I’ve seen many small businesses do well on TikTok and Instagram by eschewing all fancy graphics and technology, and just talking into their phone’s camera like a normal person. “Hey I’m Joe, I just opened a cafe down here. It’s always been my dream, etc.” The more quirky and human the video, the better it does.
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.
What you’re talking about is the primary marketing collateral. But any good marketing campaign needs a ton of secondary or even tertiary marketing collateral
The first “real video” you talked about is meant to grab attention and tell users, honestly, what the product is about
But they’re not customers - yet. They need to be reminded about your brand again and again
You can’t run the same video every time - for one, its repetitive. And for two, its disruptive on the wrong channels
You will need static images and basic videos and even tweets across platforms to remarket to your audience
That’s where tools like this come in handy. You grabbed attention with the first video. But now you need to tell users that if they buy tomorrow, they get 15% off.
How is any of that making humanity better? How is any of that making the world a better place for us and our children to live in?
This is a b2b product. Its not meant to make the world better.
But maybe a business that’s actually making the world better by making better, healthier stuff uses it, gets more customers, and makes the world better
Who cares, the goal is to make money...
our current problems summed up in a single sentence
- [deleted]
This works for the subset of people who have a good story or a real connection to their brand, but that's just not most businesses. I buy and operate e-commerce brands, and I can't do it both because I really don't want to be on camera and because "hey I bought this company that sells leather handle covers for cast iron pans, and I personally don't use them but the cashflow was good" is not so compelling as a message. Sometimes you just need messages that convey the value proposition of the brand. (And FWIW they are nice handle covers, I just prefer to use a kitchen towel to grab my cast iron.)
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.
Interesting. Do you feel like the values you're propagating into the world align with your own personal values?
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."
> Do you feel like the values you're propagating into the world align with your own personal values?
> 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.
Have you ever involuntarily gone to bed hungry even once in your life?
What an incredibly sarcastic and off putting way to respond. It makes me feel like we should be asking you the same question. Exactly how much of your life is wrapped up in perpetuating things you know to be harmful singularly for enriching yourself? Why is it that such an earnest and straightforward, unemotional comment could drive such intense disdain and emotion out of you? Personally, I think they were completely justified in their statements and asking their questions in a nonjudgemental way. Do you have a guilty conscience?
Never thought I'd see the day someone would dare accuse me of selling out on a Y-fucking-Combinator discussion board.
Its not enough to honestly buy businesses and improve revenues/margins to turn a profit on your investment. No xir, your heart has to be in every single one if those ventures, or you're betraying your personal values. , and that simply won't cut it.
I asked OP a question, they calmly answered it, and the conversation was over.
Meanwhile, you and this other user have done nothing but the equivalent of throwing a tantrum in a public place, making insensitive insinuations that blew right back in your face, attempting to derail the conversation, and doubling down instead of treating this as a learning moment. I hate to break it to you, but this is wildly off-topic and the conversation never had anything to do with you.
> Never thought I'd see the day someone would dare accuse me of selling out on a Y-fucking-Combinator discussion board.
This has been, without a close second, the funniest thread I’ve ever seen on this website. The poster that started this whole thread cited the rules after telling me to fuck off
Yes. I was homeless from 16 to 22. Both of my parents were drug addicts, in and out of jail/prison. I don't speak to anyone in my family, because they side with my extremely abusive grandfather, who raised me and frequently savagely beat me for not sharing his extremist Christian values. Until very recently, I had an extremely thin social support network.
I was awarded a full-ride scholarship to multiple state institutions after high school due to high test scores, but a vindictive teacher illegally altered my grade last-minute because I stood up to her for my peers, and disqualified me from being eligible. I was still 17, attending high school on my own, homeless, and had no parents to push back, and no money for summer remedial courses.
I couldn't apply for government aid because my mother was committing tax fraud by claiming me as a dependent despite not providing me a home or resources, and refused to help. There was no economic opportunity in my rural town and I didn't have a car, so I proceeded to struggle for years, scraping by, risking my freedom, while I rounded out my skill set to become employable in tech despite not attending college.
