The content industry is undergoing a major change. Are all the hits dependent on AI?

As AI develops beyond everyone's expectations, the trend of AIGC invading content is intensifying and will become one of the mainstream content production methods in the future. In this new era of enthusiasm, how is the content of public accounts backed by the national app WeChat performing? Let's follow the author to see how these content creators perform.

The speed of AI development is beyond everyone's expectation, and it seems to have come overnight. Whether it is a vane of capital, an auxiliary to life and work, a traffic outlet, or a topic of conversation after dinner, people have joined this trend without any prior agreement.

In addition to the fierce technological competition, the content field is also inevitably involved in the surging tide. The content of various carriers has been affected to varying degrees. AIGC (artificial intelligence technology generates content) has become a popular content production method after UGC (user-generated content) and PGC (professionally produced content).

As a new era begins, how is the content performance of public accounts backed by the national app WeChat?

1. AI painting is a basic skill to avoid copyright pitfalls

The "friendly" relationship between public accounts and AIGC began long before the current AI boom.

On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released and quickly took the world by storm.

Before that, on May 18, 2022, the well-known account "Caobian Wangshi" published an article titled "Today, I drew the title picture", and began to use AI to generate cover images and illustrations for public account articles.

Image source: "The past of the trough"

He Caitou, the author of "The Past at the Trough", described the incident this way:

"You may have noticed the title image of today's article. It is rough and strange, but it has an inexplicable vitality and a little familiar feeling. Because the artist is me. After many years, I can finally write a line of big words at the end of the copyright item of the public account article: Title image creator and Cai Tou."

Screenshot from "The Past at the Slot Edge"

In the article, he used the DALL·E mini AI painting tool. He input the description command "a big yellow tree in a blue lake, with white clouds in the sky, in the style of Van Gogh", and the AI ​​gave a series of results after 15 seconds of calculation.

At first, it was to avoid copyright issues, but after playing with it for two days, He Caitou was inspired by the amazing effect of AI painting and bought a high-performance machine to deploy a set of AI algorithms locally to create better paintings. So far, most of the title pictures and illustrations of "Caobian Wangshi" are created by He Caitou using AI tools.

Image source: "The past of the trough"

AIGC also has its own copyright advantages in combining with the platform’s gameplay. Before the Chinese New Year last year, the cover pictures of the articles of “Caobian Wangshi” were all unified into a rabbit style, and after receiving the reward for making red envelope covers, AI was used to create various rabbit images to generate red envelope covers to give back to fans.

In addition, He Caitou also prepared other pictures for fans to generate their own red envelope covers, and even attached a "Copyright Notice" to reduce possible copyright disputes.

Looking through the historical news of "Caobian Past", you can feel that He Caitou's proficiency in using AI painting tools is increasing day by day, his painting style is becoming richer and richer, and the details of the pictures are becoming more and more refined.

He Caitou does not use a specific AI painting tool. There are many AI painting tools both at home and abroad, such as famous ones such as DALL·E, Disco Diffusion, Midjourney, and less famous ones such as CogView, all of which have a signature place at the end of the article.

In recent articles, Midjourney is the main force, and the version is updated in real time. He Caitou also added an AI painting column at the end of the article to show the results of his creation.

In addition to "Caobian Wangshi", many accounts have also begun to use related design techniques. For example, Baidu and other companies have been keen on reporting the results of AI big models this year, and the pictures accompanying articles on their official public accounts have naturally become a window to show their technical level.

Image source: Baidu

When content entrepreneurs repeatedly fall into traps due to image copyright issues, the emergence of AI painting is undoubtedly a godsend. In the application of cover images with less stringent requirements, AI-created images are obviously sufficient and can indeed avoid copyright issues to a certain extent.

It is worth noting that the application and influence of AIGC do not stop there.

2. WeChat content ecosystem can all be AI-enabled

In the content industry, pictures are just one of the carriers, and AI painting tools are just the tip of the iceberg of AI applications.

Taking another well-known account "Liu Run" as an example, we put AIGC into the entire WeChat content ecosystem - in addition to using AI robots to find topic entry points and search for case materials during the content creation process, what else can AI do for different forms of content?

In terms of graphics and text, Liu Run, who previously rarely included pictures due to copyright and matching issues, has improved the visual beauty of his articles after using a third-party AI painting tool.

