Is This AI The End Of Content Creators?

some people are losing their minds because the video below would be AI generated I'm also a deep fake and you should take care when you watch a video on the internet in this video of emerging founders with manav we will be interviewing lus he's a founder of argil AI and they're building AI avatars that look insanely human likee he's one of the most interesting people I've actually talked to because he was a filmmaker he's really good at fundraising and he's also got into y combinator so he tells me all these stories in the podcast and check this video out this is an actual video made by aril it's going to blow your mind I'm a deep fake version of Zuck made by argil Ai and I'm truly convinced that we need to raise the awareness of people in the [Music] internet I'm really excited to have you on the show L this cuz I really want to use your product for myself thank you for having me met up so you're one of those multifaceted people who has kind of like proven himself in multiple domains you were in the movie industry you've helped Founders raise a lot of money you've actually hired a lot of Engineers you've joined by combinator so I feel like it's very interesting to talk to people like you because you're not only building but you're like doing many different interesting things so how did you get here like how did you get into so many interests yeah I think there's a Common Thread and what I've always been doing is storytelling I think both building a startup getting clients is telling a story about a product and solving problem that they need I think both the creative work I've been doing like writing a novel doing movies it's also about telling a story very compelling Story how do you do that even helping Founders fundraise so that was the first master class I did in the 2020 I think it's also when you help founder raise money is you help him basically craft a story for the investors for them to follow them and believe in them so I think the Common Thread is I've always revolved around storytelling but there's many ways to tell a story either it can be by building something or just like actually writing something and so I've always managed to SP my time in order to really for example my novel I wrot a science fiction novel it took me 9 months but I only that I'm not the kind of person that would be able to like have hard days of work and come back home and then write be in that mindset so I always managed to really take my time to have hard focused periods of at least a couple of months two years on different projects which is the case today with what we're doing at at Aral but also I think there's a period between your 18 to maybe 30 something years old where the cost of opportunity is super low for trying stuff and when I was very young one my my goals was like by 30 I'll retire and be a millionaire and then it really evolved in my FES because I was like at this time I can work hard but I can also do a bunch of stuff that I may not have the energy at a time to do later today and this involves creative projects like writing a book or doing a movie is stuff that you don't necessarily have enough time or energy to do later in your life so I think making the most of that period in your life is super important okay so I want to know the founding story of arill and what problem are you solving so since I've been doing a lot of video content for the past years either Super Creative like when I was working on my movie but also as I said video Master Class and Tik Tok accounts the big issue with video is always the production cost it's when you think about it it's it's a very elite media meaning it's super expensive to get into video regardless of what you're doing not even going to talk about like Hollywood or TV channels but even any YouTuber with a sizable audience will spend a lot of money doing YouTube videos so it's not that easy to get into video cameras lighting you need to know either to know to have enough money to pay for post production and editing and video ended up being the only Market where you cannot run a lot of experiments because whatever you do is so expensive that it has to work and if it doesn't work you'll have to just abandon it or take the loss so we were working on a bunch of AI projects about a year and a half ago and then at some point it became kind of obvious that the biggest problem I wanted to solve for myself was actually how do I make more Tik Tok videos and more educational videos without spending too much money and so we decided to dig on that model we looked at the market we saw that in the market some players were doing avatars but mostly for use cases for example Enterprise Learning and we're super focused on how like my goal was always avatars are not only going to stick for internal use cases for Enterprise clients and corporates they're going to be used as well ultimately for social media and at some point in the future it will make no sense to pay for $5,000 camera if you can actually generate the exact same content by typing it on a platform and so when you go far enough in the future and you know this is going to happen inevitably you can backtrack to what we're doing to today is like how do we build the first foundations of this Tech and the platform to get there first of all I'm really bullish on this idea again like there's a lot of people who also find downsides in this like oh we're replacing humans and some companies will think of it as like oh we're not even going to hire creators we'll just use avatars to pump these shortform content but I obviously think we're still going to need humans by the way these companies do not spend money to do video what I mean by this is from my my lessons is that nobody is replacing anyone because those that never did videos start doing video with avatars but would not have the budget to pay for normal videos and the ones that already do video usually just enhance their workflow so so far I think it's more job trading than job destructing so a little bit context for the people watching there are current tools like haen and Synthesia but they're targeting more Enterprise companies and their avatars they look very robotic but what laus has built with aril I was actually shocked when I first saw it because it just looks very organic I kind of want to know how did you achieve that cuz that's like really impressive yeah I think one of the things you know when you start a company is what kind of Secrets do you have about an industry I think within the companies you cited a lot of these Founders are really really good technical profiles I do think however that none of them were content creators before starting that endeavor so I guess it's more of it's not so much of a technological breakthrough as in an approach that we decided to have that avatars little to be good enough to crack views and likes and subscribers on social media so everything like every decision will make will be done in that sense so that's why in the choice of