The OpenArt Debate: Creativity vs. Content Saturation

0:00Today on the podcast, I want to talk about one of the most famous AI companies out there that is creating AI brain rot. And I think a bunch of interesting things we can learn about AI generated and AI generated tools based off of this company, which is sort of funny that I'll say it's a brain route company. I think they're actually doing a lot of interesting things, but that is how some people call them because of what some of their tools are capable of doing. So we'll get into all of that. Before we do, I wanted to mention if you want to try any of the AI models I mentioned on the podcast, I'd love for you to try out my own startup, which is called AIbox.ai.

0:34Essentially, you get access to the top 40 different AI models. and you can chat with them all in one place for one subscription of$20 a month. You can chat with different AI models in the same chat thread, switch between them, use image, audio, text, all of it in one place, and tons more models coming soon. So if you're interested, you can go check it out. There is a link in the description. All right, let's get into today's show, which is a company called OpenArt. Now, I think one thing that's interesting here, OpenArt, basically, we see these quote unquote brain rot videos everywhere. There's like, you know, you'll see like a video or a picture of a shark that's wearing sneakers and just, I don't know, like all sorts of ridiculous things, right?

1:17So these are the classic brain rot videos, which if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, I'm sharing my screen, you can see some examples of these videos. But otherwise, I think you get the picture. So people are making these and they're getting millions of views. I'm looking at TikTok right now, 2.2 million views, 22 ,000 views, 280 ,000 views, 33 ,000 views, 250 ,000 views, a lot of views for these quote unquote brain rot videos. Now, is this whole podcast about making brain rot videos and content? No. So this is the company behind basically most of these videos. But I think there's something much more interesting here and a tool that's much more interesting than it gets credit for.

1:56So OpenAR, oh, OpenArt was founded by two Google employees or former Google employees in 2022. So they actually have around 6 million monthly active users. So it's got a very big user base. I was surprised by their numbers. They also quoted their ARR, which they said they're about to reach about$20 million in annual recurring revenue. They so far have raised$5 million. They've raised it from basis set ventures and DCM ventures. They have positive cash flow. Overall, I think this is a really interesting company. And it's not even insanely expensive either. They have their most basic plan is$14 a month to get 4000 credits, which is up to four one click stories, 40 videos, 4000 images, like that's a lot, right 4000 images, I think for most of us, that's that could be a great deal.

2:43They have a$30 plan, they have a$56 plan, they have team plans, all that. So overall, I think the company structurally looks interesting. What they just launched that I think a lot of people are talking about right now is called a one-click story. So basically, this is the ability for you to upload a piece of text, an image, an element, some audio, and it will create a full video from it. So they're even saying like, this is great for making music videos. If you made a song, you could upload the song and it would create an entire music video with a whole story arc through it, making a video on here.

3:16Now, I think one of the main models I've seen mentioned on here is VO3. This is Google's newest, most famous video model, which is really good. I've tested it out at Google campus when it first came out. It's a great model. There's a couple other players that I think they have on the platform. I think they have about 50 different AI models that they use to generate their images and video. But this kind of one-click thing is really interesting. A lot of people are saying, oh, no, everyone's going to just use it for making more AI brain rot. But I actually think there's a ton of very interesting use cases where you can get videos made with just an image or just a prompt or just a concept.

3:55And basically, it will come out with that. So right now, that feature is in open beta. So basically, you can put a single sentence, a script, a song, it turns it into a video, So anything from a, you know, a lighthearted story for TikTok or some more, you know, serious content, like an explainer video, a music video for YouTube. I would imagine you could do something like, you know, an explanation of why your product is great when you upload a screenshot. I think there's like some very interesting business use cases. Open Art is basically hoping this feature is going to be used for advertising.

4:31So for making ads, and I can see this as a great use case where basically you take a picture of your product and you put a prompt in there and then you say, like, make a whole story about this product, right? You put in like a special kind of purse from your company and all of a sudden it's got a whole story about why this lady loves this purse and this whole, you know, emotional story. I mean, basically it's what ads are doing today, but they're just happening so fast and it's interesting that they're not just integrating the execution, but the creativity of a project in advertising like that, right?

