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This Week in AI — 📹 Why understanding AI video is key
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This Week in AI — 📹 Why understanding AI video is key

October 15, 2024 | By: Dave Isaac

Each week we’ll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!

What You Should Know

 

Why Understanding AI Video is Key … Even if You Don’t Usually Create Video

Adobe Firefly, released as a public beta yesterday, and Movie Gen, a new model from Meta, add to a growing number of AI video tools that allow users to create realistic videos from simple text prompts or photos. Marketers, educators, and public relations professionals have never had so many simple and inexpensive options for producing video content. From AI-assisted editing to realistic avatars and voice cloning, there are plenty of features to add to existing video capabilities or expand your storytelling.

The key will be understanding when and how to use these tools. Platforms are putting plenty of safeguards in place, though AI videos have been more meme than misinformation so far. Google has vowed to flag AI-generated images in search and YouTube, Meta, and TikTok claim to flag AI-generated video.

More importantly, think about your audience and what they’ll respond to. How can you use these tools to better connect with or deliver more value to your customers and followers? Will you use them to create custom B-roll? Personalize videos for companies or individuals? Generate memes?

Tastes will undoubtedly change as AI video becomes more common, but just as with AI tools for generating text, quick execution of a tepid idea won’t help your brand. This is why communicators must become familiar with AI video tools, even if creating video content isn’t a core part of their role.

Experiment with video tools to understand the possibilities and risks, how they might aid your storytelling and engage your audience, and where they might fall short. Consider what these new tools make possible that was too expensive, time consuming, or impractical to try before. Push your creative boundaries while staying true to your message and maintaining your audience’s trust.

Elsewhere …

Tips and Tricks

🧠 Turn your assets into an interactive tool

What’s new: Last year, Google introduced an “experimental product” called NotebookLM, an AI-powered research tool that allows users to interact with source materials like PDFs, .txt files, links, videos, and documents from Google Drive. It recently added an “Audio Overview” feature that develops a short podcast out of the sources you add to it with two co-hosts.

How it works: To start a notebook, upload or link sources on a given topic. NotebookLM is more of a language tool than a knowledge tool — it only parses the information you upload and doesn’t refer to any training material or the internet.

Once you’ve uploaded, you’ll see a “notebook guide” in the lower-right corner with a summary of the information you’ve uploaded, an audio overview, and some quick “help me create” buttons where you can create new assets like an FAQ, timeline, briefing doc, or study guide, with a single click. At the bottom, you’ll also see a chat window where you can interact with all the sources you’ve uploaded. You can ask questions or prompt it to develop new assets like scripts for a video voiceover or web copy, and it will respond with in-line citations that show you exactly where it pulled the information from.

Try this: Think of a notebook as a brain. You can load it up with whatever information you want and share it with others (probably better for internal use) so they can understand it in their own way. Maybe you upload an employee handbook, for instance. Some would rather listen to a podcast summarizing and analyzing it, while others might check out an FAQ or ask specific questions to understand the material.

You could also use notebooks to help you develop content. Say you’re building a website and you have transcripts of conversations with relevant stakeholders, branding materials, KPIs for what the team wants to achieve with its new website, and a sitemap. You could add those into a notebook and start developing copy for the new pages.

As always, you’ll want to ensure AI is giving you the most accurate info, but the in-line citations make that easier than most other AI tools. Google also says it does not use personal data to train Notebook LM, so everything stays private unless you share sources with collaborators.

Quote of the Week

“We believe that nuclear energy has a critical role to play in supporting our clean growth and helping to deliver on the progress of AI. The grid needs these kinds of clean, reliable sources of energy that can support the build out of these technologies. … We feel like nuclear can play an important role in helping to meet our demand, and helping meet our demand cleanly, in a way that’s more around the clock.”

— Michael Terrell, Senior Director for Energy and Climate at Google, to CNBC

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