Google's AI Ad: A New Era in Advertising

Reading the Wall Street Journal today, I found a story that I absolutely love. Connor and I have been talking, and that is that Google has created their very first AI ad, basically. And a lot of people are saying that they're escaping the quote-unquote uncanny valley by casting a turkey as kind of the main character in this ad. And I mean, maybe that is a real thing. Maybe if there was actual people in there, it would be a little bit more obvious that it was AI generated. Overall, though, I think this is really interesting because we're seeing a place where some of the biggest companies in the world, you know, that being Google, are starting to use AI to completely play all the characters and all the generation in their advertisements. Now, does that mean that advertising jobs are done and that actors are out the window and that directors are, you know, replaced? Absolutely not, right? The more talented you are directing a movie, the more talented you're going to be to, you know, generate this. But I think that there is a lot of shifting that's going to be happening in the industry. We've talked about AI and videos a lot in the past, but I think this is almost like more of an advertising play. Anyways, Connor, what have you seen on this? And, yeah, what was your thought? Did you see the video? Yeah, I did. Yeah, and here's the funny thing is that the video is great. Jane, you probably have it. I think it's embedded in that. Yeah, I'll be playing in front of anyone watching. Yeah, and it looks great. It sort of just looks like a kind of cartoonish thing. It's funny. It's cute, all that kind of stuff. But so a couple of things on this. First of all, I wonder if we are going to do away with that term uncanny valley. And if you don't know what that term is, it's one of these things where, you know, in the earlier days with like CGI, if you made humans, it looked almost so real that just felt weird. So you'd rather make a super cartoonish human or an actual human just to kind of when you get too close, it makes people feel very uncomfortable. There's something psychological that happens. So number one on, you know, on Vio, like, of course they could do this. Of course any company could do this. The fact that they're not heavily advertising it as AI is a real interesting threading the needle. And Jaden and I, by the way, were talking about this perplexity thing I want to get to as well on this front, which is this idea of how will people feel about it, right? And so this is where I kind of like want to also bring in, Jaden, this story that – so the way you guys just behind the scenes peek behind the curtain a little bit, the way we do this is Jaden and I are constantly sort of like talking throughout the week and like what stories we want to talk about and all that kind of stuff. And we kind of narrow it down. And then, you know, as we're kind of coming onto the show, we're like, okay, let's start with this one or whatever. But this, but a lot of times what Jaden and I do, we have too many stories to talk about. And so we're like, okay, are there themes of these stories? And this is a pretty good example of that, where it's this idea that perplexity, and this is the story, perplexity assigned a multi-year global licensing agreement with Getty Images, right? Which means that they can display Getty images, like the editorial images, all that kind of stuff. And so essentially it lets them, you know, users see content within search results, all that sort of stuff. Now the interesting, also Getty has an API as well that's going to be integrated into Perplexity, which I think is actually really, really interesting. But Jaden, does it matter? I mean, and I guess what I mean by that is we have spent probably the last year and a half, no, maybe two years talking about protection of rights, right? I mean, talking about protection of like the New York Times lawsuit is still going on with OpenAI, and now OpenAI is sort of signing agreements. It just feels like the conversation has shifted a tremendous amount from oh they stealing that IP to it doesn seem like as big a deal anymore And I not commenting on that one way or the other I just saying you know like Claude got you know their hand slapped for you know stealing all the books The problem was that they didn't pay for those books. But the judge actually said, like, yeah, that's fair use that you can train on books. And I'm just thinking, well, people really care. And then what does that do to the creative industries and things like that? So the fact that Google is very slowly, there is no way around this, Jaden. very slowly replacing creative talent. And I don't mean one-to-one. You said it very well in the opening. If you're a good director, you're a good director. I think more people are going to be able to be able to use these tools. But where a company before needed 10 graphic designers, maybe they need two now. So that, along with perplexity, signing with getting images, I don't know what this means for getting images, but there's no way they can be making as much as they were before with people licensing one of their photos. So, Gene, I'm just wondering, because you think about this space a lot. Like the implications of this VO video and perplexity with the partnership with Getty, the implications to you are what? I think they're completely opposite things, which is what gets me really