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Toys "R" Us launches generative AI video ad · Kvetch & Release

• 0:20
  Hey, we're back, folks. John Leckey here on a M eight hundred
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  c k l W. I hope the morning's going well. Eleven eleven if
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  you're one of those folks, will make a wish right now. While the
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  numbers are all the same as across the clock. Really interesting new advertisement marketing
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  campaign that's out. Toys r S launched it. It's uh, you know
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  what, why don't we take a listen to it before we dive into what
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  makes it very interesting? You'll hear it's got a real small town feel.
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  Toys r S put this out. Toys r U S put this out.
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  Well, you know what, while we're trying to get this up on the
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  system right now, now, let's bring in Carmie Levy. Who is it?
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  You never wonder how Toys r US and Jeffrey the Giraft came to be
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  the son of a bike shop owner, Charles Lazarus had a vision that would
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  go on to change toy stores forever. To watch the full story, go
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  to toysars dot com Slash studios. So the ad there you can't see it
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  obviously live on the air right now here on the radio, but what it
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  included was a small Town toy store. Someone walking down the street, they
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  walk into it. It's a small child and they've got wonderment and just amazement
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  in their eyes. And the toy store is filled with every piece of history,
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  historic toys going back fifty years, and it's showcasing the start of toys
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  r US. What makes it unique is that it was created entirely without any
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  videographer, without a production team on site, without an audio team on site,
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  without a site whatsoever. Quite frankly, it was entirely created with artificial
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  intelligence. I find that absolutely amazing and I want to talk about that right
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  now with Carmie Levy, who is CTV tech expert. Karmi, how you
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  doing. Oh? I am good, although more than a little rattled after
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  watching that thing. Holy that is that's some second level, next level AI
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  kind of level creepiness. And in all honesty, I'm I'm used to it.
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  You know, we've seen image generators and video generators at work before,
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  but you know, now that it's starting to move into the mainstream, it's
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  hitting screens that we would normally watch. We're going to be seeing them on
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  TV, seeing them online. It's really starting to hit hit home. It's
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  no longer theoretical. This is real and honestly, it's like seeing clowns in
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  the middle of the night. It's the stuff a nightmares. There is something
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  very unsettling about the idea that it was generated based off of not you know,
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  of course, there was the prompt that made it and then I imagine
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  a little bit of touch up here or there. But it looks very real.
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  I mean, there's image that it centers around a young boy who is
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  probably around nine years old, and he's got red hair, and you know,
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  his appearance changes a little bit in the different shots as you go through
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  it, but not enough that I think the average person would be able to
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  discern that. What do you think, Karmie No. I mean, you
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  know, we're the factors. We're advertising to kids, and kids aren't really
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  going to be looking that closely. So so for them it's good enough.
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  You know, buy me a toy, mom and dad, and you know,
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  mission accomplished. But I think if you lean in and you look closely,
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  you do sort of see the limits of the tools that they are using.
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  Sora, which was a video generator product that was released a few months
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  ago. Buy open Ai, the same company that brought US jack GBT,
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  and at the time that they launched it, they had some demo videos that
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  they showed and it's not available to the public yet. It's still being experimented
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  with by beta testers, industry insiders, and obviously to US is partnering with
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  them to use it. But the output is it's close enough, and in
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  many cases their level of realism is kind of shocking, and it can create
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  pretty impressive looking videos up to about a minute in length. No audio yet,
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  so that audio was clearly generated in some other way and then spliced in.
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  But you know, it shows just how far this technology has come so
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  quickly and how relatively easy it is to create that kind of synthetic asset without
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  having to hire an actor, build a set, pull out a camera,
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  hire producers and camera people, and you don't need to do any of that.
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  As long as you know how to prompt a tool, you can keep
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  prompting it until it gives you what you want, Splice them all together,
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  and voil, you've got an ad or a short or a movie or whatever
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  it is that you want to share with people. So maybe it'll sell toys,
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  but also maybe it'll throw an election. And it just shows us how
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  realistic this stuff is, and quite frankly, it's kind of frightening well talking
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  about the very practical implications of it. If we're able to see a Toys
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  r US AD, that's one thing. Again, I might go spend fifty
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  bucks and get my niece met my nephew something. But there's a real issue
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  here that if someone puts out a damaging fake video that actually looks like,
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  let's say, Joe Biden engaging in very blatant racism against a specific group or
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  anything, quite frankly, that could sway votes. We're talking about changing the
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  course of not only politics, but potentially our collective history as a result of
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  artificial intelligence. You know, the fact that this is all happening right as
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  we get ready for the big debate in the US, right, which you
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  were talking about just before, I think is ironic is that, you know,
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  we're assuming that when we watch the CNN show tonight that it will be
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  Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and they're humans and nothing is synthetic and nothing
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  is tech driven. And I think we can reasonably assume that will be the
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  case. But what about the things that we see in our social media feeds
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  We've already seen tools like soa other video generator apps being used to create synthetic
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  assets, in some cases made to look like Donald Trump was being arrested or
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  Joe Biden was doing something unseemly on a Washington street, and so you know
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  until that is proven to be false. In other words, if you see
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  it on your social media feed, but you don't see the correction, you
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  don't see the label, assuming there is even a label, and then you
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  believe that that particular politician has done something terrible, so you switch your vote.