avatars in the features that we have for example you can manage body language body movements and and and like you can say hello and all these and even on the way our editor work which goal is really to generate a fully edited video in like 2 minutes with captions and backgrounds and whatever this whole flow was thought on I want a performing video at the end and so it's a bunch of different components essentially okay so I actually have used the product I know how the setup Works can you explain how a person can sign up on arill and how long does it take from the start process to like get their Avatar up and going yeah so it depends on the grade of the Avatar that you want like what I mean by this is content creators that are already doing content at a good grade have the material have all the setup will spend maybe one or two hours doing like really an absolutely perfect Flawless Avatar because they they want to replace their real self by their Avatar and so it has to be really really good uh so well they will basically you try to have the same setup than the actual videos they do they will do every body language gesture and the training videos so it's reflected on the Avatar but I would say for the average person that just wants their avatar for any use case you really need 3 minutes of of you speaking to the camera with a decent lighting and a decent decent sound you can do two or three versions of your avatar by the way if you want like different outfits or different backgrounds but in general the process from start to end if you start from scratch it can be like 20 to 30 minutes to have the first avatar training on the platform and then it takes us a couple of hours to train the Avatar once you have it a video will take like a couple of minutes to be generated will you guys be integrating The Voice model inside the software or would you have to be always has to do it separately on your 11 lab so right now you can generate like the whole package on the platform if you have an 11 La account with specific voices that you want to use you can plug it to arel in the future we'll probably do our own model but right now it's very convenient to use it apps because they have all the languages already supported I am really excited to see how you guys progress because this is a big challenge you know cuz filming every day it's such an inconvenience like you have to set up so many things it's so time consuming and a lot of people like just that technical barrier can make them like overwhelmed or they'll procrastinate or theyve not post that inconsistency will be the reason they quit because they burn out and they don't see the results but we all know like podcasting YouTube Tik Tok Instagram is such a long-term game exactly Mr be he didn't see results for like 7 years imagine if Mr bees quit he would not be like the world's biggest Creator right now so it's great that you guys are building this I want you to talk about like what's the next thing for arjel like what are you guys focused on and have you guys already like gone to the market is it like still in the P stage like where are you guys right now yeah right now the platform is live we have already a lot of users a lot of PID clients ranging anywhere from a couple dozens of bucks a month to thousands of dollars a month depending on the size because we have an API that people can use for high volume use cases there are a lot of use cases that demand the API a good example is a job board that wants to transform every one of their job offerings into a video High scale the vision I have is in the future creating a video needs to be as easy as tweeting essentially because if we want to attract a new generation of content creators that were so far not willing to do video because of the effort because they don't like what they look like in front of a camera or for several reasons but they would use any other platform like LinkedIn or Twitter just to create content because there's not this barrier we want to remove that barrier to make basically video as easy to do as any of these so the goal is keep doing a model that is more and more realistic and keep doing the platform to creates and pre-edit videos that are going to perform on social media and have this social Loop this Loop up I create a video on the platform I post it I'm getting a bunch of likes ideally in the future we'll track the data of all of that to help you like draft videos longterm we want the platform to be an assistant as well what content do you want to exist I mean the way I see it is in like 2 years the average local plumier Carpenter is going to take a picture of work he just did and it's going to be posted on all social media because it's going to be a really cool video generated and it's going to bring in like local clients so I see that as every want we have an incentive to create video and we want to help people do that okay so this is kind of like a question I'm guessing you think about a lot but how are people going to differentiate is there going to be a watermark situation on videos in the future I mean cuz it's not just your platform there's so many now ai generated video platforms like how are we going to differentiate in the future or is there going to be a need for that or no so if how we're going to predict what's going to happen I would say that for the next 2 to 3 years will'll need to water my mark videos because we're still at a stage where people feel cheated and away when it's an amatar most of the work I'm doing is try to explain people that I'm not cheating anyone I'm still doing the content I'm just saving energy on actually filming myself energy and money but at the end of the day I'm trying to bring as much value as I would if I had filmed myself so we need to go through that stage but I think especially because the new generations are much more comfortable with AI avatars and AI in general I would imagine that in 3 to four years the need for water marks will just disappear because I think the audience will not care whether the content is a or not and I'm pretty sure this is going to apply to any everything I 100% agree with that I think AI is just raising the bar the quality we look for and it's so funny right now if there's a bunch of ads that were created just by AI they're actually outperforming the human ones because they stand out more which is like in my opinion crazy I was actually going to ask you to make a prediction but you already kind of did so I'm really happy about that but yeah thank you so much for coming on the episode I really appreciate your time I know you're extremely busy person and I really appreciate you coming on the show and like giving your thoughts I think there's a lot of of nuggets in the podcast and yeah I'm really excited and rooting for you guys cuz the quality is impressive there's no other company that's doing this with the level of quality you guys are doing and it seems to be on like a great trajectory so I'm rooting for you guys thanks a lot manav thank you lus see you soon