i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
I don't think AI reduces cost of marketing in any significant way. Everybody has access to these tools so at best it just allows marketing companies to employ fewer ad-creation teams to pump out the same amount of advertisements.
Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.
I suspect the end state will be just-in-time rich ad creation (not bidding) tailored specifically to you.
> Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.
For a superbowl ad, there's the high cost to air the spot, but most of them also have a high cost to produce the spot (maybe not for the the one from last year that was just a dvd logo esque bouncing qr code for a crypto scam); if your marketing budget was ~ $5M, maybe you spent $1M on production and $4M on airtime. If AI gives you a good enough result for approximately no money, maybe you spend all that budget on airtime, maybe you cut the budget and still spend $4.5M on airtime. Of course, if everybody is spending more on airtime, you might not get more airtime, but you could still reduce/eliminate the production part of the budget.
>your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
One could imagine that once every company in a market uses AI videos to reduce said costs they will then have to spend even more to stand out from the other marketers, leaving us all back where we started, but with a lot of crappy AI videos to wade through.
They also get crappier though. I am generally okay with a lot of the tradeoffs to reduce the cost of construction and mass production. We definitely have more crappy stuff than we need—I'd prefer if we had a little less, higher quality stuff, but the balance is not too far out of whack.
With media though, I feel it's a lot worse. It's already been trending that way for text with blogspam already diluting the value of the web even before AI. But with AI this is accelerating to video and audio as well. Not only does the AI slop drown out the best of human creativity, it also raises the floor on superficial production value so that if you don't use AI you fall behind on the initial attention-grabbing first impression. I acknowledge a big part of this is due to where we are in the hype cycle, and once we absorb the capabilities of the tools, we'll figure out how to use them more tastefully, and human creativity will shine through again. But no I don't think always making everything easier and more efficient is necessarily always a good thing a priori. Friction and effort sometimes leads to positive outcomes.
We once built pyramids, massive castles, temples and churches which took hundreds of years to build. We don't build those things any more. Same happened to music and art. There's this eternal sloppification of everything, although at the same time things get on average better and cheaper for more people to enjoy. Quantity beats quality, i.e. capitalism optimizes for scalability.
The end game is quite sad, which will be some kind of neural device which just directly manipulates brain signals for happiness, and everything physical will be just gray goo. It's more scalable to make you think the world is beautiful, than to actually make it beautiful. We are almost there already, because we experience the world through a screen, which shows us happy things, while we care less and less about the real world around us.
