"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
Hemlo. Am AI "expert."
It takes around 307.2 Wh to generate 8 seconds of AI video.
(8 seconds × 24.0 fps × 12 seconds/frame × 480W combined TPU load ÷ 3,600)
70,000 prompts is 21.5 Megawatt-Hours.
They are very likely not saving any money or time by doing this.
But are they paying for this energy or is it AI companies doing so and waiting for the golden goose that will make it all worth it?
No, the ones who are paying for the energy are the people who live near whatever data centers received the slop requests.
Well the Microsoft fillings hint that OpenAI lost $11.5 billion last, so I'm going with they're waiting for the golden goose
It takes around 307.2 Wh to generate 8 seconds of AI video.
That's fucking insane. Do you have a source for that that you can share?
Try running a local video generation model like DALLE-3 on your machine; or just generate a few frames, like 96 sequentially in FLUX at 1024×1024.
Video generation is a lot harder on GPUs than single image gen.
My own local performance is 480W with consumer level hardware, and obviously enterprise grade can be about 5× more efficient (see: Nvidia H200/600W) depending on optimizations, load balancing, and highest grade chipsets, but overall, it's still a pretty gigantic computer task to generate even a five minute long video from scratch.
They're saving it by offloading the costs to AI hype investors.
Okay, so:
Like I know you didn't list a final price, but if you're suggesting this runs at 5x the compute efficiency of your home setup, so about 4.5 MWh (again, your assumptions, and we'll even keep that baseless 12-second prompt output average), then assuming a comically high rate of 15¢ per kWh at this scale (that's more like a household consumer rate), that would be 4500 x 0.15 or six hundred seventy-five dollars to render. If you think $700-ish is even a drop in Coca-Cola's advertising budget, you might be delusional.
Did you learn to become an expert in basic arithmetic before you got your expert degree in AI-ology? I'm not a fan of the proliferation of genAI, so it hurts me to point out how ridiculous what you're saying is.
Yeah, $700 isn't even a drop in their budget, I agree; the issue is with just using a team to render an actual commercial.
Sifting through 70,000 generations likely cost them labor-hours regardless, and throwing away 5 MWh (to 21 MWh at the very worst end of the estimates) on top of that, seems like a waste of time and energy.
If they're hiring people to make a CGI advert, why not just .. have CGI people make the advert?
I'm not sure in the difference of hourly pay between a CGI artist and "routine AI video sifter/rater" but on sheer guesswork, I'd have to say there's likely a net negative on the process (in terms of quality for money spent on the project).
Alternatively, I could just be completely wrong and the future of advertising is everyone just shooting out AI-genned adverts at Mach 10.
Don't forget that manual review is not inherently required for all 70,000 prompts. GenAI also classifies images, and it's probably a reasonable workflow within this studio's capabilties to, say, mindlessly create a bunch of minor variations of the same thing, feed a sample of a few frames from the first N frames of each video into a classifier model, and tell it to mark them as probably bad and put them to the side if they look anomalous.
Obviously a GPT classifier has zero understanding of what that actually means, but you can probably filter out a sizable chunk of prompts this way – heuristic reason being that an AI-generated video tends to decohere over time as it feeds on itself, so the initial frames are probably the best you're going to get.
You'll have tons of false positives and won't filter out all of the bad ones, but who cares about false positives when you can generate another one with a change of the prompt? This method I made up just now in five seconds is probably well-surpassed by a rapidly developing knowledge base about how to microoptimize the shit out of GenAI.
There are a couple more assumption that may result in costs worse than reality:
Though I am neither an AI expert nor in charge of creating AI videos so both of these suggestions may not reflect reality.
At this point, I think making an obviously agitating AI video that make people talk about it ... is all part of the marketing.
Why make a great advertising video when you can just cause a bit of controversy and get people to talk about your ad
~~Have you seen the Lindt Chocolate ads? It took me 3 viewings to realize it was AI. They totally can hide it.~~
I was wrong.
Care to post an example?
You know what, I have to eat my own foot: https://grinderfilms.com/bts-lindt-extra-creamy/
Not only is it not AI, but they brag that it isn't. Watching the commercial, the hands always seemed to move in a blur, but now I'm sure that cheff just holds things weird lmao.
Also, if openai charges 50 cents for each second of video generated, and they had to create 70000 pieces of slop plus paying 5 "specialists" to sift between all the shit... did they actually save money doing this vs normal CGI where all the models are recycled from the last year campaign?
CEOs: No, but just imagine the added brand value in being associated with AI, the Hot New Thing Nobody Is Sick Of™!
