AI Bots are Coming For Your Screens

We were going to kickoff this newsletter with an exploration of AI hype and haters – all the bad press lately – and review the Hype Cycle curve that we’re in, but TikTok just launched their fake people and influencers capability. So. Let’s. Start. There.

AI Bots are Coming For Your Screens

In the you-knew-it-was-coming-but-not-quite-yet category, Tiktok just broke the Internet a bit more with their launch of AI generated (aka fake) people and AI generated influencers (aka attack of the clones). Sure, everyone wants easy, fast, cheap, great content, but in a stroke of excitement and disregard for reality, we now have TikTok Symphony (actually great name for this btw). Here’s the tl;dr; on this part of the release:

• Stock avatars based on real stock footage actors for use in promotional videos
• AI clones of participating influencers to create more content (with a focus on multi-lingual capabilities)
• Custom brand ambassador avatars that are like real people (actors), but they aren’t real people

The tech is cool, but here’s a hot take on why this might be a miss. First the super business-y transactional reasons:

• Stock avatars – this is just cheaper than paying actors, but not any different. No, they don’t come with any built-in audience. So, great, you can ride the uncanny valley for a while until they straighten the kinks out. It’s already pretty cheap and easy to hire real people, so I don’t see a lot of traction here right now.
• Cloned influencers – there’s a lot to unpack here, but, basically an influencer is valuable because of their audience and, to some degree, scarcity. If the pitch is that the clone has new language capabilities, then there’s no audience overlap or lift. The influencer is going to want final control over look and feel and message, so that’s going to slow the process down and beg the question of why not just hire the real influencer in the first place. The other implications are huge here, but just from a business perspective, I don’t see this as a big win right now.
• Virtual brand ambassadors – similar to stock avatars, why would an actual brand experiment with a fake human when a real human is better and cheap, and the brand retains direct control. I don’t see brands yielding control to a fake TikTok creation anytime soon.

and that’s just the business end of things. One day the real humans might revolt and demand their jobs back, so there’s that issue in the back of everyone’s mind even though they are “eager” and inviting us all to “join in shaping the future”.

-> read the official release here: Tiktok Symphony

Bad Press All Around: Why the Haters?

In general, there’s a ton of negative press around AI right now, and a lot of it is of the “told-you-so” and “frustrated” variety. Some headlines that stuck out to us:

• Google’s AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That’s How AI Works. Wired
• “Worst results on Google”, AI spam breaking the internet Fortune
• First Came AI ‘Spam’. Now, with AI, We’ve Got ‘Slop’ NYT

but, though we agree a bit with some of the perspectives – it’s actually just a reflection that we’re in The Trough of Disillusionment (boo, hiss) from the (Gartner) Hype Cycle. This might look familiar:

With AI, there was really, really early mass media hype. There were early adopters investigating what was possible (and mostly failing). There was suppier proliferation (and is now in a bunch of different categories). There’s definitely activity beyond early adopters and every digital product jams generative AI into a key corner of their application. And now, the negative press begins. Google search results are sliding. Generic content. Broken AdWords campaigns.

But the cycle is real. And the issues will get ironed out. This is all here to stay. Some thoughts given the current state and the pattern recognition of this cycle:

• There will be consolidation of solutions and providers. The fragmented market will coalesce around the winners
• Even though adoption seems high – it’s way, way off it’s future peak. So, we’re still at the beginning (and maybe just the end of the beginning?). New solutions and new capabilities to come.
• Everything will get better and more capable building on what’s just a glimmer of possibility right now.

And our overall take is that great content still rules. Great content and H2H (human 2 human) interactions still matter, because buyers are still people. That great content needs to get in the hands of your (still very human) sales team and marketing partners, because it’s the foundation for the revenue of your future.

Did Someone Say AI

We’ve added AI magic to all asset titles for all content added to Content Camel. We released this a bit ago, but it’s the best kind of feature where it doesn’t get a lot of notice, but works well. Even some of our developers didn’t realize it was at work all day, every day. We wrote about it here: Better Content Titles with AI

CRM Integration + Other Content Notifications

Getting content activity posted to your CRM and engagement notifications to your sales team is a big deal (and a missing piece of the puzzle). A while ago, we released the ability to send notifications to external systems when content is added, updated, or engaged with. We wrote about it here: Easy Content Updates with Webhooks