Amazon Ads Launches a New AI Video Generator

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: On Thursday, Amazon Ads announced Video Generator and Live Image, "our first generative AI-powered technology designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that enhances ad performance."

Amazon's blog post calls it "a new feature that uses generative AI technology to make it easier for advertisers to create more interesting and relevant video ads for customers. The new feature, Video generator, creates visually rich video content in a matter of minutes and at no additional cost. Using a single product image, Video generator curates custom AI-generated videos tailored to a product's distinct selling proposition and features, leveraging Amazon's unique insights to vividly bring a product story to life."

An accompanying video demonstrates how Amazon's AI-powered tech can be used to animate still images, making it appear that steam is rising from a coffee mug, flowers are being blown in the wind, the night sky is changing breathtakingly behind a telescope, and that waves are breaking behind a smart speaker at the beach.

How long until

[Anonymous Coward]

our entire economy is nothing but advertising?

Re:

[Calydor]

always_has_been.jpg

More dilution via pollution

[ukoda]

Videos of products for sale were sometimes useful to better understand a products features and operation before purchase. The catch was most videos were a waste of time. With this new 'service' it will further dilute the number of useful video by polluting them 'fluff' market video that tell absolutely nothing about the product.

The enshittification continues.

success=telling more convincing lies

[Iamthecheese]

Up next: automatic redrawing based on click rate leads to AIs that outright lie in the picture, for example showing a more popular product or brand name or writing a lower price in the ad text.

Unlikely to be compliant

[xack]

With various truth in advertising laws, but Google and Microsoft run so many scam ads these days it probably won't even be noticed.

Not Any Good?

[darkain]

If the tech was any good, then why didn't Amazon dog food and use their own AI Ad Generator to generate the Ad for their AI Ad Generator? HHMMM I wonder.

Re:

[test321]

I can imagine two applications:
1. Small value products, e.g. you make mobile phone accessories, you want a video ad because your target audience watches videos.
2. Quick prototyping. A creative agency makes several proposals for a new advertisement campaign; the AI generator transforms the crude storyboards (stick figures) into a more pleasing video. The proposal chosen by the customer gets to be filmed professionally.

Re:

[kmoser]

"...remove creative barriers"

Barriers like ad agencies, artists, and animators?

Hey

[The Cat]

Look at that! Now you can play video poker^H^H^H advertise on Amazon with really REALLY shitty video ads! All brought to you by Pigfucker(tm), where you feed the machine money, something happens, and you hope sales come out!

And if no sales come out, you get to feed it more money! What's going on inside the slot machine^H^H^H ad robot? Who the fuck knows? But one thing we do know, it will cost you sixty cents a click to find out! Too bad your product is price-capped at ten bucks so you can't recover the cos

So

[RitchCraft]

It's a bull shit enhancer ... got it.

In other words: "better crap"

[gweihir]

Still crap, as basically all ads.

It's probably creepy

[Powercntrl]

Every AI generated video I've seen so far always has a very off-putting fever dream look to it. It's like someone took the uncanny valley effect and dialed it up to 11. I doubt Amazon has had any better success with this tech.

Re:

[leonbev]

What's amusing is that other AI learning models will probably scrape these videos and add them to their own knowledge base, and start convincing themselves that this is somehow the right way to generate videos. Who knows, ChatGPT and it's relatives might start telling people these weird effects are the "correct" way to produce good content.

The weird artificial quality of these videos might also buy the meatbags still in the promotional video generation business a few more years until they're put out of work

I'll never understand the advertising industry

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Ads are the most boycotted "product" in history [searls.com], advertising and advertisers are universally hated, it transformed normal society into a hellish corporate surveillance dystopia that people have little to no chance of escaping, and yet corporations that rely solely on advertisement as a business model have flourished to the point of becoming unassailable monopolies and they keep doubling down on it.

How the hell does something this hated generates so much revenue? Something doesn't add up. The only explanation I can come up with is that advertisement actually doesn't work at all - and possibly drive away people who are subjected to it despite their efforts to avoid it - the advertisement industry knows it but keeps it hush-hush and somehow convince their customers that they should keep advertising.

Re:

[allo]

Nobody admits that ads work for him. Still companies buy ads for a lot of money. Something doesn't add up ...

It's your cognitive dissonance. Ads work even for you. They may not work by you buying right now, but you know the company name and so on. And if you measure the performance after months instead of days, things add up. That's why you should use an ad blocker. You're not immune to ads, even when you say "I would never buy something advertised" and avoid clicking on online ads. The whole industry knows

Re:

[allo]

I can't fully judge how much you may or may not be manipulated, but after considering how much money this industry makes while everyone claims to be unaffected, I've come to the conclusion that it's probably just some kind of cognitive dissonance to claim to be immune to the manipulation experts. The only winning move is not to play. Block the ads instead of testing how much they can work on your subconscious, possibly without you ever noticing that last week's ad worked.

Doesn't make a lot of sense

[bubblyceiling]

Yeah, but AI video looks like AI Video.

If one is spending millions running a TV spot, why would anyone bother with this? Normally the marketing dept will work with a media agency, who will for a fraction of the media cost, get the content done professionally and make something worthy of the ad-spot

Maybe if you happen to be creating low budget content for FB or Instagram or something, this could be useful. Or maybe as a way to storyboard & create a rough cut.

Re:

[allo]

It's probably a long term thing. Now they build the infrastructure to provide AI ads even when they look crappy. When the AI finally produces good videos, they just need to swap models while the competition still needs to build the infrastructure to serve AI ads.

So all ads will now be streaming videos?

[misnohmer]

Because web pages don't have enough videos loading, chewing device batteries and data bandwidth, annoying the readers. Now all those still image ads will all start animated. Did I get that right? Or is this just a giant effort to drive people towards ad free browsing subscriptions - "how much do I have to annoy my users before they will pay for my content rather than view ads"?