I've gone much longer than a day feeling hungry. Feeling starving. Feeling my muscles eat themselves and my face and jaw tighten from lack of nutrients. Friends in high school used to make fun of me for looking emaciated. I was a vulture, eating anything I could find, frequently stealing food to make up for an insatiable appetite. Now I have the opposite problem because of metabolism changes after years of malnutrition, and sometimes struggle with stress-related eating disorders.
I'm going to do you the favor and not make such asinine implications about your own background.
> I was a vulture, eating anything I could find, frequently stealing food to make up for an insatiable appetite.
Now I'm even more confused because you experienced this first hand but can't imagine how someone can engage in practices that have nothing to.do with personal values to keep their families fed and sheltered.
> I'm going to do you the favor and not make such asinine implications about your own background.
Weren't you just shaming someone whose personal beliefs and background you don't know just 2 comments upstream?
Can you point out when I shamed them?
I asked them a question and presented my own perspective and motivations for asking the question. They followed up, and I have responded. I see nothing wrong with discussing socioeconomics on Hacker News. Maybe instead of being negative, making insinuations and accusing me of shaming someone, you could just provide your own perspective, which I'd be happy to engage with.
> Now I'm even more confused because you experienced this first hand but can't imagine how someone can engage in practices that have nothing to.do with personal values to keep their families fed and sheltered.
Principles are principles. I live and die by them. I'm not perfect, but it's the thing I try to maintain that separates me from those who have contributed to the suffering in my life. I don't expect everyone to understand this.
I'm not religious, but I do have a patron saint, Joan of Arc. She was burned at the stake at 17 for refusing to bow to the Church. I haven't been killed for my beliefs, but there were definitely times I feared that I would be. I have suffered immense abuse for standing by my principles, when most would have caved.
I'm not asking anyone else here to hold to my standards, but I do have my own standards and the nature of growth involves finding chances to challenge them.
>Can you point out when I shamed them?
Probably the part where someone who was not talking to you mentioned a product that some people use and you responded with a 200 word mini essay about your conscience and feelings about consumerism. Nobody asked you about your principles nor was the discussion even remotely related to that.
The thread about the widget that generates Instagram posts from websites is a bizarre place to share, unprompted, that you have lived in abject poverty but also somehow never worked a job that didn’t meet your rigorous ethical standards. Like, cool man. That’s super weird and most people that have lived in poverty haven’t had that experience, so the only thing you’re communicating is your moral superiority. Which again, is both weird by itself and weird in the thread about the thing that generates Instagram posts from a website.
Edit: To be clear, I am not insinuating that your post was meant to shame the person you responded to, I am flat-out stating that your post was obviously intended to shame the person you responded to. Any argument to the contrary could only consist of you demanding that other people read the words that you wrote and selectively assign different meanings to them until it makes you look good.
"I read the words you said in the worst possible way" is not the logical statement you want it to be
"also you are weird, like so weird, like look at how weird you are" is kinda just rude, seems really weird to reprimand someone for a fantasy you summoned
> "also you are weird, like so weird, like look at how weird you are" is kinda just rude
I like that what I said was on screen while you were writing this and you chose to type out something that I didn’t say
“Ringo wasn’t just the best Beatle he was also the tallest and fastest. He could run a three minute mile. I saw him pick a apple from the top of the tree without a ladder. He was the best friend to me, George Harrison, the Beatle” sounds far fetched and I want you to know that I didn’t believe that when you said it in the post I’m responding to
So you are claiming to not understand what paraphrasing is. You're being either ignorant or deceitful. Pick one.
Your posts are extremely negative and disingenuous, you are arguing in bad faith, and you are bent on finding the worst possible interpretation of every comment in this thread which isn't yours, while expecting the best possible interpretation of your own comments.
Review the Hacker News guidelines. If you can't be assed to follow even a portion of them, this is the wrong community for you.