excited about this. Oh, interesting. Okay. Polar opposite. So on the Google front, we have an ad which is completely made with AI, but they don't label it as like, you know, make cool videos with VO3. It's an ad for a completely different thing, albeit they do reference their AI like tools in the video. But like the whole video, like technically could have been made with a plush turkey animal and CGI. Like you could have made this commercial, but they used AI to do it. So I think they're showing that. But the fact they didn't label it as an AI thing, it's not like it's promoting that exclusively. It's actually an ad for an ad's sake. And they just happen to use AI tools. So I think that's interesting. And so it's kind of like showing, look, we can use AI to do things that never used to be AI before. On the perplexity front, what I think is so fascinating about this is essentially the way the deal is going with Getty is that it's not like a licensing deal to train an image model, which is what a lot of these AI companies will do with image generation tools. It's just a licensing deal to display Getty images inside of the search results, which in perplexity are AI generated. So what's interesting here on the Google front, you're taking AI and replacing something that wasn't AI with it. And on the perplexity front, you're taking something that previously was a perplexity AI generated search result. And now you're putting something real inside of it. And I think that people will love that, myself included. And here's the reason why. This whole deal kind of happened because Getty Images, I believe, maybe I'm not sure if they were the person launching the lawsuit or if they were tagged on. But essentially, perplexity took maybe the Wall Street Journal, I think, article. When someone searched for this particular news story, they summarized it like all of these AI-generated things do. But they grabbed the image from the actual Wall Street Journal article, and it was a Getty Images. And Getty, obviously, has got their famous trademark, a watermark on there. They're very protective of their images. And the interesting thing about Getty Images is anytime there's a major real-world event, people sell their images to Getty Images. You know, anytime there's some sort of war, some sort of conflict, some sort of red carpet event, like those are all up on Getty Images before anywhere else. And those photographers, they make money through the licensing when journalists and news organizations want images of like happening things that happen immediately. They grab it from Getty Images like the way that you source it all So what cool is perplexity is essentially turning into a publisher here You can rewrite the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal can get mad at you yada yada There's going to be these kind of fair copyright and fair trade arguments. I think at the end of the day, you're going to get away with it because you're rewriting it, just like if I read the Wall Street Journal and wrote my own blog about it. I'm allowed to do that, so I think perplexity is fine. But what you can't do is grab an image of the actual event, and you can't really use it. I wouldn't go and generate an AI-generated image of, let's say I'm covering the war in Syria or in Ukraine. I'm not going to generate an AI-generated image of the war in Ukraine and put it on the top of an AI-generated article. That feels alive because that's not a true image. With the text, it's just text. You're just summarizing what happened. So I think this is a really cool opportunity for these AI-generated feeds like Perplexity or even OpenAI and any others that want to do this to have the AI-generated summary. but you're getting a real actual picture of a real event, especially when it's news. That's what people want. So that's what I think is really interesting here. Yeah, it's funny. I hadn't really thought about it like that. But then it kind of now has me thinking a totally different direction. This is why I love this podcast because it always goes in directions that I never expect. To me, the point of this podcast always, Jaden, is to sort of think like, okay, so what are the implications? And in this case, because we can find like tech news everywhere. In this case, my question is, like, will people care? Like, this is two kind of, like, parallel stories of do people care? Meaning, like, they see, like, what, you know, Vio does and they're like, hey, this is all AI generated as opposed to, hey, this was created by real people. And I can sort of see both sides, right? I can see some people being like, hey, this was – like, do you remember those commercials that appeared during the Super Bowl? He gets us, like the Jesus commercials. Did you see those? and I thought they were really, I mean, you and I are actually both biased because we're both people of faith, but I thought they were really cool commercials, but the cool thing was like, I thought those were fake images. It turned out those were real images and actually made it more powerful to me. In the same way, it said like, hey, this cutting board was designed by hand. You can increase the price of that cutting board because it was designed by hand. On the other hand, you sort of have this idea of like, yes, but if we can create this, you too can create something that looks like this. So you're sort of like reaching, it's curious to sort of see like who