5:01Like I think so often we think of, okay, like my background's in marketing And so like we think of, okay, like we have this product, we want to market it, someone's got to write a good script, they got to write a catchy thing. And then we move it over to like a protection company that's going to do all the production for it. This is like basically, I think for solo people for small companies, you just upload a picture and it creates the whole thing. I think this is really, really interesting. So there's three different templates you can choose from, you can do a with their with their like one click story thing, you can do a character vlog, You can do a music video or you can do an explainer.

5:33So for a character vlog, basically you can upload an image of the character and then you enter a prompt about what you want to basically happen, which I think is kind of interesting. If you upload a song, it basically understands the lyrics and it creates animations that align with the song's themes. So, you know, it would be illustrating like flowers blooming in a garden if the song is singing about that. So I think this is pretty interesting. as a side note as someone who my wife is a musician and has done a lot of work to promote her music recently and so she's actually experimented with doing things like running meta ads targeting people that are interested in your style of music towards your Spotify cam your Spotify artist page but making the meta ads is a lot of work to basically make all of the ad sets that you use to send people so anyways honestly a tool like this that creates some of those animated graphics that you basically put clips of your song up and then have some sort of animated graphic in the background and then a caption on there.

6:32I think a tool like this would be really, really cool for that. So you then are able to edit individual clips by going to they have something called the editor's storyboard mode, you can tweak your prompt if you want to refine your results a little bit. So they have a whole bunch of big tools, image and video tools on there that I think are really interesting. So overall, I'm really excited. I think a lot of people have kind of criticized when you're doing these video generation, like the the concerns around IP. I think their CEO talked about this specifically, he said, we try to be cautious around IP infringement.

7:09When you upload some IP characters, by default, the models we use will reject them. And it's not able to produce IP characters, but sometimes it slips. It's kind of interesting that a company like this doesn't have basically they put all of the liability onto the foundational models right they're like the models we use by default won't let you upload IP right like open AI and everybody else however it's interesting because them as a platform they don't have any way to screen or look at or stop that anyways I'm not criticizing that I just think that's an interesting thing you'll see with most of these AI companies they'll try to push the liability out to the to like the foundational model like oh yeah they don't accept this kind of content when it's i don't know it's just interesting it's uh it's the buck is getting passed for sure okay one thing that i do think is interesting um is basically the fact that open ai believes uh something that they think really sets them apart is that they can do character consistency this is something i remember when the first models the first image models came out of open ai my wife was like oh my gosh i'm gonna to make like these illustrated kids stories.

8:14I'm super excited. And she tried using them. And it was impossible to get a consistent character throughout any sort of a basically image model. And she gave up on that idea. And we've since moved on with our lives and have other things going on. So I don't know if that particular idea is going to get revisited anytime soon. Today, things like OpenAI, I think, and their GPT image generator is amazing because you could basically get it to generate an image of a character. You could upload a picture of that character and say, have this character doing XYZ things. So you basically can do the illustration for an entire book with a consistent character, I think through chat GPT that way.

8:49Open art also is able to do that. This is what they said about it, though. They said a problem that a lot of AI couldn't really handle well is to have a character consistent in the same video. If you don't have the same character, then it's hard to get immersed in the story. So this is something interesting, right? Basically, open AI solved that problem for images. And it looks like the next step is to solve this for video, which is really interesting. So I'll definitely keep you up to date on what they roll out. I think this is a very interesting tool worth trying if you're in the art space, if you create any sort of video, or even images, but really, I think this is a great video platform.

9:22Go try out OpenArt. Very interesting, not sponsored. I just think it's an interesting tool worth taking a look at. Thank you so much for coming over to the podcast today. I appreciate you guys tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to go check out AIbox.ai to try out all the latest AI models in one place. There's a link in the description and I'll catch you in the next episode.