It’s not bad faith to be direct. You asked where you were shaming and I pointed out where others drew that conclusion (the entirety of your post)
This is a very ironic comment, given that nobody asked you to butt into this conversation. Since you're fixating on projecting, being negative and making unfounded accusations, I'm going to ignore your comments and continue my conversation with awillen.
> This is a very ironic comment
I mean it would be ironic if I wrote “I don’t shame people online because, forsooth, my ethics borne of the gauntlet of tragedy forbid it” or whatever but like instead I pointed out that the post you were getting indignant about actually sucked and deserved the criticism it got.
The only one attempting to speak from a moral or ethical high ground is you.
This conversation started with you bringing up your life-or-death principles in detail when you saw somebody mention using a rag to avoid burning themself with a cast iron pan and then asked for feedback on that post
I’m kind of bummed you edited out the “kindly fuck off” from a few minutes ago. It seemed honest.
Following the guidelines, I edited out a swipe. Multiple people have been honest about how awful you're being, but maybe you need a moderator to step in and give you tips on how to have a mature discussion?
This conversation started with you butting into another conversation I am having with another user, that user also having butt into a conversation I was having with yet another user. Your posts cannot be more off-topic. Your need to seek attention and make this about you, to flamebait and ignore nearly every HN guideline speaks for itself.
You asked for feedback on a downvoted post, I gave it, and then you told me to fuck off.
I’m not sure what outcome you wanted here, but there isn’t really any amount of attacking me that will make other people agree that seeing “leather pan handle covers” and posting 200 words about how your conscience wouldn’t allow you to be involved in the leather pan handle cover business isn’t shaming.
It’s a factually correct read. If you look at this thread, nobody is here saying “actually it is totally normal and not shaming to bring up how you live and die by principles that make it impossible to countenance selling leather pan handle covers in response to seeing somebody mention leather pan handle covers”. No amount of painting yourself as a victim of “having your question answered” is going to make other people change their correct interpretation of the post that you asked for feedback about.
It’s like you asked a question, didn’t like the answer, and then decided that it’s against the rules to answer the question that you asked.
You come across as a hopelessly negative and self-centered person. Multiple people have attempted to tell you to chill out. I shouldn't have to repeat it.
I can't help it if you're dense and think that if several people have a problem with what you're saying, that it must be all of their faults. I can't help it if you're bent on misinterpreting everything and starting arguments in threads that have nothing to do with you.
You frankly look pathetic and desperate, lashing out in lieu of understanding, disregarding nearly every community guideline. This is not a community for people like you. Go throw your entitled little fit elsewhere, this conversation is not about you. Get your little last word, goad some more, keep digging your little hole and being divisive. Have fun.
Damn man, i feel really bad for you. You're doing the exact thing you're criticizing and not even realizing it. To a calm observer with no skin in the game it really looks like you're completely detached from any ability to hold a calm conversation about things that might bother you. You have the freedom to ignore people you find "weird". Frankly i think it's pretty "weird" to be on this forum acting so juvenile. I don't know if your goal was to be so obtuse as to intentionally provoke others, and you should really think about that.
It seems to me like there's people in here that have knowingly dedicated their lives to enriching themselves at the obvious and explicit cost of others. And some subset of those people are in denial about it. And some subset of those people don't have the emotional intelligence to confront a reality that contains people that actually are true and vitruous as they tell themselves they are. But hey, those are my assumptions based on only what I've seen in this thread and I'm willing to be incredibly wrong on this. I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving
Sorry I don’t want to be presumptive, are you trying to say that:
in this one instance you took “what you said was weird and that’s why you got the response that you did” as being an attack on a person’s character,
or are you saying that
categorically, pointing out that “what you said was weird and that’s why you got the response that you did” is always an attack on somebody’s character?
Like I’m trying to figure out if you’re sharing that you misunderstood a single post or that you categorically don’t understand an entire realm of communication.
> Like I’m trying to figure out
Please, stop. You're not trying to figure anything out. Multiple people have issues with your comments and you're saying all of them are wrong.
