Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

AIGC tuyere swept down, find the right scene can quickly become popular.

After painting, AI set his sights on "memes".

In the last week of 2022, an App named Memix-Chat with Meme soon topped the iOS free list in the United States, which undoubtedly added another fire to AIGC, which is already in the "center of the world". With the help of AI technology, Memix can help users automatically synthesize the entered text into a topic-specific emoji package GIF and share it with one click to the private message conversations of common social software such as TikTok and WhatsApp.

The creative team behind Memix's appearance on the US iOS App Store free list Top1Memix is also something to be reckoned with. The team launched the social app "IRL" in 2020, which attracted more than 20 million users and achieved 400% growth during the epidemic. In 2021, IRL's excellent results brought the creative team $170 million in round C financing led by Softbank Corp., valuing the team at $1.1 billion and successfully becoming a social unicorn.

Is the driving ability of "emojis" really that strong? What does this mean for the commercialization of AIGC in the future?

01. AI can't refuse emojis. Nowadays, few people should be able to resist the magic of emojis.

When you do not know how to reply to a message, when it is difficult to express your inner feelings in words, and when you want to ease the atmosphere, as long as the "meme" comes out, the conversation between the two sides will not be too awkward. Most memes can be read and understood in just a few seconds. An appropriate meme can often convey a variety of inexplicable but powerful emotional messages, which is a high-quality carrier to quickly get closer to each other.

However, as people more and more like to use emojis in the process of communication, for those who rely on memes, the most frightening thing is that they hate less when they are used.

Just imagine, you are having a hot chat with your friends in the group, and the topic mentioned by the other person pokes you hard, but you can't express it in words at the moment. You can't find a suitable meme even though you open your picture favorites for a long time. What would you do?

Once you decide to make your own meme or create a popular image, you first need to download a suitable picture, then import it into the image editing tool, use the erasure pen to clean up the original text, then paste what you want to express, and finally export the new meme.

Group topics are always fleeting, and when you do these tedious operations, your friends may not know how many rounds of conversation they have changed.

Memix aims at this pain point, trying to use AI technology to instantly find the right picture for your text and combine it into emojis in a simpler and faster way.

Memix main interface | Memix the interface of the application is very simple. The home page lists GIF with random, holiday, World Cup, celebrity and other topics. You can also enter keywords such as "happy", "celebration" and "sarcasm" in the search bar to choose a GIF that is closer to your intention. Then just type the text in the text field, and the program will automatically insert the text in the appropriate location of the GIF. You can even enable Memix directly in the iMessage settings to generate and send emojis based on the content of the conversation at any time.

In order to facilitate sharing, Memix also allows users to share completed emojis directly in App to social applications such as Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, TikTok and so on. Of course, you can also save the emoji package to your album so that you can use it next time.

The emojis generated by Memix can be shared directly to other apps | with Memix in Memix, it is no longer difficult to make "meet the occasion" emojis, and it is easy to understand that addicted young users can push it to the top of the list.

According to Swyft Media, more than 6 billion emoticons are sent through communication apps around the world every day, and 68% of 18-to 34-year-olds feel more comfortable expressing their emotions visually than through words.

CEO Abraham Shafi of the IRL team agrees: "emojis have become a universal language that anyone can use fluently." For the IRL team, which has always aimed at "building close network relationships", it is natural that they will not refuse to try to develop tools such as emojis.

Peng Lan, a professor of communication at the National people's Congress, once expressed such a view in his paper: "the virtual communication brought about by the Internet has a limitation in the initial stage, that is, it can not convey people's emotions in all directions. In particular, there is a lack of" facial expressions "commonly used in face-to-face communication, so the continuous innovation of emotional communication means is an important clue in the evolution of virtual communication. "

If we analyze this evolution process from the perspective of technological development, it is not difficult to find that from emoticons composed of pure characters to graphical expressions, there are advances in communication and graphics technology behind them, and from officially set emoji expressions to user-made emojis, behind which is the popularity of picture tools such as image editing software. Now, with the open source of a large number of AI models, in the context of the popularity of AIGC for more than half a year, it is not surprising that the field of emoji production has been "occupied" by AI.

