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.

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 that the product folks over at Google overseeing an experimental project like this have such outsized influence over something core like the ads engine

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.

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?

Same, do you think this will work with vpn?

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.

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.

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

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.

They didn’t gatekeep LLM technology; they published their results in the open.

sounds really illegal and unlikely

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.

Illegal, yes.

> 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.

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.

Sounds like a bug?

> and Adobe

Have you seen their announcements during Adobe Max? The AI features are mind blowing. Adobe is alive and well.

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

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.

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?

> 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...

AFAIK and this may have changed, but at least in the US, AI-generated content is not copyrightable so it's effectively public-domain.

Bill Hicks would not mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdjQICcD-XA

> 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.

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 .

> 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.

Copyright or not, surely there's ToS that you're expected to just click through and not read.

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...

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?

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.