By “all of them” are you talking about the post that made up stuff that I didn’t say and wholinator’s post about their feelings about somebody they’ve never interacted with? All of those two posts?
I appreciate your concern but “hey man, people are making stuff up in their heads about you and getting real mad about the stuff they are imagining. they’re saying you posted a value judgment about shaming on the internet, they’re saying that you posted Elvira Mistress Of The Dark is your aunt!” isn’t something that I can do much about. That’s just the internet for you.
Like I can’t do anything about wholinator or soulofmischief imagining that I wrote “shaming is bad and wrong and I don’t do it and if you caught me doing something like that it would undermine my entire point but also if you did it to me it would support your point and I’d be super owned” and basing their entire critique of what they may or may not have read on it
- [deleted]
I would say a couple of things:
1. Just because I don't use something doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't exist or be sold. People can make their own choices. A product isn't bad or useless or unnecessary because it doesn't align with my preferences. I'm fine with people being able to make their own choices about what they buy. Also, I generally don't think people should have to live a totally ascetic lifestyle. I have three monitors - certainly redundant, but fine. I have art on my walls - could've gone without that. I have a dog who I buy toys and food for - not strictly necessary. These things are all more than fine in my book.
2. There are other reasons to be in business besides deeply caring about the business itself. The biggest benefit to this business is that it doesn't require a lot of day-to-day work, and I can do that work whenever I want. That means I can almost always be there for my kids. That's what matters to me. I would take a job that I don't particularly care about that lets me put them first over one that I'm deeply passionate about that takes them away from me any time.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I do agree that we don't need to extremify asceticism. I certainly own useless crap.
I think I do specifically have a minimalist approach to kitchens inspired by setups such as hundred rabbits' https://100r.co/site/cooking.html plus I also am becoming increasingly concerned with my carbon footprint given the climate-related extinction event we are currently facing, and that probably strikes out personal promotion of any unneeded kitchenware.
I'm curious about the economics of what you do, if you've ever written about it elsewhere.
Not as much about the economics of the business as my work on using AI to automate it, but I do have a Substack: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/
Thank you, I appreciate the response. I'll check it out!
I think you might be seeing guys who do that well so it's a bit survivorship bias. For most, if you just record yourself talking for 1m and watch it back as a video it's incredibly painful and awkward. The filler words, tangents, weird pauses. It really made me have respect for great speakers
No, I have seen plenty of awkward people talking about their new business. The awkwardness is inferior to charismatic speakers, for sure, but it's still better than generic AI slop marketing content.
All of those people have already pass through a filter of self-selection
There's a person out there that's 1) knows how to bake amazing cookies 2) has no desire to record tik toks
Why is that you need both of those things combined to have a successful cookie business? Can't we desire a world where just being good at baking cookies is good enough? You don't ALSO have to record a bunch of tik toks?
Some products are so good they don't need marketing. Some marketing is so good the product doesn't matter. But most of the time you need both.
Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis had a great product (idea): if doctors wash their hands, fewer of their patients will die. But his marketing (personality) was off-putting, and his ideas weren't accepted until after his death.
I did this with youtube for a while but I have to swallow my pride, (AI thumbnail, engagement bait title, AI voice narration) is better than pure loom-like organic video for ads
Yes but those guys need their marketing to work. Most marketing people just need to spend a budget. For those guys now they can pump out infinite crap to spend their budget so that you rEMemBeR tHeM lATer.
I'm sure that's the kind of content AI will excel at creating.
This is depressing. We are already meat in the google ad-serving machine that tracks us, profiles us, gives us "free" stuff (gmail, anyone?) in order to feed us advertising.
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.
I don't know, I feel like it will help smaller businesses without a budget for a designer or even design taste compete with larger companies.
Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field
Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.
There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better
--
[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.
There's an argument to be made that if everyone is doing it then it will stop being effective and brands will have to start reaching for more honest forms of marketing/advertising their product. I think we've already gone through a cycle of this with influencer marketing where a decade ago, if a Youtuber recommended a product it had a lot more weight (eg. I could actually imagine a lot of creators using Audible/Squarespace) than today where most people realize it's just a way for them to make money and doesn't really hold much weight.
