it was about a guy who needed to make content for "National Avocado Day" despite thinking it was a fake and bullshit thing. he AI generated a script, stumbled over the words despite reading off an autoprompter, then was able to use transcript-based video editing tools to crop that bit out. it was a good ad - it felt vaguely relatable, it demonstrated the way the tools worked, it did some work in terms of framing the shots to make a guy sitting in a chair using a mobile phone look somewhat dynamic.
and it definitely struck me that it was an advert for Vimeo specifically. Vimeo used to have a brand for being the place where the good & cool video content went. the stuff that was well considered & had had serious time spent on it, not the content churn of YouTube. i understand they did not make much money from that, and have since pivoted to making tools, doing video hosting, generally providing "solutions". and the tools demonstrated in this ad were good! i mean, not so keen on the text generation part, but i can see the use of it, and the other parts are, while not groundbreaking, genuinely useful parts of a workflow. i guess this is their new business model filtering through to consumers, and while i'm pretty sad that the part of their business which supported genuinely interesting culture is dying, i can understand it in terms of business case.
but.
it really does strike me how the thing that is being sold here is content that no-one wants to watch, not even the person creating it. it's "content" in it's purest sense, something that fills up space, something that happens on a schedule, something that fills time but does not necessarily convey value. like "bullshit" as defined by Harry Frankfurt, content may possess value (convey meaning, express emotion, be a genuine creative act, etc), or it may not - the characteristic of content is not the absence of value but the way in which value's presence is entirely optional. spam and poetry on an equal footing.
and that's the usecase for AI tools - when you are expected to say something, but you don't especially care about what you are saying. the appearance of effort (a person being friendly and personable, talking about avocados!) but the effort is entirely in the appearance.
