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> Image, video, and other content generation is going to become more important and companies will be spending on that. We've seen some impressive improvements there.

They are assuming that people _want_ automated content enough to pay for it.

Like at the moment its great because its essentially free, but paying >200billion?

Are we assuming that we can automate the equivalent of instagram, netflix/disney and whatsapp and make advertising revenue?

I think the unmentioned pivot is into robotics, which seems to have actual tangible value (ie automation of things that are hard to do now)

but still 200billion in r&d

I would assume that generative AI will be able to make endless hours of personalized reality TV content that will hit a surprisingly large demographic. And then it can use recommendation algorithms to distribute that reality TV AI slop to all the people that might or might not want it in order to turn it profitable. Evidence: all the god-awful foreign reality TV on Netflix currently.

It's a bit harder to replace Disney at this point, but give it 20 years. I'm bullish on AI slop on par with The Apple Dumpling Gang or Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo within a decade or so. Evidence: The rapid evolution of AI generated video in the past few years extrapolated into the future.

I keep thinking about how, 20 years, 3D printers became accessible for tech/price, and there was a lot of talk about how we'd all just print what we need (pretty much like in Stephenson's book Diamond Age), and you'd get rich selling digital patterns for material goods.

Instead, we got the elevation of the handmade, the verifiably human created, typified by the rise of Etsy. The last 20 years have been a boom time for artists and craftspeople.

I keep seeing AI slop and thinking that all this will do is make verifiably human created content more valuable by comparison, while generative AI content will seem lowbrow and not worth the cost to make it.

Creative people are on the whole a lot better at keeping AI slop out of art and craft fairs than they have been with the lazier output of 3D printers, CNC, laser engravers and off-the-shelf resin mould art.

It is as if the relatively unspoken feelings about the downsides of technologies as a gateway to art have been rapidly refined to deal with AI (and of course, even the CNC and laser engraver people have common cause).

But I think it is fair to say that if they feel success, there will be a growing pushback against the use of 3D printers, eufyMake resin printing and CNC in a niche where hand tools used to be the norm.

And speaking even as someone who has niche product ideas that will be entirely 3D printed/CNC cut/engraved, I don't really disagree with it. I am mostly not that kind of creative person (putting aside experimental photography techniques) and I see no reason why they shouldn't push back.

The reality is that "craft" fairs are an odd mix of people who spent a lot of time refining their art and selling things that are the work of hours of expressive creativity and effort, and table upon table of glittery resin mould art and vinyl cut stencil output stuck on off-the-shelf products. I think AI might help people refine their feelings about this stuff they once felt bad/incorrect/unkind about excluding.

It's a bit like the way the art photography market is rediscovering things like carbon printing, photosensitive etching and experimental cyanotype, and getting a lot more choosy about inkjet-printed DSLR output.

Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. Ergo we shouldn't be surprised if AI can replace 90% of supposed art and media in the long run. Not sure I will particularly notice since I can't stand most media already.

But good luck with that remaining 10% AI...

I think the reason 3D printers can't print anything is because most things are mixed media and 3D printers aren't so great at that yet. There are also issues with topology and the structural quality of 3D printed things compared to things put in a mold. And that's not entirely unlike people (who I once would have thought would know better ) oversimplifying the engineering and scientific challenges of AI for it to be human equivalent or better.

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.

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.

And why haven't they? Master Chief has been around since 2001, Lara Croft since 1996 and Darth Vader since 1977. The technology has been around for ages, and as far as I know, no networks have opted for virtual anchors.

Just from where you are pulling the data that on-air personalities are too expensive?

I don't have a good answer for why they haven't already. I have wondered about the possibility of doing this for 10 years or more.

"The data that on-air personalities are too expensive?" It doesn't seem to me , for the purposes of this conversation, that identification of a cost center required a quantitative analysis. The cost of human talent is non-zero, presumably large enough to merit scrutiny, and unpredictable; that is sufficient, to my way of thinking. So is the cost of the equipment and infrastructure to capture and transmit video image of that human talent, and the humans who maintain and operate that infrastructure.