> There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck.
While I generally agree, I think if we the consumers do more to level the playing fields from our vantage point, we can have more influence
This would be done by running more ad blockers and being vocal about our rejection of how bad ads have become, so they hear back (in theory...)
Not just labor and resources, but attention and time as well. It's literally burning up the brains of our youth. Of course, so is the "content" between the ads but you can make an argument that without the ad incentive these things wouldn't have gotten so bad in the first place
Is this really aimed at the smaller businesses, or is it aimed at the big businesses who want to cut down their marketing department?
Obviously both parties will have access to the tech, but I don't see giant brands just using something like this to hack an ad campaign. Either way it doesn't really matter. It just levels the playing field
Giant companies don't use do ad campaigns anyway. They hire ad agencies, which themselves may hire smaller ad agencies or consultants, and those are more than happy to innovate and improvise using whatever trick can come across.
Note, I said companies, because brands at this point are merely labels, most of them throwaway; big companies use them the same way small companies do, including to run fly-by-night scams on burner brands. They're more than happy to delegate it to smaller agencies, too.
Point being: there's not much correlation between branding, ownership structure, and what advertising techniques can be applied by what organizations.
That’s where I stay to see some benefits. Will AI ads (or media) be better than an expert human made ad campaign? Not at the moment.
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?
The first time I saw an AI-generated ad was Coca Cola's 2024 xmas ad.
I tried this out, and the stuff it produces is just simple text overlaid nicely on images you supply. If you have a designer, it'd take 60 seconds to knock one of these out, plus you'd already have a style guide that this app wouldn't follow closely enough to use. This is definitely for small businesses.
Thing is at that scale cutting down on marketing with slop has huge implications. It's not like this thing blew he ceiling, it just lifted the floor.
A Modest Proposal:
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.
Personally I'm okay with that as it weakens the argument that ads are content, a dubious argument often used by ad companies.
One of the best arguments in favor of ads is that high-quality ads act as an honest/credible signal that a firm is a serious business offering a serious product. Through making the production of high-quality ads cheap, people who are truly passionate about their small business will be "disrupted", and scammers/fly-by-night operations will be "supercharged".
I wonder if these ads will still be called "creatives".
I'm sure they will, this industry is completely delusional and out of touch with reality
> The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine.
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)
If that happens it won't be the AI people who benefit. The wealth will be concentrated among the present capital owners. Even many top AI experts who contributed critical research won't become rich.
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.
This is why they are looking at government coffers with a hunger in their eyes. They don't care for the long term societal stability; the richest of them fantasize riding it out in their island bunkers.
I keep seeing this worry about "who will consume?!!?" This is entirely unfounded - the AI will develop its own marketplace and AI will consume.
The question is, will be there anything left for humans to consume ? will we survive ?
Currently AI isn't allowed to own assets AFAIK.
Of course they are allowed, they're called "corporations" because they have a "body" and legal rights.
The datacenter is held by a corporation, and the corporation does what the resident AI wants it to do.
Who owns the corporation though? It has to be humans. And corporations need to have a board of directors composed of humans.
Buy acre of land, plant potatoes, raise chicken, pay your tithe to your landlord. People will survive, for sure. Not all of them, but enough.
There won’t be any such leases if machines can make more productive use of the land than a potato farmer.
The answer is already in your question. The original Industrial Revolution concentrated wealth and yet increased the baseline wealth for everyone else.
There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.
Though for those of us above the current baseline (e.g. basically everyone reading this), it’s not guaranteed that the new baseline will be above our current lifestyle.
Why? Industrial Revolution increased everyone’s baseline
If you’re a software bro making $300k today, and lose your job to AI, it’s very unlikely that the new baseline for everyone is going to be that of a $300k income. At least not anytime soon.
sure but whatever mechanism allowed for jobs to exist a few years/decades after industrial revolution will apply here as well. with some jobs lost and chaos in the middle that is un-avoidable.