you're going to reach on this. Like, do you want the people who want the authenticity or do you want to sort of say like, Hey, anybody can do this. And then on the Getty thing, same question. Like, you know, it's, there's something intoxicating and I think there will be more and more about seeing a real photograph. I'm starting to, this is why I don't, I don't know, Sora, all this stuff. I don't know. I don't know. Cause like, I want to see like the real guy, like fall off his skateboard. I don't care if you put your friend's face on, you know, or Sam allman's face on falling off. I don't care. I want to see the authentic thing. So, Jaden, to you, is this going to be driven by what consumers want? In other words, when I think about self-driving cars, why aren't all cars self-driving cars? Because people freak out. The technology is there. The economics are there. But people freak out. That's very consumer-driven, holding back that market. But another thing is, well, do people really care that these are stealing Disney copyrights? Maybe they don't. So I'm just wondering, where do you think people would care? Where do you think consumers are going to drive this conversation? What do you think is going to happen with all this? I think for, like, stealing Disney copyrights, people will hate me. I'm like, well, it's a cartoon, whatever. The Mickey Mouse Like how long are you guys going to keep it Sponsored by Disney That them guys that again yeah yeah disney will disney will hate my my guts forever but like i don care disney mickey mouse is old i think that copyright if it needs to get in the public domain come on i don't know how they kept getting breaking that one out so that i don't care about but real world events i want 100 think this is going to be a consumer driven preference that if perplexity if i search for what is happening in, you know, what did Jerome Powell say in his recent Fed chair meeting? When I see it, and when I perplexity summarized that for me, and there's a picture at the top of that, I want a picture of the actual Fed chair meeting that happened, not one from like seven years ago, you know, not one of him addressing the United Nations in, you know, Rwanda that was like a long time ago that's like super irrelevant, right? Like you want the actual specific event. People are going to feel like they're getting more credible news when that happens. So I think for real world events and for news, which Perplexity does a lot of, I think 100% this is the right step. And I think that users will gravitate more towards that. And OpenAI, Google, everyone will probably have to make these Getty or some other sort of licensing deal if they want to have that same quality in that specific use case. And then the same thing kind of, though, on the flip side of it, you kind of mentioned, like, the Sora thing. I get the same feeling with you. I don't feel like the Sora app is going to be this massive social media. Yeah, I don't know. It's going to take on Instagram and Twitter the way that Sam might have hoped for. I do think that there's a place for making funny, creative, interesting videos. I mean, they just entertain you. My wife and I were looking at some Instagram reels the other day, and there was like an AI-generated one that for like the first two seconds looked real. And then all of a sudden, it just like, you know, just went insane. And you're like, okay, that's obviously AI-generated. And it was like momentarily funny, but also I'm like, I can watch one of those a day. And like, you know what I mean? So there's just a limit. I think people probably get sick of them very fast. They're funny, but they're not real. I want to see, there's so much documented footage and there's so many incredible things in the world. I just want to see the real stuff that actually happened. That's what's going to hit the dopamine receptor in my brain the most when I'm scrolling through TikTok endlessly, right? 100%. Jaden, I'm with you on the Sora thing. Again, you know, timestamp this, maybe you and I will be like the idiots who didn't realize this would be absolutely huge. But to me, it's the same thing. I think we want authenticity or I do anyways. And listen, guys, as you are sort of exploring all these tools, I have to shout out Jaden's AI box. If you have not tried AI box yet, you have to get on this. Guys, 19 bucks a month. You're going to be hooked on this instantly. It solved two of my biggest sort of like pain points. One is that I'm constantly, by the way, I now pay like $100 for Claude a month too. So I'm now paying like 500 bucks a month for these tools. For 19 bucks a month, you can just try AI bots and you get to sort of like, you know, put side by side different ways that these models interact with each other. But the really cool feature that we've been waiting for for two years was this workflow feature where Jaden has created this product and his team have created this product where all of a sudden you are just building out workflows. No code. I have no coding experience whatsoever. However, all of a sudden you can just mess around with incredibly easy drag and drop, move these things around. It becomes a flow chart for how you're going to work. It is super, super easy. Try it out. It's absolutely awesome. AIbox.ai. And we will catch you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone. And make sure to leave a rating and review. We'll catch you next time.