We've seen several decades of human cost-reduction initiatives, across multiple industries and fields of endeavor, so I'm taking that as evidence that if there is a cost that can be reduced or removed, someone somewhere is looking at doing so. Everything from assembly-line automation, to switching to email over inter-office memos and mailrooms, to the abandonment of fixed-benefit pensions, to self-service kiosks in fast-food restaurants, demonstrates that costs will be cut where they can be cut.

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?

> 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.

Actually, I sense a mounting "AI fatigue". Angry comments under AI contents. Social media accounts that proclaim to be "AI Free". I was thinking today that the killer app for AI could be a filter that automatically exclude all AI content.

There's a huge vegan market segment but meat industry still plods along

at least it's possible to be a vegan. imagine trying to be a smartphone vegan. I hope we're not headed there with this abominable technology. I hate using it and don't want to be forced

Roughly 2% of the US is vegan. About 5 million people.

This would be why the meat industry “plods along” century after century. For every vegan there are 49 people who eat meat, and probably 35 people who feed their pets meat.

There is actually a huge market for animal meat and it is the vegan industry that plods along.

In fact, what even _is_ the vegan industry? Or do you mean it’s basically marketing hype for companies that combine plants in various ways to sell as food?

Yes. Most people don't care enough to change their behavior. Others think about it & decide it isn't for them

Industry is plant based food, certification orgs, vegan charities, consulting, books (both recipes & lifestyle advocacy), content creation, ...

It is very obviously there. People are not simply accepting the AI-bro justification that one day they won't notice the difference so it's all fine.

Ordinary people are understandably either exhausted by or angry at AI content, because it is relentless and misleading, and because they know instinctively that the people who want this to succeed also want to destroy employment and concentrate profits in the hands of a few Silicon Valley sociopaths.

Google are experimenting with different filters that intentionally blur the lines between real and fake video in their shorts. A creator I follow who makes human-in-shot videos suddenly looked fake, like some animation filter was applied. I commented on how bad it looked, and someone said YT are doing it to people's videos as some sort of "trial". The effects were to make the human look more AI generated. The only use for this I can surmise is to make AI content even harder to detect.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/1lno8ub/i... first I heard of this, looks like they're calling it ai upscaling

I agree. Back in the 90's there was plenty of skepticism, along with some mockery, surrounding the internet. But you never saw headlines like "Lawyer caught using the internet" or "Artist busted using the World Wide Web".

With AI, it's different.

> They are assuming that people _want_ automated content enough to pay for it.

I’m assuming gen ai will supplement so instead of ten artists producing content you’ll have three orchestrating and correcting but the output will be indistinguishable from what it was before. Just now the margin is much higher.

I never think of direct to consumer sales in this context.

Anecdotally I've seen lots of anti AI posts on instagram from gen-z accounts, and on YouTube ive seen "ai not used to make this music" in the description.

Also anecdotal, but I do think there's gen z anti-ai sentiment, these kids are joining a world where they will never own a house and have bleak prospects and now even art is something they can't do if AI takes off, so the market might not be there

Seems like older people love AI art, people over 50, which is a sizeable market don't get me wrong, but in 10-15 years idk

But whats the USP of that though?

> indistinguishable from what it was before. Just now the margin is much higher.

In both music and TV/film there has been an explosion in productivity. A kid in a bedroom with a mediocre microphone can produce something that sounds 95% as good as something that took a team of ten to do at a big studio. The same with VFX. If you compare "the golden compass" from 2006 to the series in ~2020 the quality of the TV show is much higher, at a higher resolution and has more VFX shots in it.

Both music and TV, the margins have dropped precipitously.

I just cant see how making it easier will bring up margins.

The whole VFX market is something like 10 billion USD a year.

Which is a huge amount, but if they only capture a piece of it, it might not amount to much compared to their spending.

Everything professionally produced you currently see uses a lot of CGI, and you can’t even tell.

