Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

"How can I make money using AI?"

When I typed this question on social media, I received a variety of responses. It is not limited to teaching you how to use AI to design posters, use AI to edit videos, use AI to write and then monetize it... The answers are different, and the methods are also different. But among the endless responses, how many people actually make money from AI?

Nowadays, the trend on social media has shifted from "whether AI will replace humans" to "how to use AI to make money." What kind of people make money from AI? How do you make money? How did they become the trendsetters in the development of the industry? We talked with those on the trend.

Enter the game and become famous

Last year, a group of visual works with the theme of "Maimai Museum Series" became popular on the Internet. This series of works combines McDonald's products and cultural relics, and uses AI technology to create new creations and displays. A series of interesting concept items include heirloom jade French fries, bronze Big Mac burger, blue and white porcelain Coke, etc.

This set of works has also become one of the important works of "How AI Reshapes Brand Marketing" in 2023. After the work was published on Xiaohongshu, it received millions of exposures. Later, McDonald's took the initiative to cooperate with the creator himself and released the series of works on its official account.

The creator behind this series of themed works is Potato Man. I met Potato Man at the 2024 Zokuu Design Week. He believed that "the popularity of the work does not mean how good the idea is, but that the right time, place and people are there."

At the end of 2022, Tudouren just started to come into contact with AI. At that time, his first reaction was fear. "When I first came into contact with this technology, I couldn't sleep at night. I thought it was a devastating blow to my career." After using some AI-generated applications, Tuduo realized that it only took a few seconds for his ideas to come to fruition, which felt like a “collapse of his outlook” for him.

At that time, Tudouren made a prediction: AI will be popularized in a short period of time, and will have a huge impact on all advertising, marketing and design industries. After a short period of panic, after calming down and thinking carefully, the Tudou people decided to follow the trend of the times and complete the transformation as soon as possible.

Four months later, he left the advertising company where he had been working for 7 years, gave up his position as a creative partner, and set up his own studio to focus on AI content creation.

It is not difficult to use AI to create. What is difficult is to form a personal color and produce high-quality content. Tudouren said that he focused on quantity in the early stage, and AI can generate a large number of works in a short period of time, which greatly improves the efficiency of creation. But in the later period, he paid more attention to personal style, creativity and quality. It has become normal for a graphic work to be modified hundreds of times, and for a certain segment of a video to be generated hundreds of times.

Now, the content created by Tudou people has been polished with a precision that has completely surpassed the accuracy level of traditional creation in the past, and the creation time has been extended from one or two days to half a day.months or even longer.

Currently, there are only three people in Tudouren’s studio, but it has cooperated with more than 30 first-line brands, including Estee Lauder, Dior, Lenovo Group, Mercedes-Benz, Avita, etc. With the support of AI, he formed a team by himself. Currently, Tudouren's business order quotations have increased more than ten times compared to the past, and are still rising.

From AI painting to video, he earned 300,000 yuan in half a year

Ye Bodhisattva has multiple identities. He is both a creative person in a technology company and an advertising company. A partner in the company's AI business. In addition, he is also a self-media person and AI course instructor. In his view, "One person has multiple identities, which will also become a future development trend and is an intuitive manifestation of AI improving human efficiency."

At the end of 2022, the technology company where Ye Bodhisattva works began to use AI. He continued to test experiments and used AI tools to run some vocabulary in batches to test its boundaries and effects. After a lot of practice, Ye Bodhisattva formed his own AI methodology - emphasizing the input and use of prompt words.

In March last year, the short film "Detection", a collaboration between Ye Bodhisattva and Feishu, was hailed as the first AI video commercial in China. At that time, Sora, Keling, etc. had not yet been born. This short film consists of more than ten paintings of surreal scenes, presented in the form of video. Ye Bodhisattva said that he only received a request from the brand two days before the press conference, and he could only produce an AI video.

He found a group of AI content creators to think about ideas together, and then produced content based on text-based pictures and pictures-based pictures, and then edited and created based on the content. The short film only took 11 people from conception to completion. Hour. In Ye Bodhisattva’s view, this case reflects the changes that AI has made to the creative process.