Image source: "Liu Run" (West Lake Xinchen Mini Program)

In dynamic forms such as audio and short videos, Liu Run's AI attempts began last year, focusing on feeding past materials to reproduce twin digital humans and text-driven audio generation. At present, the oral videos in Liu Run's video account of the same name are basically completed by digital humans, and the beginning of these videos are marked with the words "Part of this video was produced using AI technology."

According to the information revealed by the "Liu Run" team in an interview with "Jianshi", they used to shoot once a week, which took at least 2 hours each time and published 6-7 videos a week. After using digital humans, they can publish about 10 videos a week, which saves a lot of communication and shooting costs and improves content production efficiency.

In addition, AI can also be used in private domain operations.

The "Liu Run" team has been testing the "Xiao Run Zong" robot combined with ChatGPT to answer a large number of consulting questions from community users and free up the time of operations staff.

Under the "Liu Run" monetization model that focuses on knowledge payment, the team uses public account articles, Liu Run's books, and related questions and answers to train the AI ​​robot's corpus, trying to let the robot be responsible for answering basic general questions, and let real teachers answer more professional questions, thereby improving the efficiency of students and teachers.

However, they also said in the interview that although the feedback was good, the more realistic problem was that the cost of using ChatGPT was high, "about 1,000 times that of traditional search engines. Only after calculating the input-output ratio can it be truly put into actual scene applications."

Image source: "Liu Run" (West Lake Xinchen Mini Program)

Obviously, the possibilities of AI applications are very imaginative. When applied to the WeChat content ecosystem and even the entire content industry, it can become the butterfly that stirs up a tsunami.

3. Is AIGC’s invasion of the content industry a fresh spring or a strong rival?

The public's perception of the level of AI development comes from the information they receive.

When every account is writing about AI, the technology account is writing about how great AI technology is, the consumer account is writing about how cool the brand's metaverse and AI products are, and the media account's headline is "AI will replace all walks of life". Therefore, AI is a hot new thing in the minds of the public, and AI content is everywhere.

In fact, there are two levels of content here: one is content with AI as the theme, and the other is content generated by AI. The former is the content that keeps pace with the times, and the latter is the change of technology, namely AIGC.

At present, there are not many creators who have truly turned AIGC into a daily content production method and have notified users of it. Whether it is because they are worried that fans will think AIGC is perfunctory or because AI applications are not yet mature and costly at this stage, more creators use AI as inspiration for selecting topics or as a drawing tool.

But there is no doubt that AIGC has invaded and gradually surrounded the content industry.

The B station UP host "Storyteller Yuan" used SoVits AI to assist in creating a series of stand-up crosstalk works, with the highest number of views reaching 276,000.

There are also many UP hosts like "-AIas" who use AI secondary creation to produce video content. The video he released, "AI Makes You Feel Different MV", has been played over a million times and received 29,000 likes.

From AI drawing, to many creators trying to use AI to create articles, to using AI to drive one-click generation of audio and video, although AI applications have not yet fully become daily content production tools, their scope of influence is visibly expanding.

This trend is driven not only by the changing times but also by the impetus from content platforms and technology providers.

Currently, the competition between content platforms has reached a stalemate and needs to be injected with new vitality. AIGC is the traffic eye that is expected by many. Therefore, Baijiahao vigorously promotes the "AI Co-creation Plan", Bilibili launches the "Virtual Voice Creation Plan", and AI Stefanie Sun is popular all over the Internet, all of which are microcosms of the approach of AIGC.

As a technology provider, the current large models have begun to roll out vertical segmentation functions. Baidu Wenxin Yiyan continues to strengthen its Chinese comprehension capabilities, iFlytek Spark's assistant center has more than 200 categories, and the newly released 360 Zhinao boasts its multimodal capabilities. In short, it constantly emphasizes to users that using its own AI, you can achieve the freedom of one-click content creation in minutes.

The progress of the times is irreversible, and the trend of AIGC invading content will only intensify, and it will inevitably become one of the mainstream content production methods in the future. The unpredictable future is temporarily put aside. At this stage, AIGC is a new development period for content creators. It is difficult to increase the efficiency of reading volume, but changing the idea to reduce operating costs may be feasible.

As content creators, we should embrace AI instead of going against the tide. Although there is a threshold for early learning, didn’t we also publish content on various platforms bit by bit in the past?

Author: Chen Chumu

Source: WeChat public account "Weiguojiang (ID: wjam123456)"