Pomelli
blog.google
blog.google
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I failed to restrain myself from continuing to engage with what in hindsight was obvious bait by two other users, even rereading their comments now, and the comments from multiple other users agreeing that these two users were being needlessly negative and argumentative, it seems clear to me that my comments were not intended to escalate (sans my final, unnecessary comment).
I even edited a comment at one point after I absentmindedly introduced a swipe, and one of the users continued to attempt to escalate by fixating on words I intentionally removed from the conversation. And at the very end, I lost my cool and got fed up.
While I respect the decisions of the moderators on this website, I fully disagree that my original comment which you have detached deserved moderation.
I try my best to observe the guidelines, in fact you can see I mentioned them several times in this thread, as I saw several blatant, wholesale violations of them. In this case, it was an innocent question to a user that was well-received, but became a target for others.
As another user in this thread mentioned, it seems quite relevant to Hacker News for a user to raise questions about the morals and ethics around owning and running digital businesses. I saw the exchange between awillen and I as very healthy, and I appreciated their answer, it meant something to me to encounter such a perspective.
From my personal view, moderating this comment is vindicating to the two individuals who attempted to derail what could have been a very tight, focused conversation between another user and I. The user did not have an email address or I likely would have just reached out to them over email to avoid attracting negativity.
You were still a player in the flamewar and you could have done more to defuse the situation rather than inflame it, but I can see that it was the others who escalated first.
I've re-attached your comment and the healthy part of the subthread and detached it where it became a flamewar.
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.
Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field
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.
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...)
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.
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?
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.
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)
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 ?
The datacenter is held by a corporation, and the corporation does what the resident AI wants it to do.
There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.
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.
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.
It is a bit like denormalizing smoking. It is a long game and a lot of education work but it is working.
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.
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 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".
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't look like they developed any models. The 3d relighting and 3d manipulation are all 3rd party models given a UI.
Google appears to have their AI product game together!
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.