Essentially what they are doing is cheaper, more accessible CGI. And in the same way at it is now, you are not going to be able to tell it was used in expensive productions and will be able to see it in the cheap productions.

As an ex VFX infra guy, I can totally tell.

But to your point, if we take all of TV production world wide I doubt thats going to add up to 100 billion spent on set extension/characters/de-aging/fuckit fix it in post. And thats keeping spend at the same rate. (not to mention the recent peak spend on TV)

For openAI to make money it has to be an order of magnitude cheaper, quicker and quality, and be the lead so that people spend AI bucks with them. Rather than having a VFX company tune an opensource/weights model.

Right, the main reason media has value is because of scarcity. Generated media is almost worthless because there's seemingly infinite piles of it.

If a painting costs $20 bucks, and you can generate 1 million paintings, that doesn't mean you just made $20 million dollars. It means paintings no longer cost $20 bucks.

> They are assuming that people _want_ automated content enough to pay for it.

People love money. That's not an assumption but established fact. Producing content manually is expensive.

You are way too emotional about this. Ads are a proven business model. We have AI models producing some pretty slick video and images now that are more or less publication ready quality. For next to nothing. The media industry not saving cost when they can is unlikely in my view.

Robotics is indeed another angle that OpenAI might do something with. I'd say that adds to my argument. That's a potentially really big market as well. But I don't consider OpenAI to be clearly leading that one. There are at least half a dozen companies active producing humanoid robots. But undeniably those might be a lot more useful with AI that understands and can interpret visual imagery.

> Like at the moment its great because its essentially free, but paying 200billion?

OpenAI needs to about 20-30x their current revenue over the next five years. A tall order. But these are large markets. It's not impossible. And when the financial times is ignoring major revenue sources it needs calling out.

> People love money.

That is a given. The issue here is supply and demand. AI potentially could completly swamp the supply side. That means no profit for creators, only the network. Thats going to make a ripsaw effect.

> And when the financial times is ignoring major revenue sources it needs calling out.

What sources of revenue?

Sure there are lots hypotheticals that may or may not exist. But for 100s of billions of

> IMHO near term a lot of that stuff might start showing up in advertising and news content, the whole media industry is going to be a massive consumer of this stuff.

One of the candidate for mayor of New York ran a whole AI video ad campaign.

Half of the real estate listings have AI remodeled pictures.

Probably a quarter of the printed ads I see each day are AI generated.

It will only increase, but it's already here.

Real estate agents only use AI because it's cheaper than paying $70 CAD per image for human-made images. There's a cap on how valuable the AI generated images are.

The last time I sold a house, a professional photographer took some beautiful photos, gave the realtor like 60-80 and he picked 40 for the listing. He absorbed the cost of that with his commission. No way in hell did he pay $2800-5600 (I'm also in Canada) for those photos.

I'm referring to virtual staging, not photography

The main thread through the case laid out has a fundamental flaw "assumes a spherical cow in a vaccuum" . There are cheaper/faster more open competitors out there doing as much as OAI and getting integrated in real product pipelines across the planet.

Its not a Blueray vs HD-DVD situation (winner takes all and competition dies on the vine) or early Google vs Yahoo Search i would posit its more like bitkeeper vs git - and will probably eveolve into a git/hg/bazaar type situation. Costs will only keep dropping and the easiest/cost effective options will get faster uptake in the backend dev world where it matters.If im integrating a LLM and the whole field can kinda do the equivalent capex/opex will push the decision.

I think actually selling media is going to be tough. 1: you have to beat the current price point so people will use it, 2: it can’t be too cheap or you can’t make money. That mad market price point makes it hard to get right. The more content the fewer eyeballs, meaning the less value, meaning people willing to pay less. If it makes making movies a lot cheaper, then there’s a lot less money to be made.

The thing about tech is it has to scale to meet tech valuations, and there’s a reason instagram basically gives content creation tools away for free.

These are all commodity use-cases though. Google, Meta, and Anthropic already all have competing products of equivalent quality and customer pricing is being driven down aggressively.

But there's fierce competition since no moat. How will generated images and videos avoid being a stock photo situation?

