Advertising? "We don't want to pay an artist" goes a long way for a small business with a limited budget.

whynotmaybe 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We're using voice generation from clipchamp for our promotional videos.

It's an ethical conundrum because we're not paying anyone, but we don't have the money to pay anyone, and it's good enough for our budget.

But we're getting used to the process of changing a part of the text in a few seconds without any artist involved and for 0$.

I guess that soon we'll be able to create voice sample from know personalities for a few $ with prices based on the popularity of the artist and some sanity check based on the artist preferences.

	▲	yakattak 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think this is where I see the benefit for small business. I don’t want to speak for you, but I imagine it’s either “no voice over, we can’t afford it.” or “inexpensive AI voice over to make it more accessible and appealing.” My thought is the large corps that could afford it, still won’t because it’s a cost they don’t need to incur. For them it’s not even a moral conundrum.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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rm_-rf_slash 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.

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gwd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

FWIW I've never seen a correlation between a small company's website and the quality of their product. Slick website? Maybe they care for their craft, maybe they're all marketing and no content. Website stuck in 1998? Maybe they're sloppy and don't care; maybe they care about their core product, not a slick marketing brochure. I don't see any reason AI would be different in that regard.

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yakattak 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s true. I think it’s more of a problem of getting someone in the door. Anecdotally going to art festivals I’m much more likely to enter the booth of someone who has handcrafted marketing over the person who has generated marketing.

	▲	hedora 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Basic marketing theory says that spending extra to make your ads signals (term of art) to your potential customers that (1) you are successful, since you can afford it and (2) you are confident your product is superior, since you’re effectively paying people to try it, and expect doing this will generate revenue in return. Much like the star bellied sneetches, when the quality of some ad format becomes untethered from the cost of production and placement, then marketers will flock to some alternative. YouTube influencers fill[ed] that niche for a while because content milling SEO spam and fake reviews is a lot more expensive if you present the results in video form with good production values. (Not sure how long that will be true, since AI is getting better at short-term video).

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switchbak 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Every local business I deal with is completely lacking on the online side. They might have square POS terminals and all that stuff, but their website either doesn't exist, sucks (not updated in years) or they throw me to Facebook (also sucks).

This is like the last mile for online presence. The average barber out here doesn't use Squarespace, barely knows how to use Facebook and doesn't touch GenAi. But they can still cut your hair pretty well - tech savvyness doesn't have a huge connection to business competence out here.

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awepofiwaop 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The amount of lost revenue due to the implication of cut corners needs to be higher than the cost of hiring an artist by enough of a margin that the managers who make the decision start to care, and enough that they're willing to put the effort into hiring an artist.

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sekai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It can also backfire. AI slop ads and marketing material imply cut corners and poor quality products. If a bakery isn’t going to bother touching up its AI slop banner, I don’t expect their cookies to be great either.

Average person won't notice, and would not care either way.

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hypeatei 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This assumes that models won't improve and you'll always be able to tell that it's "AI slop" ... that seems like a bad bet. Five years ago you'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting that a computer could produce images from a natural language prompt and that it'd be accessible to everyone -- not just corporations with deep pockets.

	▲	yakattak 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah if/when it becomes indistinguishable I think most people won’t care. That being said I do think someone finding out something is AI generated will be met with poor response. Does that ultimately matter? Probably not in a business world.