Archive for who gets paywall https://archive.is/09ZtS
(I didn’t get paywall but the verge is in my noscript blacklist)
They boast having hired 5 slop specialists that chose the least worse shots over 70000 prompts
They have something like $50 billion yearly revenue, can’t pay real people for an ad? Literally peanuts for them.
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.
That’s it, cola wars? I can’t take it anymore.
Anything to distract from Epstein.
AGAIN?!
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.
lol i’ll be drinking Pepsi this holiday season.
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.
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.
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
They’re saving it by offloading the costs to AI hype investors.
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.
A+ example and description
I don’t have a machine capable of any of that kind of compute. And W doesn’t tell me much about the amount of energy used.
Okay, so:
- Getting your figure from your specific home setup. Cool methodology you fail to mention until later.
- Admitting later on that modern datacenter GPUs get much higher compute efficiency than your home setup (where you pull “5x” out of your ass, but we’ll run with it).
- Assuming the videos generated on average were 12 seconds, which is a wild-ass assumption if you see how often the actual ad cuts.
- Implicitly failing to account for economies of scale on the electricity itself.
- Assuming specifically DALL-E 3 which even in its own line has been superseded since this March by GPT-4o.
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:
- It is assuming each frame is independently generated. In reality, the AI model may use keyframes and interpolation which would reduce computation costs.
- It is assuming the 70,000 prompts were all fully generated. But since AI is deterministic, taking a low resolution, low framerate sample of each prompt to discard the 99% of trash would be an easy way to save a lot of resources
Though I am neither an AI expert nor in charge of creating AI videos so both of these suggestions may not reflect reality.
Degenerative AI is the precise opposite of deterministic. It’s stochastic.
No, it’s deterministic. If you control the source of random numbers (such as with a seed), you will always get the same result from the same prompt.
Computers are mathematically incapable of randomness. Even a stochastic sampling requires randomness which will be deterministic if your source of random numbers is controlled.
So let me translate this from technobabble to English.
If you explicitly make it non-random it’s non-random.
Duh.
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.
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.
A-fucking-nother one?
They saw the amount of free publicity and doubled down
The holidays are coming guys!
I have my Jack-o-lantern out, and I will remain to have my Jack-o-lantern out until it decays in my cold dead hands
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!
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
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.
Well? Who made it?
Bill. From accounting. It’s his side hustle.
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
I thought they stopped doing it after they got alot of dislikes on their video.
Why would they stop doing something that got a lot of intention?
Intention or attention?
lol, oops. Since you understood it, I’ll leave it so someone else can get a chuckle
Haha no worries! It was a genuine question. If it was intention, I would have assumed it was a phrase I’d never heard of before.
OK that makes sense