The moat is the infrastructure needed to run this at "Google" scale for the entire planet. So far only OpenAI and Google have managed to pull that together. It's just really hard to raise the hundreds of billions you'd need for that.

If the moat is just infrastructure, there isn't really a moat then right?

Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AliBaba all have similar cloud infra which could be utilized to provide this

This sounds very similar to the Tesla stock value hype train. It’s all a gamble on the promise of tech that isn’t quite there yet.

What I don't understand is how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output. He's known for not caring about privacy, so there's no real difference between buying a Tesla one or a Chinese one. Both will look and listen into your home and transfer as much data as possible to their true owners.

He congratulates Jeff Bezos for New Glenn, and rightly so, but he's absolutely silent about the Chinese robots. One has to admit that they're already ahead of the US. This comes from a German who well recognizes how far behind Germany is in comparison to the US, in regards to any digital technology.

Oh that's easy: as soon as China gets good enough to compete at any market seen as vital, "the west" either makes up some nebulous national security threat to cut them off or imposes high enough import taxes to make the home-made versions cheaper in comparison. The same way "the west" has done it with cars, phones, and social media in recent years.

There is no free market competition between "the west" and China, they're two completely separate markets for a reason. You're only allowed to cross that isle in a limited capacity, as soon as you get big enough to be seen as a legit threat, you're getting cut off. Works both ways, Tesla can sell in China, but they can't beat BYD. Apple can sell iPhones, but only because their market share is not big enough to matter.

I'm not really against your point but I just quickly checked (and it agrees with my personal observation), iPhone have been the very most popular phone brand in China for many years and recently the market share grew beyond 25%. I would not say that's not big enough to matter.

You're confusing recent sales figures with overall market shares. Both Tesla and Apple use this neat little trick to their advantage, not just in China, but also in the EU and I'm sure in other places.

They both sell only like 2-3 models at a time, always heavily preferencing one of them in marketing, and then use that to claim they have the "best selling phone in the market". Which is true, but is not the same as having that percentage of the overall market share as a brand.

Nearly every Tesla sale is a Model Y sale, and nearly every Apple sale is an iPhone 17 sale. This does not apply to other brands such as BYD, Geely, Huawei, Oppo, (Samsung, Volkswagen,) where you can walk into a store and pick between about a dozen models targeting different niches.

On top of that, Apple just started selling iPhone 17, so yes, if you Google it, you find out that they've "reached 25% of the Chinese market" and not realise that this is what happens every Q4 simply because that's when they start selling new models. That is not the same as having 25% of the overall market share at all. Overall, both Tesla and Apple are around fifth most popular brands.

If you capitalize "West" (the West), it becomes a proper noun and you don't need the quotes anymore.

> market seen as vital, the West either makes up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world

Other than that, I think China also has a barrier to entry which the West does not have towards China, where companies had to have a Chinese "babysitter" in Western companies having factories in China. If VW wanted to have a factory there, the only way to archive this was to partner with a Chinese company and do 50/50 split, so that VW could not own more than 50% of the factory. While this is no longer valid since 2022, there are now other mechanisms for getting strong control over foreign factories.

In contrast, China can do whatever the German legal system allows them to do in Germany, for example with Kuka. They have the same rights as German or US companies.

> how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output?

... with said humanoid robots?

While it's true China's manufacturing sector can outproduce the west's right now, ubiquitous autonomous humanoid robots can level the playing field to a meaningful extent.

Which is why China is investing a lot of resources into developing those while the west just kind of continues on with muted efforts.

Yeah, considering Teslas upload imagery from their cars to datasets their employees have been known to access (and abuse that access as well) there's practically 0% chance I'd ever let a Tesla camera inside my home. Its bad enough they're recording me when my neighbors drive by and when I walk around, I wouldn't want them in my home on a device that's designed to be able to go through my stuff.

Probably China is building useful robots, not gimmicky "humanoid" ones. For any given task or set of tasks I'm very sure there are vastly better robot designs than mimicking a human.