Is Generative AI the Junk Food of Content?

The content of the water hose overfloweth. According to various estimates, every day about 4.5 million blog posts are published on WordPress. Additionally, more than 500 million tweets are sent each day on Twitter (subject to change based on the variable X), and more than 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Video is now responsible for more than 50% of all Internet content.

Generative AI’s raison d'être, at least for the moment, is to help us produce all of this stuff even faster. But is snackable content just digital junk food? After living in the trenches with Generative AI for the past 6 months, we’re realizing that AI might be better at cutting and snipping than creating.?

Will fast food AI churn out better content? The jury’s still out. But it might get watched more if it’s shorter. According to Pex, around 90% of videos people upload on their YouTube channels never reach 1,000 views. For a video-sharing site that gets more than 5 billion views daily, that’s a lot of under-consumed content.

What’s new in the world of fast-food Generative AI? For academics and academic wannabes, there’s PaperTalk.io. Astoundingly, it will take an inscrutable academic paper (I believe academics are secretly paid by the word) and provide a really solid summary. Here’s an example showing how it took a full-length academic paper, shrunk it to size, and even included an audiobook-like transcript for read-a-phobics.?

Then there’s what Axios calls “smart brevity.” Axios began its life as a daily email newsletter to provide a summary of top news stories from around the world in a quickly digestible format. It named its particular writing formula Smart Brevity. Now Axios has codified “Smart Brevity” into a Axios HQ, a commercial AI that helps us all be brief and to the point. You enter an outline of what you’d like to say and Axios HQ does the rest. HQ is big on bullet points, headlines, subheads, and underscoring what’s important for the reader. Good for PR, HR, and corporate team members who want their communications read and not deleted. Pricing is based on the organization's size and (sigh) there is no free trial.

For video, it’s the same story. Cut that CEO’s 45-minute speech down to a digestible series of bullet points. Or cut a 45-minute webinar down to a quick snack break. Our latest faves in this booming category are Vidyo and Opus. Both get Ph.D.s in taking a long-form video and finding the most salient parts.?

Conor Eliot, Head of Creator of Partnerships at Opus, told me that even his own team was surprised at the enthusiasm of the corporate world about Opus. The AI was designed with creators in mind but quickly found a need to cut video in so many different instances, from real estate to product launches.?Both programs have different approaches and features but basically, they ingest a long video and chop them up into juicy parts.