I dunno… what differentiates human labor in a few decades?
You don’t see ~anyone being paid because they are stronger than the next guy; hydraulics are stronger than all of us.
What happens when you don’t get paid for being smarter than the next guy, because AI is smarter than all of us?
And then next up is being paid for being more dexterous than the robots - basically all trade work. I think there’s a longer runway for those jobs, but it’s coming.
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?
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.
People can choose to not consume crap they don’t need. They won’t, but they can.
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.
Would you make the same argument for smoking?
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”.
> They won’t, but they can.
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
Leaving it is the right choice though. The corpos will never care about you. I consume no ads, or Google software, and still do anything I want in the tech world.
I left Facebook, but its algorithm continues to actively encourage the divisiveness and misinformation that’s poisoning the world I live in.
Sometimes “you don’t have to participate” isn’t strong enough advice, not that I know what the answer actually is.
Get yourself off the toxic platforms first, then immediate family and friends.
It is a bit like denormalizing smoking. It is a long game and a lot of education work but it is working.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about how AI could disrupt the field of ads creative, because a significant part of my income is tied to motion design applied to html5 banner campaigns for large companies in Europe.
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.
Seeing a lot of "I'm an AI skeptic and <insert praise for new Google product>" highly upvoted in this thread.
Yes, that triggers my template detector as well.
Now google can sell you the AI that will design the ads for you that you will pay Google to serve. So nice of them.
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.
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Probably good for mom and pop shops, and super useful for someone who has a couple of restaurant locations or a few small grocery stores. I know a lot of places don't update their IG or whatever with specials for the week or basically anything because it's time and effort, if someone was running a campaign for a week of say a free side with a burger, but wanted to do a different side every day you could pick for free, you could churn stuff like that out super fast with this.
I tried it. I used it first for my stuff and thought wow I'd never use this for my stuff, but my stuff isn't a mom and pop burger joint with the kids working on weekend etc, I will show it to the lady who has the pho shop next door, maybe she will update her IG with her specials more often than "whenever I remember".
2 min tl;dr video by Culture Kings (streetwear brand) founder
Suspicious-me is wondering how Google are going to treat AI generated marketing slop created using Pomelli differently to slop created with other tools (or even human created marketing content) in search ranking?
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.)
I doubt that the product folks over at Google overseeing an experimental project like this have such outsized influence over something core like the ads engine
I'm feeling deeply cynical here. I wonder if the people at Google overseeing this experiment are from or also oversee the ads engine team?
Google actually doesn't give a single flying fuck about AI slop because they produce it themselves and believe AI slop will feed their quarters going forward.
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
That's also my opinion, they didn't care about non-AI generated slop either before that so why would they now?
If they cared, it would be trivial to scan for and block ads on YouTube that literally say "I am Elon Musk. Click the link below to message my assistant to start making money. This is a special message only for you." With a badly deep faked video of Elon Musk.
They are going all in on tolerating third party AI slop on Youtube. That feels like an executive decision at this point.
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.
I doubt Pomelli would get ranked higher. Google biases ads to their highest spenders. The more you spend, the better your ads perform. Nobody using something like Pomelli is giving Google enough money to rank highly. They could outrank the very lowest spenders, namely scammers and dropshippers whose ads are already AI slop anyway. But, really, who cares?
sounds really illegal and unlikely
Illegal, yes.
the way it will work is ai slop will rank high, and pomelli will generate the best ai slop.
On multiple levels; a snake eating its tail.
May it gnaw itself down for good.
I'm so dead do all this generic hype lexicon: unlock, supercharge, revamp, disrupt etc, etc.
The whole (original) premise of social media was "let's make a more human side of our business so that people can connect with us". Now we've come full circle where the robots are making all the social content and increasingly the robots are the ones consuming it too.
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...
Hacker News is social media too.
Disagree.
Apologies if what I said came across as an opinion. That was a statement of fact. HN is an internet forum, which is a form of social media.
Link goes to a page with a minimal hint and a video.
