known to belong to FAANG.
Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field
But can a small business use AI tools to make a better ad for their smaller budget? Probably.
I was thinking about this in the context of some videos posted here a few weeks back. They were AI generated video shorts. They weren’t fabulous, but they were funny and entertaining. There was a small writing team behind it that was able to produce solid video content that would have been way out of their budget just a few years ago. But with AI tools they were able to get their ideas made and content available.
That’s where I start to struggle… I’m not a fan of pure AI content, but if it helps smaller teams on smaller budgets compete a little more, or helps individual creators get to tell their story when they otherwise couldn’t, is AI content completely wrong?
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population? (the owners of AI hardware and software)
There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.
You'll see the wealth concentration you talk of, but it'll be completely different people who get this wealth, maybe even people who own businesses where wages are a large outlay.
The question is, will be there anything left for humans to consume ? will we survive ?
Who cares? That's two quarters away. What matters is that I got my Lambo and my speedboat today. Let the poors worry about the future.
Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.
I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.
The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.
That is the problem with this advice. “Can choose not to” is code to stop someone complaining. “Just don’t use it then”. It sounds equivalent to the “love it or leave it” slogan used in the 70s in America.
We don’t leave. We fight. We don’t stop using. We openly and publicly criticize
Sometimes “you don’t have to participate” isn’t strong enough advice, not that I know what the answer actually is.
From the article: "..like your social media, your site and your ads..."
I failed with my platform in the sense of online marketing. Although the platform itself did not fail, it has a solid user-base, but not enough reach to make a living from it.
Why did I fail from a marketing perspective? Because my social media, blog, ad words, etc. all do not have enough reach! The human made content itself is good and never was the problem. Reach it is!
This tool would not solve my problems.
Weird, uncanny valley times. And, FWIW, not times I want anything to do with, hence why I've been off all social media for years now...
If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.
They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.
In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.
Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.
Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.
(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
They sometimes pretend to care but not really. You can already stuff Google Merchant full of ai-generated slop images that have little to do with how an actual product looks like and that's something they could easily control if they wanted... but do they? Nah, they're going the other way, creating shit like Product Studio and that's just the beginning.
Make no mistake, Google is going all in on slop - search, ads, youtube, merchant, workspace, cloud, everything
Guessing: because they have AI products in the pipeline that can create Youtube shorts or similar.
This aspect will be interesting to watch.
Edit: Youtube Premium should include an optional AI slop filter.
Their blog post has some detail: https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/pomelli/
Kagi said the "Key features and functionalities of Pomelli include:
Content Generation: Pomelli can generate various marketing assets
such as social posts and ad creatives by analyzing
a company's website to understand its brand identity
Brand DNA: The tool builds a "Business DNA" from a company's
website to ensure generated content is consistent with the brand's identity
Campaign Creation: It aims to generate entire on-brand marketing
campaigns with minimal user input
Editable Assets: The generated campaign assets are editable
Canva Alternative: Pomelli is positioned as a competitor
to design tools like Canva"Seems like Google will kill a whole bunch of SaaS companies with this.
> founder @orshotapp
Maybe you should mention that when advertising your app?
I would love to hear what people’s takes on the market dynamics are, especially if any of the YC founders working in this space see this!
Still waiting for the AI LLM based ad autobidder so that I can just plug a machine to Google and press the "give them all my money" button.
I'm so glad we're all in this Faustian nightmare together, because as it all goes wrong we'll have a clear incentive to band together and help each other, right? Just like a lot of little Fausts would do.
What I see is that clients that invest in a campaign do not want to think about what an AI can produce. They don’t want to interact or brief an AI, they don’t want to do feedback rounds with an AI. They want a group of professionals that knows them to take over and do it all. If the professionals then use some AI for it, they mostly don’t care.
This is true so far for any campaign that allocates relevant funds (mid 5 figures and upwards). When it comes to the actual creation phase, right now AI is fundamentally immature and incapable of being controlled past the creation of static content.
All the motion and animation part for example is still somehow terra incognita for these tools. Take Adobe Animate, which is the go-to tool for anything 2D-animation, or Google Web Designer. Zero AI-features, simply because you can’t LLM frame by frame animations and have a result that is as precise as you need it. Or maybe you can, but for some reason these companies don’t see a business case for allocating resources to this specific development.
These tools can be great for smaller business that won’t have access to large campaigns, but as someone else mentioned, why do that when hiring a working gen-z social media native student will cost you slightly more, and possibly perform 100-times better with their native social media aesthetic?
Ps: Pomelli means door handles in Italian, and that’s… weird? Feels like a name randomly regurgitated by an LLM as well.
