Comment by Hamuko
2 days ago
Yeah, I have a hard time believing that there’s a massive demand for AI-generated videos and images. Like, why would the news industry want to generate images and videos with AI? It’s not news. The advertising industry maybe, but even then it’s probably not your top brands that go full in on it. If you see that all of Apple’s adverts are generated with AI, it’ll probably lower your brand perception.
We already put more importance on handmade goods vs. factory-made, even if the latter is cheaper and better quality. I have my doubts about humanity collectively embracing content generated from prompts by black boxes.
> Yeah, I have a hard time believing that there’s a massive demand for AI-generated videos and images. Like, why would the news industry want to generate images and videos with AI? It’s not news. The advertising industry maybe, but even then it’s probably not your top brands that go full in on it. If you see that all of Apple’s adverts are generated with AI, it’ll probably lower your brand perception.
(disclaimer: I don't work in ad and don't know more about it than the next person)
Whether the end product (the ad) is AI-generated or not is almost irrelevant. The whole production chain will likely be AIfied: to produce one ad you need to go through many concepts, gather reference images/videos, make prototypes, iterate on all that, and probably a ton of other things that I don't know about... The final ad is 1 image/video, but there's been dozens/hundreds of other images/videos produced in this process. Whether the final ad is AI-generated or not, AI will almost certainly (for better or worse...) have a major place in the production chain.
The cost of operating television studios and paying related staff, including on-air talent, is probably significant. I can easily see major news networks turning to AI-generated newsreaders. TikTok is already full of AI voiceovers; seems like a short leap, to me.
Is the cost of on-air talent so great that you want to replace recognisable faces of your network with a generic voiceover?
Personally, I consider TikTok very different to news networks. TikTok is also primarily vertical video. Are news networks going to do that too?
I don't quite follow this point. Master Chief is recognizable. So is Lara Croft. So is Darth Vader's voice. Networks could easily develop virtual personalities with distinctive, bankable, appealing characteristics.
They wouldn't have off-air scandals, require insurance, pensions, teams of wardrobe and makeup artists, security details; They wouldn't need to travel. And that is just the on-air talent. You can replace thousands of tv studios all over the world with a handful of workstations and compute power.
2 replies →
I think there's a good chance people would watch an entirely generated character read the news, so long as they find the presentation reliable according to their world view.
Tucker Carlson or Wolf Blitzer or Lester Holt might as well be cartoon characters to me. There's practically zero chance I'll ever meet them in person, especially more that we'd have any kind of real human connection. What one cares about is if they think the overall source is reliable and what kind of information (or disinformation) their orgs are pushing to the people. Having them be actual meatbags is a liability, they'll pop too much ambien one night and say some pretty terrible things on social media compared to only ever being a highly curated output of the organization. Unless they pull a Tay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom
> TikTok is already full of AI voiceovers
And it makes it look/sound cheap.
I think thats the biggest issue they will face. For example, a company that uses avatars and emojis just looks cheap, because it is cheap to do.
Are you going to pay for cheap looking TV, especially when you know its shit?
But then the more important thing to remember is that news isn't expensive because of the news readers, its expensive because it costs lots to operate a news network. If you news anchors are costing millions, you have a chat show, not a news programme.
The way I see it is, it doesn't matter if I'm willing to pay for shit content/presentation or not. This discussion is not about what is good for customers, or for news consumers in general. It is about what is good for publicly-traded content providers' bottom lines. My opinions as a consumer of video-based news do not matter. They're going to give me what they want, regardless of what I think about it, and as they have done for the past 50 years.
It is no different than charging me for a channel package full of content I don't watch, cancelling my favorite shows, flooding their channels with unscripted reality garbage, or using "stunning" and "so-and-so just did such-and-such" on nominally serious news web sites. If I don't like it I can choose not to participate, but if I do choose to participate, I agree to accept whatever is offered to me; my opinion was neither requested nor required. So if the top three linear TV news providers chooses to go with an AI-based newsreaders that people initially don't like... so what?
> We already put more importance on handmade goods vs. factory-made, even if the latter is cheaper and better quality
I guess if 'importance' means sentimentality, however, the "factory-made things" industry certainly makes the vast majority of the money to be made in manufacturing. Handmade is a niche. I think the argument is that whether people prefer it or not, AI-generated content will have a major place in the marketplace for content because of its natural advantages. In other words, a movie heavily generated with AI won't win any Oscars but there is a world where such things would make a lot of money and some of that money would flow to OpenAI.
I have a hard time understanding why I would want to waste my time watching something generated by AI when they clearly didn't value the time spent making it.
I have a limited lifespan, I'm not going to use that to consume slop.
That's generally been my principle too. If it wasn't worth making by a human, why is it worth consuming by one?