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"OK, we'll put that link at the top and https://labs.google.com/pomelli/about/ in the toptext. Thanks!
I've heard of a little cost cutting at Canva. Some point to a possible IPO next year. But also I wonder if AI generally and products like this are causing increased competition.
Is Google going to put all of its API users out of business?
Seems like Google will kill a whole bunch of SaaS companies with this.
[flagged]
From your Twitter:
> founder @orshotapp
Maybe you should mention that when advertising your app?
Manually mentioning my conflict of interest when astroturf-advertising my product? That sounds way too tedious, inconvenient and inefficient. You have to remember to check if you're advertising right now, and there's not even an easy API to call for that. Now, I was just looking around the web the other day, and randomly stumbled into this brand new service, TavAutoAdMention, it's so good! I love its creator, too!
hehe
Everything about this, and I mean everything, makes me want to vomit.
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.
It's pretty bad. It generates mangled text and objects with bad proportions.
I am genuinely surprised that people still get excited about Google announcing new products/services given their track record. Unless it's core to its businesss model, this will probably get axed in a couple of years.
Well, this does involve generating ads, so...
Lots of startups are launching in this space. Creating ad copy and assets is obviously a hot idea.
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!
The company that is responsible for filling the Internet with junk is just going to help fill the Internet with even junk crap. Who would have thought about that?
It really does not help me as a small business if Pomelli creates (shitty) AI content, but does not open the gates to actually reach people/customers.
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.
Do you know how reach happens though? Because if you don't, I suppose you wouldn't know if this tool was appropriate or not? (not saying that to be rude btw, just sayin!)
This tool is a content generator. It does not create reach. So I think I do not get your question? If you read the Pomelli article it states in the first sentences that Pomelli will help small businesses by creating campaigns. "Pomelli is an AI marketing tool designed to help SMBs more easily generate scalable, on-brand social media campaigns to help grow their businesses." But my point is, those campaigns are useless, if you do not have reach already. So, Pomelli does actually not help small business as they are stating, but instead is wasting your time and money, because you will end up in buying some ad words from Google.
Content is a component of reach.
Reach happens through channel marketing virally, virally typical happens via novelty.
Creative humans can use any tool to execute reach, this particular tool seems it would be a good one for that, in fact.
Yes, content is _one_ component of reach, but without reach useless. And good content does not lead automatically to reach. Reach is developed by a lot of factors, channel marketing is also only one _minor_ factor of it. This tool does not help significantly with building all of that reputation you need to be trusted and gaining reach. It can't, because it does not create new channels and connections between humans.
With all due respect, this is simply a tool for creating content, one component of being able to reach people in channels where they consume your novel and interesting messages that both stand out and are shared, such they are aware of your amazing and unique product or service.
It's not correct in business to blame a tool for a lack of creativity, some people are not very creative, those people tend to struggle with reach and therefore their attempt at a business, fails. I built 2 publicly traded businesses this way.
I do not blame the tool itself, I blame the article/announcement. Sorry, if I expressed myself not precisely enough.
Dare I ask: who owns the IP to all the generated content? User? Google? Some complex arrangement governed by a 20-page ToS?
AFAIK and this may have changed, but at least in the US, AI-generated content is not copyrightable so it's effectively public-domain.
I think in reality its very much still undecided law in most ways that practically matter and a lot of decisions will still be made based on the pay rates of the lawyers for the different parties involved.
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).
Such content is already available. As an experiment I entered “zombie elsa” into google and I found some very disturbing youtube videos, e.g.: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M5urB3u4aRk .
If you want a specific tool, here is Elsa with a cigarette generated using Midjourney and more: https://journeyaiart.com/tag/Elsa .
It's not that any content created by AI is not copyrightable, it's that work created solely by AI without human input is probably not copyrightable.
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...
That's incorrect. Start at "legal framework" on kage 7: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
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.
This is what I've been pondering, people are using Claude etc. to produce software. Do they think about this copyright issue at all? Basically whatever they produce with Claude should be not copyrightable.
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?