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  It's kind of terrifying to think the level of misinformation and disinformation possible with
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  tools that allow us to create frighteningly realistic video depicting anything we want. And
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  so if you want the election to go one way, go ahead and use
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  a tool like Sora to do just that, and there are no controls over
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  any of this. It's one thing to sell toys to kids. It's quite
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  another to move an election, bring down a company a company, bring down
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  an individual, slander that individual. It is all incredibly possible, and the
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  tools are developing so quickly, much more quickly than the protections that we need
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  to protect us against the kinds of abuses that we're talking about here. You
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  know, traditionally, if you were going to make an ad like this Toys
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  RS one that came out, it would probably be a four to six month
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  process from inception to approval, to production to editing, to pushing it out
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  and buying the ads and then getting it onto the screens. It was just
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  a couple months ago that this entire program was released and this video is now
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  out. That how quickly it's moving is truly staggering. I don't know if
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  it is surprising, quite frankly, because there's obviously billions of dollars being pumped
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  into this, and so much of it has been done behind the scenes because
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  it wasn't really none of this has been released to the public until it's been
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  trickling out with chat GPT three to start, and now here we are so
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  much just getting ready for a public release. But things are moving very very
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  fast. It makes me wonder, you know, what is this all going
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  to look like? Dare I say two years from now? We're already starting
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  to see the effect of that. I mean, Microsoft invested thirteen billion dollars
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  in open Ai, which is generating this technology, creating it for a reason,
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  because that thirteen billion dollars will obviously multiply allow it to create this kind
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  of opportunity in the market, drive AI into the very core of all of
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  its products, and hopefully remain relevant long after we bought our last copy of
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  Office. But you know the scary thing here is we're already seeing the impact.
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  Just after Sora was released. Tyler Perry, you know the movie Mogul,
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  He had plans to build an extension to his huge studios just outside Atlanta,
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  and he was going to spend eight hundred million dollars on it. And
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  he saw the demos from this new tool and he was so shaken by it.
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  He put those those investment plans on holy said, I don't need stages,
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  I don't need cameras, I don't need producers. I don't need to
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  go out into the field schedule a shoot. I can just do it all
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  in AI while I spend the money. And he did so, and he
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  went public in doing so because he wanted to illustrate the disruptive capabilities of these
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  technologies. And we can't stop it. We can't put the genie back in
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  the bottle, but we can certainly talk about the impact that it's going to
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  have on entire industries. The Hollywood, the writers and actor strikes from last
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  year, they revolved around artificial intelligence, and they fought for protections against having
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  their jobs essentially rendered obsolete. How do we ensure that this technology is allowed
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  to develop responsibly while we protect industries from being completely decimated in the process.
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  We don't have answers to that, but we really need to need to be
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  having those conversations. So the average age of an elected official is like over
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  the age of fifty for the most part, not the most tech prone or
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  keeping up to date on these things. If you had five minutes, no,
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  actually, let's do this. If you had thirty seconds with a elected
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  official who was in charge of introducing legislation to deal with this, why is
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  this all as important as it is? First thing is because if we don't
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  technology always disrupts. That's just the way it is. But if you don't
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  control that disruption, you end up with destruction without replacing it with something that's
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  even better. And so you know my answer to that, or is I
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  would tell a politician, now, either you understand what change this is going
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  to drive through society, and you commit yourself to protecting your constituents from the
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  worst of those abuses, or you find someone else to replace you. And
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  as a voter, we need to find representatives who elect us, and we
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  have an election coming up next year. What better opportunity. Make sure that
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  they're savvy with technology, and if they're not, they should not get our
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  vote. We need folks who get this technology, not who folks who say
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  the Internet is a series of twos, because we remember that that didn't get
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  us any any you know, didn't get us any further at the time.
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  We need folks who get AI. Otherwise it's just going to be one disaster
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  after another, you know, whenever a new industry becomes of course, as
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  you said, there is that disruption, just as when the automobile came rendered
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  the buggy whips salesman irrelevant entirely, and many would have screamed that, you
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  know, that's a huge problem, and it was. It displaced a lot
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  of workers, but it also innovated and pushed us forward. I'm sure that
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  you're still optimistic that AI will have benefits for us, though aside from these
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  potential concerns, absolutely AI is already the unico field for example, to identify
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  disease as years before than would otherwise be possible. For example, Alzheimer's.
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  AI can detect and diagnose Alzheimer's now seven years before current approaches current processes,
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  which means we can actually get help for Alzheimer's patients now because using current diagnostics,
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  by the time we figure it out, it's too late. So it
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  will revolutionize life. What we need to do, though, is identify those
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  use cases. In other words, what bets should we be making to take
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  advantage of the sheer capabilities of AI to build those new new industries, next
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  generation in the industries and capabilities so that we're ready for it and we can
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  capture all of the value in it. Much like at the time when a
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  horse and buggy was prevalent, if we had a government that said, oh,
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  I understand that the you know, the car industry is going to replace
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  this, So now we need to build roads. We need to have tax
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  breaks for factories, we need to build industry. We need to create rules
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  around workers and factories and assembly lines. Have that forward look, have that
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  conversation. Have people who see the opportunity and understand how to transition from today
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  tomorrow. That's who I want representing me. That's where I want crafting the
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  laws that ensure that we can ride that technological wave. Well, hey,
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  just from me to you, maybe consider putting your hat in the ring because
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  your streets ahead of most people who are in the House of Commons right now.
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  Quite frankly, when it comes to this stuff, Karmie, you're always
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  the expert that I go to to chat about this, not only because it's
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  fun, but because of how knowledgeable you are. Thank you so much for
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  your time today. Really appreciating here, John, Thank you, cheers.
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  Karmie Levy is a CTV tech expert. What do you think about this?
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  Are you concerned about AI? Do you like it? Are? What are
• 12:54
  your thoughts? Let us know call or text us five one nine seven nine
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  to two cklwack after this