“TtoA” The Impact of Text to Anime: Innovation in Short Video

I recently wrote about “ShortTV: Short Video App.
Here is a continuation of that article.
A Chinese investor I often talk to says that the hottest thing right now is AI-based video generation.
He has been investing in his own AI engine for several years now and has finally found a use case for it recently.
One of them is “TtoA” (Text to Animation), an AI technology that generates animation directly from text.
It seems that 100 three-minute animations can be created for a few tens of thousands of yen.
What can you do with this technology?
First of all, you can easily create many different types of videos with different storylines. Happy ending or sad ending? You can even change the scenarios along the way.
You can even change the characters. You can change not only their hair and clothes, but also their age and mood.
If the characters and scenarios can be automatically tweaked, this is now an automatic animation machine.
Anyway, you can create videos with slightly different characters, slightly different stories, slightly different settings, and so on, at zero cost.
This automatic video generation reminds me of an innovation in ad-tech.
It was more than 10 years ago. I think it was after the Lehman Shock in 2008, when an American venture company suddenly entered the world of advertising and started doing something interesting.
That was AB testing of banners. They would change the ad copy slightly, change the background color, or create various patterns for the same ad and distribute them all at the same time.
Then, only the creatives that received the best clicks (response) were kept. And then, only the creative that gets the most clicks (responses) is kept.
The creators do not decide what kind of creative is good, but the data does.
It’s numbers. It’s scary.
Video generation AI means that this same thing will be possible in drama.
Especially in the world of short videos. No, if it is on the Internet, it is also possible with video commercials.
Watch them on your smartphone in your spare time. It was YouTubers who met the demand for such video viewing behavior.
New people are entering video production, which had been dominated by professionals.
This is a major innovation.
Still, in light of the emergence of video-generating AI, this may have been only the beginning of change.
After all, TV producers vs. YouTubers is a battle between humans.
Now it’s humans vs. AI.
It is said in other fields as well. It will come into the world of video as well.
Anyway, the number of videos will increase even more than before. This means that, economically speaking, the value of the videos will decrease.
It is not profitable.
But the demand for video will not decrease. So, the question is, which layer do we use to make money? I think that’s the question.