But what happens if they MIX some of their own code with AI-generated code, is that combination then their copyright? With such combined output it would be very difficult to determine which part was created by human, which by AI, and which by AI but slightly modified by human.
In the domain of graphics the AI could put in some markers which tells the graphic is AI-generated, but with code that is probabaly not possible, code is code and can always be edited by humans.
A separate question is that if I use Claude to generate some code but then stamp the output with my copyright notice, am I doing something illegal?
As a simple example, assume a specific LLM-based tool (like Google's own, or someone else's) happens to generate a social media mascot for you that looks a lot like the modern rendition of Mickey Mouse.
Let's see how long that creation flies as public domain because it came out of an AI (that almost certainly consumed a giant amount of content produced by Disney as part of its training).
If you want a specific tool, here is Elsa with a cigarette generated using Midjourney and more: https://journeyaiart.com/tag/Elsa .
See also [1] mentioned in the framework linked by sibling comment, AI copyright is essentially a logical extension of this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
The short version is the copyright office says it is possible works by creative human authors using AI tools are partially copyrightable in many cases.
You have to either have some big cajones or be totally lost to think it's a good idea to create a startup that is just a simple cheap veil on someone else's extremely advanced and expensive product
What sort of market dynamics do people predict here, winner takes all? Especially when this is integrated into the platforms of distribution.
If no one uses it, that means the market has proven, no audience for this kind of product. Google loses, everyone else loses.
If everyone who wants this sort of thing uses it, that's it, Google won, everyone else loses.
The outcome to sell to investors is the least believable: people will pay for some offering when a nearly identical one is available directly from Google for free. And anyway, they have the best generative creative tech, so how could anything be better than Google's?
Google appears to have their AI product game together!
But to answer the question, it looks a lot like a Canva competitor.
Nano Banana alone obsoleted all of Photoshop. (And the Chinese versions of Nano Banana are even better!)
I'm most worried for my friends in creative though. I have some extremely talented friends at WPP and other agencies. Everyone is shaking in their boots.
Nobody's buying ads because of the economy, then these tools are nipping at their heels. They've already had one massive round of layoffs, and there's another one supposedly happening early next year.
Where are these millions of people going to go? These are six figure income earners.
There are five million marketing professionals in the US. If half of them lose their jobs, then what? What's lined up for them after this?
If AI fails, the economy goes boom.
If AI succeeds, the economy goes ... bigger boom?
I used to think the tools would wind up creating more work, especially in narrative creative work. Outside of A24 and indie/foreign films, Hollywood is so trite. These models drop Pixar/Disney VFX into the hands of every YouTuber - and that could be really cool when used by the right people. Like the Corridor Crew folks.
Maybe gaming and media will see a boost, but advertising and marketing folks are really going to get hit hard.
If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.
Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.
Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.
AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.
A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.
Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.
I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.
If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.
When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.
The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.
You should look at ComfyUI.
Control is here, it's just not widely distributed or easy to use.
If you're patient, you can fully control the set, blocking, angles. You can position your characters, relight them, precisely control props, etc. You have unlimited control over everything. It's just a mess right now.
Have you seen their announcements during Adobe Max? The AI features are mind blowing. Adobe is alive and well.
It doesn't look like they developed any models. The 3d relighting and 3d manipulation are all 3rd party models given a UI.
I wonder.
They're doing well with their existing customer base of digital creatives and related industries/professions.
Who may all be the buggy whip makers of the late 2020's.
Way too many of the people/companies who traditionally paid highly skilled and creative Photoshop users are rapidly moving away from doing that in favour of cheap GenAI slop.
I'm sure there are people in graphic design, illustration, videography, photography, UI/UX, 3D art, augmented reality, social media, creativity and design, collaboration and productivity, and education who are super excited about what Adobe is doing. I'm also sure almost all of those people are very concerned about their career choice and future (or are ignoring the reality of what's going on around them).
Sure, the top graphic designers in the world will still earn great money being highly creative for key clients. But the vast majority of people in those fields are not the top in their field, and the vast majority of clients those people invoice are going to consider cheap AI slop "good enough" for their businesses and use cases.
I have a 30+ year career in web related roles, working more or less closely with graphic designers, artists, illustrators, photographers, and other website development related professions. All of the ones I've remained friends with over that time are either deeply concerned about their career future, or have already jumped ship and become nurses, carpenters, teachers, caregivers, and even priests and drug dealers...
Aside from the last one, that kinda sounds like a win for society.
xd
Sometimes even with a US account some things flop when you try to use them while traveling. You'd think the richass CEOs travel a lot so they would notice this problem but then you realize they never use their own products and have meat intelligence do all their shit for them anyway.