Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

they just acquired read.cv: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/17/perplexity-acquires-read-c....

> I see the demand for being able to produce content with 0 effort, but where is the demand to consume it coming from?

There isn't one. The only type of people excited about AI content are people who are into AI, and see it as the aforementioned way to produce potentially algorithmically driven viral content with no skills or effort. And, with anything as unpredictable as various content platform's algorithms, and especially when it's initially starting out, there will be successes, simply by the law of averages. However, no one, and I do mean absolutely no one, is seeking out AI content beyond for the notion of maybe seeing what it's like for it's own sake. People comment regularly on TikTok and elsewhere about how they find the AI voices grating, they dislike the AI captions that don't match what's actually said, and we have ample history of content farms turning out repetitive, odd nonsense that people have already become incredibly sick of... which is basically what you're guaranteed to get when you have an AI generate a TikTok for you, because of both the weight of those videos in the training data, and because of how these models work.

For those in the know, there's been substantial trends going back a decade now of low effort, slop content being driven further and further into irrelevance because for every hundred lazy grindset people trying to generate income, you have one person who knows things and has studied them, who has insight to offer, and figures out the remaining parts by trial and error; how to shoot video well, how to light a set, all of that. And those people naturally move to the top of engagement. You might, MIGHT, catch early accounts or new users who haven't found interesting people yet... but the algorithms on most of these sites, paradoxically, are going to identify those interests and then drive users towards more interesting people talking about them, because that's what the vast majority of users want.

It doesn't need to be important, or like... pillars of civilization type knowledge, this applies to any topic you can think of, no matter how insipid you think it might be. If I was interested in collector Barbie dolls, would that algorithm draw me towards a video of a Barbie enthusiast who owns hundreds of them and has studied the topic to death, or to a content mill churning out detritus of some AI generated Barbie-girl woman, talking in TikTok narrator voice, about how her dolls are so cool and neat? And like, sure, maybe you can make the AI video thing so good that it can reproduce the same room, the same presenter, with perfect features and clarity hosting a collection of dolls you somehow manage to keep in the AI's memory, all of that is difficult, but solvable, in theory anyway. How do you give your AI presenter with her AI dolls anything even remotely interesting to say about the dolls she doesn't collect, in the room that doesn't exist?

Congress has "supposedly" seen the evidence, but is confidential. But more than that they seem to be acting in something that can happen more than in something that has happened already

Before investing billions in individually curated, generated influencers and content creators, maybe we should market test it first and see if it's what anybody actually wants, let alone whether it's even achievable in any meaningful way.

A lot of AI people make strong assumptions about what the consumer market demand is for explicitly (as in, not "tricking" the user) AI generated art, music and content.

AI needs user data, user generated content and behavior patterns.

Google has platforms Google also purchased Reddit user content. Meta had platforms and user content.