Here’s what happened, and is happening, in AI marketing news this month.
First up, preliminary looks at OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora.
Sora: is this the end of video production?
Announced and demonstrated earlier this month, Sora has the entertainment industry fearing the worst. Tyler Perry paused an $800M expansion of his studio, while others fear an impending filmmaking apocalypse.
Much remains to be seen. Access is limited during the tool’s red-teaming, or safety and testing, phase. Speculation suggests a possible public release around March 2024, but no official date has been confirmed.
But as the Los Angeles Times pointed out last month in an in-depth study, tens of thousands of entertainment jobs are at risk in the next three years. And in the wake of the Sora announcement, the Times urged “individuals and companies to be as proactive as they can in the face of what is likely to be an era of meaningful disruption.” Particularly while studios are “under severe Wall Street pressure to cut costs.”
All in, this IndieWire article sheds some much-appreciated optimism on the subject. For one, “Studios will have to be very careful not to integrate generative AI into their process,” considering such material cannot be copyrighted. Doing so would be “basically producing public-domain works…”
Marketing, on the other hand, might see a bigger shake up in the meantime, considering Sora’s 60-second clips are “perfect for ads.”
However, this isn’t the first time the AI entertainment news landscape has felt ominous.
As Edward Saatchi, CEO and Founder of Fable Simulation, points out: “Every single three years, Silicon Valley tells Hollywood that they’re gonna totally disaggregate them and change everything and they’re finished, and Hollywood survives and thrives.”
Google pauses gemini's image generation
Next up in AI marketing news, the controversy surrounding images generated by Gemini.
Gemini, Google’s family of AI tools, was released December 6, 2023, partnered with Samsung Galaxy S24 series in January, and then upgraded mid-February.
But by the end of the month, Gemini-centric news focused almost entirely on the tool’s generation of gender- and racially-biased, or “woke,” historical images.
In response to the backlash, Google acknowledged that the tool was generating a broad range of people to reflect global diversity but admitted the issue was “completely unacceptable.” As a result, Gemini’s image generation capabilities were put on hold.
The incident reflects the challenge of balancing representation and accuracy in AI technology, reflecting ongoing debates about bias, representation, and the responsibilities of tech companies in shaping the future of AI.
On Monday, February 26, shares of Alphabet fell 4.5%, closing at its lowest price since Jan. 5 and registering its second-steepest daily loss of the last year.
more AI-Powered Tools for Small Businesses
On the entrepreneurial front of AI marketing news, GoDaddy’s Airo joins the offerings of AI-powered marketing tools for small businesses, as reported by Fast Company. Airo positions itself as providing “everything you need to get online and start wowing customers.”
The past year has seen Mailchimp offer the use of Intuit Assist to “tackle the manual parts of marketing,” Squarespace AI to “draft website copy, generate decorative images for your site, or set up entire web pages” and Wix AI for everything from “generating creative text and images to setting up a website with the correct business solutions and improving SEO more efficiently,” says Hila Gat, Head of Data Science at Wix.
Fast Company also lists more specialized services. Looka creates logos and branded materials, another AI website builder Hocoos, and Owner, “a one-stop platform that focuses on marketing and online ordering for mom-and-pop restaurants.”
And of course, if you’re looking to grow your brand’s YouTube channel, no matter your goals, the data shows our own AI-powered tools will get you there faster.
More AI marketing news where this came from
And in case you missed it, here’s last month’s roundup, plus some interesting insights into digital marketing trends from our creator’s panel at VidSummit.
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