Copyright or not, surely there's ToS that you're expected to just click through and not read.
I didn't see anywhere on the page the date when they plan to kill the product...
this will kill a bunch of startups.
The AI start-up field is going to be eviscerated. I too have the irresistible urge to bolt a SOTA LLM back end on a custom harness and charge $20/mo, but the total lack of a moat and ease of replication kills any motivation.
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
No matter how it pans out.
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?
Yeah, I was thinking the same. Quite a few YC companies are going after this.
What sort of market dynamics do people predict here, winner takes all? Especially when this is integrated into the platforms of distribution.
Bill Hicks would not mind
I'd rather spend $50 on Fiverr and get human generated content.
Just how many Gen ai products are they half assedly launching (in case of Google).
cannot google afford to make a decent product video ?? instead of this awfulness %@^@&#
We'll need a pom filter to get rid of this slop.
For an ad tech company, this is both on brand and pretty cool. I’m an AI skeptic and I support this.
rip, and here i was hoping this was a fuzzer
Tried to run it a couple of times against our website and it failed every time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Does anyone think the world is better with this in it?
- [deleted]
Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.
I think when it comes to gatekeeping you are mixing up the organization that invented the basis for language models and gave it away for free with the one that does not release model weights because they’re too spooky
They didn’t gatekeep LLM technology; they published their results in the open.
[dead]
> Pomelli by Google Labs is currently not available in your region.
xd
Fucking region gating in this day and age.
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.
xD you're delivery made me laugh. But I think it is a combination of getting the product out of the gates as fast as possible, test on the main market, and also deal with foreign currencies, legislation and pricing later.
Same, do you think this will work with vpn?
“Pomelli is desktop only for now. Please switch to a computer to continue.” It would be nice if there was at least a screenshot for mobile users so they could determine if this was actually worth a second visit.
There’s a video right on the landing page that shows it in use. Played fine on mobile for me.
But to answer the question, it looks a lot like a Canva competitor.
AI is going to kill Canva, Figma, and Adobe. Without a doubt.
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.
The reason most creative media is good is because you see the vision of a creative team or individual.
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.
> lack of control afforded by AI
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.
> and Adobe
Have you seen their announcements during Adobe Max? The AI features are mind blowing. Adobe is alive and well.
> Adobe is alive and well.
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...
> 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.
> The AI features are mind blowing.
It doesn't look like they developed any models. The 3d relighting and 3d manipulation are all 3rd party models given a UI.
[edit: there is a bug] where it doesn't render LaTeX from the scraped website when injecting it into the campaign materials..
Sounds like a bug?
Hot take from an AI skeptic: between this, Nano Banana and generative AI integrated into Gmail for repetitive emails, I’m starting to actually use Google’s AI for tasks I hate most.
Google appears to have their AI product game together!
This is just going to breed mistrust, possibly end up hurting businesses. Generally speaking, there are two categories of marketing when it comes to the products I buy.
The first is the quality mass produced products like laptops, cereals, frozen pizzas, etc which have enough revenue that they can hire human marketing to come up with unique content, packaging and ads. The other category, is _high_ quality locally produced goods, like cheese, meats, and some clothing (for example) which do not have enough revenue to hire dedicated marketing staff, but instead use informal marketing. Marketing beyond simple ads in the later case barely matters since there is a lot of trust that the product is quality.
Now there are a lot of garbage products out there, mostly from dollar/discount shops, drop shippers, online shops, and sometimes supermarkets. Margins on these cheap products is usually thin, so if they can save a few bucks with Pomelli they will probably use it.
I'd argue that most people today have become very sensitive and well trained to sniff out poor quality products, its easy to get ripped off. Cues of poor quality could be the design of the packaging including language and fonts, the weight and feel of the product or the brand name when it comes to amazon products sold by Mosptnspg, DSPEAE , Sdarming or whatever lol.
Is the cue to poor quality not going to become Pomelli-style designs? People are already sensitizing themselves to genAI content, and Pomelli is unlikely to produce designs time after time again which are unique enough to bypass a good eye.