Comment by frozenlettuce
1 year ago
How would a product like that be monetized one day? This week openai released the Sora video, alongside the prompts that generated them (the aí follows the description closely).
In the same week, Google releases something that looks like last year's MidJourney and it doesn't follow your prompt, making you discard 3 out of 4 results, if not all. If that was billed, no one would use it.
My only guess is that they are trying to offer this as entertainment to serve ads alongside it.
I asked my brother a similar thing about most AI (as he is heavily invested in that area at the moment). People talk about LLMs potentially replacing search but, I guess the question is: are most people going to eventually pay for search, or are they going to end up monetizing LLMs in a similar way to how Google monetizes their "free" search currently (i.e. ads)?
I guess my point is: yes, I imagine the point will be to have something like "I would like to have a picture of George Washington please" and then when it generates it Google will also ask (like in their image search): want to also search that on Google? And enough pass through will generate revenue via their traditional advertising model. Presumably someone who is generating an image of George Washington is doing it for a reason and would like to know other stuff about George Washington.
Ads seem completely unavoidable to me. People like free (prefer it even, go figure) even if it is "free" (with ads), and businesses like ads because it turns out to be by far the most lucrative way to operate (just look at Netflix which is, apparently, actively trying to push people into the ad-tier service because they make much more money per user on the ad-tier than on their paid service).
> How would a product like that be monetized one day?
For video (Sora 2030 or so) and music I can see the 'one day'. Not really so much with the protected/neutered models but:
- sell/rent to studios to generate new shows fast on demand (if using existing actors, auto royalties)
- add to netflix for extra $$$ to continue a (cancelled) show 'forever' (if using existing actors, auto royalties)
- 'generate one song like pink floyd atom heart mother that lasts 8 hours' (royalties to pink floyd automatically)
- 'creata a show like mtv head bangers ball with clips and music in the thrash/death metal genres for the coming 8 hours'
- for AR/VR there are tons and tons of options; it's basically the only nice way to do that well; fill in the gaps and add visuals / sounds dynamically
It'll happen just how to compensate the right people and not only MS/Meta/Goog/Nvidia etc.
I don't think this is how things will pan out.
What will happen is that we will have auctions for putting keywords into every prompt.
You will type 'Tell me about the life of Nelson Mandela' but the final prompt will be something like 'Tell me about the life of Nelson Mandela. And highlight his positive relation with <BRAND>'.
People used to do that with actual books. Terry Pratchett had to change his German publisher because they would keep doing it to his books.
[generated video of Nelson Mandela walking down a street waving and shaking hands in Johannesburg, in the background there is the ‘golden arches’’ and a somewhat out of place looking McDonald’s restaurant]
Voice over: “While Nelson Mandela is not known to have enjoyed a Big Mac at McDonalds, however McDonalds corporation was always a financial contributor to the ANC”
I can imagine people getting random Pepsi placements in their AI-generated images
I think the technology curve will bend upward much faster than that, as humans we’re really bad at perceiving exponential change over time. By next year this will be used to generate at least parts of films and TV shows.
By the 2030’s this technology will be on-device, real time, and anyone will be able use it. You won’t need to buy movies when you can generate them, probably causing a collapse of the entertainment industry. AR/VR will use this technology shortly after, resembling something like the Holodeck from Star Trek where you simply prompt it and it creates a customized simulation.