But it's ✨✨new✨✨ so it HAS to be good!
Why are we giving the light of day to a company that sent paramilitaries to kill union organizers? That has been confirmed to have murdered at least 14 union leaders in Colombia and 8 in Guatemala, with workers literally assembled at gunpoint inside Coke plants and told to quit the union or die?
A company that has been draining communities' water supplies in India, forcing wells to run dry and poisoning farmers' land, with $28 million in damages assessed (and never paid)? That sold products in India containing pesticides at 140 times EU safety limits, including banned carcinogens?
A company operating in illegal Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land, funding extremist pro-settlement groups, and contributing taxes to fund military operations during an actual genocide?
A company that's been named the world's worst plastic polluter for 6 consecutive years, producing over 130 billion plastic bottles annually, then quietly dropped all its reusability commitments in 2024?
So using AI slop for advertising is just the cherry on top of the shit pie that the coca cola company already is, so if you're not already boycotting the literal embodiment of capitalistic evil, let this be the last straw.
That's it. I'm switching to Pepsi.
FFS it's coca-cola. Do they really even need a new ad at this point? Who is going to see it and go, I should really try this coke thing out.
They’re selling overpriced sugar water, constant advertising is all they have.
Just a guess, if you like coke, and you see the ad, it might make you want a coke right now?
Personally, I work in a supermarket and drink our own brand cola, because it's sugar free, way cheaper, and I know who made it.
A-fucking-nother one?
They saw the amount of free publicity and doubled down
5 AI “specialists”, 70,000 prompts, and this is the best they could come up with?
A vague red truck drives past iconic winter animals: a sloth, some seals, a panda, and a horde of bunnies that clip through each other. Some lights appear on trees, but not all the trees, just a few of them. What a sad lacklustre ad, even from AI.
Coca-Cola is once again using generative AI to reimagine its classic Coke caravan holiday commercials, and in doing so, killing some of the festive joy you have for the brand.
Oh, you got me fucked up for someone else, The Verge. A soda manufacturer shilling their product does not bring me, nor anyone I know, "joy".
Boomers love Coke advertising. It's nostalgia. And real actual hoarding too, Coke collectors are nuts.
People talking about how they could have just CGI'd it traditionally for (maybe) cheaper, but what about even the non CGI option most ads go with? It's a gimmick.
They're doing this to get people talking, which it does. That said, don't drink coke. Like, regardless of the ad -- it's super bad for you, lol
yep. two years in a row they've said "fuck artists" and gone with the same assholes.
I saw something along the lines that they computed 71,000 shots; that must be a LOT of garbage to get a few usable seconds.
I can't imagine it's cheaper than paying a creative house but perhaps they're laundering money or something.
coke should do better.
70,000 prompts? Let's say it takes 30 seconds to render a shot, and 30 seconds to consider if it's acceptable. That's 145 person days to get a bad result.
Massive waste.
There were definitely more person days spent doing it the traditional way. Ib the article they note they would've started a year ago. Even just the handful of folks on set, the caterers, drivers, costumers, location scouts, permit wranglers, talent, director, writer etc probably gets close to 145 people days if the shoot went over 2 or 3 days.
Why do they even need a new ad? What's changed since last year? Or the year before? Or the year before that? I don't remember them having the year in the ad or anything.
Replaying the ad and saving the money it would cost to give as a Christmas bonus is what M&Ms does... Its actually a pretty good idea.
This is much much worse.
That's exactly what Coke wants. This brand is so big they don't advertise to sell but to remind people that they should grab a coke from the fridge and brb I'll do just that
Marketing these days: make the most horrible ad for cheap money, let every single outlet report about it.
That is peak journalism!
I thought they stopped doing it after they got alot of dislikes on their video.
At 70000 prompts it would have taken less work and far less co2 to just make an ad and hire actual creatives.
All people want to hear is “holidays are coming”
You could play a clip of every ad for the last 50 years and it would achieve the same result. It’s the music.
Silly twats
So the (negative) hype around the shit they vomited out last time was so good (/inconsequential) they did it again? I sure do hate this timeline ...
I'm really disliking this episode of black mirror.
I'm not going to mourn the salaries of people who knowingly ~~psychologically manipulate~~ advertise for an industry which systematically spread health disinformation about sugars and fats in the 90s and is an intentionally enormous contributor to the ongoing childhood obesity, health more generally, and plastic pollution epidemics.
I will say, though, that I'm not happy this probably makes said ~~psychological manipulation~~ advertisement cheaper for them.
Yeah, this is the same crap they had last year.