02. The technological inflection point has arrived. Where is the commercial inflection point? It is an indisputable fact that AI is getting closer and closer to ordinary users.

Different from the popular illusion of capital speculation in the past, this round of AIGC wave can be said to be caused by ordinary users after experiencing AI painting, ChatGPT and other products from the bottom up.

Over the past year, with the continuous updating and iteration of the AI model, the efficiency of generating content in AI has been gradually reduced from 1 hour to more than ten seconds, while the requirements for running equipment are gradually reduced. Take the Stable Diffusion developed by Stability AI as an example, with only a consumer-grade 8GB GTX2060 graphics card, the model can generate a 512-512 pixel image in a short time.

Image generated by Stable Diffusion | Stable Diffusion this means that the inflection point of technology has arrived, and AI is no longer just a distant existence in the laboratory, even ordinary users can feel the magic and fun of AIGC at the nearest distance in front of their computers or mobile phones. At the same time, the exploration of the commercialization of AI technology is no longer just a game of To B and To G, but finally has the opportunity to take a step towards the consumer side.

As Stability AI opened up the Stable Diffusion model at the end of August 2022, eager entrepreneurs set out collectively, hundreds of AI painting companies sprang up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, draft.art, casual AI painting, Style art, Didi Community, Uni Dream and other applications were launched one after another, and Internet companies also took the right time to release similar functions.

But hot situations tend to mask unresolved real problems, and bubbles are not burst until Stock AI announces a shutdown.

Also in the last week of 2022, AI painting company Stock AI announced on Twitter that previous subscriptions would be cancelled and refunded based on the rest of the account.

According to Danny Postma, founder of Stock AI, "it's expensive to run an AI-driven startup like Stock Al, and the current paying user base can't afford it." Under the background that the cost has not been reduced to a lower level with the technology iteration, facing the competition from more and more similar enterprises, Stock AI has only survived a short period of four months from its establishment to the shutdown of the platform.

Stock AI shutdown announcement | Stock AI at present, the business model of most AI painting products is to provide a certain number of free trial opportunities, and then charge according to the number or duration of the trial. However, due to the serious homogenization of AI painting products, it is difficult for ordinary consumers to form a willingness to continue to pay after trying out related products, so it is naturally difficult to maintain the commercialization of related products.

After the appearance of various AIGC products, Memix will still be able to stand out at the end of 2022, in the final analysis, it has found a differentiated scenario in which there is no large-scale competition.

Compared with AI painting, the sharing attribute of memes is stronger, and consumers' demand for emojis is more long-term and rigid, whether in online chat or website posts and other scenes, they can not avoid using emojis to express themselves.

At the same time, since IRL, a social app owned by the same team, now has more than 20 million active users, 75 per cent of whom are young users of Generation Z, Memix has its own traffic advantage while the vast majority of AIGC start-up platforms are still in the stage of accumulating original users.

After receiving investment from Softbank Corp. and Dragoneer in 2021, the team behind it was valued at more than $1.1 billion, which gave Memix the strength to provide services temporarily for free.

Although there is no doubt about the technological potential of AIGC, it is undeniable that the AI industry is still in the exploratory period of commercialization. At a time when costs have not been significantly reduced and users' willingness to pay has not been cultivated, it is not wise for too many entrepreneurs to fight in a single scene.

Fortunately, the emergence of Memix gives a new application scenario of making emojis, which will not be the only answer, and even this road may not go smoothly to the end, but it may remind us that finding more diverse application scenarios and developing more differentiated applications will be an urgent problem for AIGC entrepreneurs to think about.

In the new year, the commercialization of AIGC may still be a year of hard work rather than harvest. After all, there will inevitably be jet lag between the technological inflection point and the commercial inflection point.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: geek Park (ID:geekpark), author: Yu Sanxiao, Editor: Jingyu

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