AI-generated video was once a novelty. Sometimes they were impressive, but more often than not they were laced with unpleasant human distortions and spectral graphics. But over the past year, rapid technological advances and new professional workflow tools have made video AI even more useful, experts say, eventually making it powerful enough for, say, a Carl’s Jr. TV spot.
At creative agency AKQA, AI now plays a role in most early-stage creative experiments, but this is a relatively new development in the past eight months, according to AKQA CTO Ben Royce.
In fact, Royce said the quality of video AI tools has reached an inflection point this year. The output has long since graduated from the extra fingers and distorted faces of early products, and Royce said the software now seems to have a better understanding of the terminology and needs of video editors (AKQA primarily uses parent company WPP’s internal tools that leverage a variety of video models).
“The tools are finally down to the bare minimum to get you started,” he told Morning Brew.
So what does this agency bring to the table in a world where creative AI models have reached that level of sophistication?
“[Clients] You are paying for the skills and talents that you will be able to use. [AI] “It’s effectively above-brand quality, and they’re paying for flair. It’s easy to produce something bad…The difference is that we know how to structure and produce assets that are good enough or require minimal editing on the first pass,” Royce said. That’s difficult, right? It’s actually a craft. ”
Although OpenAI discontinued its video platform Sora earlier this year to free up resources, rapid progress continues in the field of video AI. Other experts agreed that the past year has been a turning point, both in terms of the tool’s usefulness and thorny legal issues.
Many of these tools focus on creative production workflows with multi-model platforms to meet the needs of marketers. As of last year, nearly nine in 10 digital video buyers said they were using or planning to use AI to create their videos, according to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
“If you watch TV today, there are a lot of commercials that are made with AI,” Caroline Ingeborn, COO of video AI modeling startup Luma, told Morning Brew. “They don’t tell me it’s made with AI, but I know it’s made with AI because I watch a lot of these videos. So this is already happening.”
Capture the heart of creativity
Ingeborn said Luma, which has worked with agency holding companies Dentsu and Publicis, has an immersive process for introducing agencies and marketing departments to video tools. Luma works with creative staff on multiple concepts over the course of two weeks. This could also include mockups for pitches and localization opportunities, she said.
“This helps answer one of the questions we often get from executives, which is, “This sounds great, but I have 500 creators working for me, and they’re not using A.I. They don’t want to touch this. How do I tell them to touch this?’ We’ll have another creative expert come in and tell us how we can make their daily lives even better. ”
Ingeborn said Luma is trying to frame the platform for creators, not as a cost-cutting measure, but as a way for creators to generate ambitious ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
For AKQA, one of the biggest time-savers of AI is uploading authentic 3D graphic assets from brands like Lexus and using AI to create “hundreds, if not thousands” of variations. From a Lexus SUV driving through the snow in Sweden to cars driving through the streets of Barcelona and Brooklyn in different weather and lighting conditions, Royce said.
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“Suddenly we can do more testing, because it’s not flights and hotels that stop us from getting into more variants, it’s creativity,” Royce said.
The new Creative AI platform will also help professionals switch between different video models, allowing them to choose between AI services depending on which one is suitable for a particular task. Joaquín Cuenca Abela is the co-founder and CEO of one such tool, Magnific (formerly Freepik), which is used in campaigns by Carl’s Jr., Puma, and Amazon Prime. house of david.
Cuenca Abela saw what OpenAI’s early models like Dall-E could do, and the company began its AI journey relatively early in the generative AI revolution. Rather than competing with big tech on engineered models, Magnific wants to give creators access to a wide range of top models.
legal questions
Cuenca Abela said brands were initially wary of the legal and copyright gray area surrounding video modeling, at least in external marketing. Things are starting to change as courts issue rulings on fair use. In some cases, the sources of video training data have also become more public.
“Today, all the big video models are supported by social networks and get their videos from social networks,” Cuenca Abela said. “So this is a combination of a clearer provenance of the data used to train the model and some rulings. [brands] This will give you peace of mind that everything is really okay. ”
AKQA’s Royce instructs his brand clients to only use enterprise platforms that do not plagiarize intellectual property to train future model iterations. He said model providers are getting better at ensuring overall legal security.
“The industry has finally reached a point where it has matured enough that model providers are taking customer concerns seriously,” Royce said. “They provided compensation or proof that they were not going to retrain on their own data or use someone else’s data that they didn’t do. [gotten permission to use]”
Marketers are also concerned about the quality of videos featuring valuable brand assets, said Hanna Elsakr, Adobe’s vice president of new business for GenAI.
Brands are interested in AI “to protect their intellectual property, and if they see that the output matches their brand in terms of bit depth, quality, color, character, physics, etc.,” El-Zakr told Morning Brew.
But no matter how sophisticated AI video tools become, there will always be a place for talented creators who know how to coax the best material out of these models, AKQA’s Royce said.
“Giving the best tools to people who don’t know what they’re doing isn’t going to produce good results,” he said. “There are technologies and new skill sets to know how AI models react to things, what they’re good at, and what it takes to get really good at it, and I think that’s something the whole industry needs to master.”
