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- Hacker News
- Link goes to a page with a minimal hint and a video.
Their blog post has some detail: https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/pomelli/
Kagi said the "Key features and functionalities of Pomelli include:
Content Generation: Pomelli can generate various marketing assets such as social posts and ad creatives by analyzing a company's website to understand its brand identity Brand DNA: The tool builds a "Business DNA" from a company's website to ensure generated content is consistent with the brand's identity Campaign Creation: It aims to generate entire on-brand marketing campaigns with minimal user input Editable Assets: The generated campaign assets are editable Canva Alternative: Pomelli is positioned as a competitor to design tools like Canva"by WarOnPrivacy - Is Google going to put all of its API users out of business?
Seems like Google will kill a whole bunch of SaaS companies with this.
by echelon - I've heard of a little cost cutting at Canva. Some point to a possible IPO next year. But also I wonder if AI generally and products like this are causing increased competition.by emmelaich
- OK, we'll put that link at the top and https://labs.google.com/pomelli/about/ in the toptext. Thanks!by dang
- The whole (original) premise of social media was "let's make a more human side of our business so that people can connect with us". Now we've come full circle where the robots are making all the social content and increasingly the robots are the ones consuming it too.
Weird, uncanny valley times. And, FWIW, not times I want anything to do with, hence why I've been off all social media for years now...
by dmje - Hacker News is social media too.by rgblambda
- I'm so dead do all this generic hype lexicon: unlock, supercharge, revamp, disrupt etc, etc.by Oarch
- On multiple levels; a snake eating its tail.by wewtyflakes
- May it gnaw itself down for good.by wartywhoa23
- Suspicious-me is wondering how Google are going to treat AI generated marketing slop created using Pomelli differently to slop created with other tools (or even human created marketing content) in search ranking?
If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.
They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.
In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.
Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.
Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.
(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
by bigiain - the way it will work is ai slop will rank high, and pomelli will generate the best ai slop.by blazespin
- sounds really illegal and unlikelyby hhh
- I doubt Pomelli would get ranked higher. Google biases ads to their highest spenders. The more you spend, the better your ads perform. Nobody using something like Pomelli is giving Google enough money to rank highly. They could outrank the very lowest spenders, namely scammers and dropshippers whose ads are already AI slop anyway. But, really, who cares?by ryukoposting
- They are going all in on tolerating third party AI slop on Youtube. That feels like an executive decision at this point.
Guessing: because they have AI products in the pipeline that can create Youtube shorts or similar.
This aspect will be interesting to watch.
Edit: Youtube Premium should include an optional AI slop filter.
by lysace - Google actually doesn't give a single flying fuck about AI slop because they produce it themselves and believe AI slop will feed their quarters going forward.
They sometimes pretend to care but not really. You can already stuff Google Merchant full of ai-generated slop images that have little to do with how an actual product looks like and that's something they could easily control if they wanted... but do they? Nah, they're going the other way, creating shit like Product Studio and that's just the beginning.
Make no mistake, Google is going all in on slop - search, ads, youtube, merchant, workspace, cloud, everything
by Culonavirus - I doubt that the product folks over at Google overseeing an experimental project like this have such outsized influence over something core like the ads engineby aster0id
- Probably good for mom and pop shops, and super useful for someone who has a couple of restaurant locations or a few small grocery stores. I know a lot of places don't update their IG or whatever with specials for the week or basically anything because it's time and effort, if someone was running a campaign for a week of say a free side with a burger, but wanted to do a different side every day you could pick for free, you could churn stuff like that out super fast with this.
I tried it. I used it first for my stuff and thought wow I'd never use this for my stuff, but my stuff isn't a mom and pop burger joint with the kids working on weekend etc, I will show it to the lady who has the pho shop next door, maybe she will update her IG with her specials more often than "whenever I remember".
by neom - 2 min tl;dr video by Culture Kings (streetwear brand) founderby nomilk
- Now google can sell you the AI that will design the ads for you that you will pay Google to serve. So nice of them.
Still waiting for the AI LLM based ad autobidder so that I can just plug a machine to Google and press the "give them all my money" button.
by vasco - Seeing a lot of "I'm an AI skeptic and <insert praise for new Google product>" highly upvoted in this thread.by rgblambda
- Yes, that triggers my template detector as well.by wartywhoa23
- I’ve been thinking long and hard about how AI could disrupt the field of ads creative, because a significant part of my income is tied to motion design applied to html5 banner campaigns for large companies in Europe.
What I see is that clients that invest in a campaign do not want to think about what an AI can produce. They don’t want to interact or brief an AI, they don’t want to do feedback rounds with an AI. They want a group of professionals that knows them to take over and do it all. If the professionals then use some AI for it, they mostly don’t care.
This is true so far for any campaign that allocates relevant funds (mid 5 figures and upwards). When it comes to the actual creation phase, right now AI is fundamentally immature and incapable of being controlled past the creation of static content.
All the motion and animation part for example is still somehow terra incognita for these tools. Take Adobe Animate, which is the go-to tool for anything 2D-animation, or Google Web Designer. Zero AI-features, simply because you can’t LLM frame by frame animations and have a result that is as precise as you need it. Or maybe you can, but for some reason these companies don’t see a business case for allocating resources to this specific development.
These tools can be great for smaller business that won’t have access to large campaigns, but as someone else mentioned, why do that when hiring a working gen-z social media native student will cost you slightly more, and possibly perform 100-times better with their native social media aesthetic?
Ps: Pomelli means door handles in Italian, and that’s… weird? Feels like a name randomly regurgitated by an LLM as well.
- This is depressing. We are already meat in the google ad-serving machine that tracks us, profiles us, gives us "free" stuff (gmail, anyone?) in order to feed us advertising.
Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.
by jwr - People can choose to not consume crap they don’t need. They won’t, but they can.
Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.
I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.
The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
by nkrisc - > The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine.
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population? (the owners of AI hardware and software)
by Culonavirus - Personally I'm okay with that as it weakens the argument that ads are content, a dubious argument often used by ad companies.by realusername
- A Modest Proposal:
We set all our servers to listen on port 4443, and walk away from the whole sorry mess.
Make it all again from scratch. Block whole swathes of IP ranges known to belong to FAANG.
- I don't know, I feel like it will help smaller businesses without a budget for a designer or even design taste compete with larger companies.
Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field
by bko - I’ve seen many small businesses do well on TikTok and Instagram by eschewing all fancy graphics and technology, and just talking into their phone’s camera like a normal person. “Hey I’m Joe, I just opened a cafe down here. It’s always been my dream, etc.” The more quirky and human the video, the better it does.
I know this new tool looks to be for static graphics; but I do think the same thing applies. Not using AI-generated polished graphics will become a differentiator.
by keiferski - I'm sure that's the kind of content AI will excel at creating.by EnPissant