In the early days, Ye Bodhisattva published AI-generated content on different platforms. Finally, he found that Xiaohongshu was more popular among users than other platforms, so he began to systematically carry out AIGC information on Xiaohongshu. Sharing, popularizing science and displaying works. In just three months, his fans exceeded 10,000, and within half a year, the number of fans increased to 50,000. He successively cooperated with brands such as Volkswagen and Intel, and his business quotations rose to six figures.

In 2023, Ye Bodhisattva will offer AI painting courses. "I think that my good creative ideas should be known to more people and converted into commercial value." Its course prices range from 1,000 to 5,000, and it is a 3-week, 12-session training course. Thousands of people have signed up after several sessions.

The Xiyangshi team only established an AI video company in September 2024. The three members of the team have different backgrounds, but one thing they have in common is that they are young. There are former programmers from major manufacturers, fresh graduates with master's degrees in computer science, and post-2000s who have switched to programming from the materials industry.

In the process of starting a business, they realized that if they want to make AI a long-term business, they need to be linked to the real needs of the market. "In the field of painting, they have made the unit price very low." Compared with the increasingly saturated field of AI painting, the AI ​​video track has more development prospects.

“AICultural travel films, AI short dramas, and AI advertisements are actually very good tracks, especially AI advertisements. For brands, in the past, the cost of shooting advertisements in real scenes was very high, requiring equipment and a lot of manpower and material resources, which often cost hundreds of thousands. However, with the help of AI tools, the cost of time and energy will be significantly reduced. "The Xiyangshi team believes.

The "In-Depth Report on Domestic AI Video Large Models" released by Soochow Securities in August this year also shows that the potential industry space of AI video is 317.8 billion yuan. Among them, the total AI video market share is 317.8 billion yuan. Under the model, the production costs of movies, feature-length dramas, cartoons and short plays have dropped by more than 95% compared to the traditional model. The same is true in the advertising industry.

The Xiangshi team published their works in the early stage. Go to major social platforms to accumulate fans Silk, they gradually expanded their voice through their works and attracted more users.

In the later period, they also explored the "three-terminal parallel" development model. Training course), more than 500 students have participated in it. By creating personal IP on the C side to feed back to the B side and G side, the Xiyangshi team has made nearly 300,000 profits in half a year.

"AI didn't help. No matter how much money the company makes, I haven’t been eliminated yet”

In the context of AI creation, people cannot predict the effects generated by AI, nor can they allow AI to accurately provide the results they want. This creates a certain conflict with past business habits. "Changing the script based on the generated content" and following up the entire creative process have become important issues in communication between creators and brands.

Ye Bodhisattva said, "Customers who understand AI now do this. ,but Those who don’t understand are still the same old ones, which makes the entire communication process particularly difficult because AI cannot restore the script content."

The Xiyangshi team also mentioned that communication is a major factor in cooperation. Difficulty: On the other hand, current AI technology still cannot fully generate the desired content. In the creative process, it often requires the combination of multiple AI tools, from chatgpt to midjourney, and then to stable. Diffusion requires a variety of methods such as text pictures, pictures and videos, and even 3D modeling in the later stage to achieve consistency in product and AI promotional content.

Selling AI courses. This incident was not completely recognized by the market. On social media, the words associated with it were "cutting leeks", "deceiving people", and "dissuading people from quitting". Some outsiders also questioned the wild situation. Bodhisattva is cutting leeks, and he doesn’t make excuses. He does not teach the specific operation of AI tools, but focuses more on the cultivation of creativity and aesthetics, as well as the use of prompt words in the art field. A member of the Xiyangshi team said that he also passed the test at first. Buy other people’s courses to learn more about AI tools.

However, more people are still unable to earn this pot of money, even in the design field that is most affected by AI.Yu Ziji, the founder of Y.STUDIO, said, “Nowadays, AI is used more in copywriting and planning. In terms of graphic design, it only provides some inspiration and ideas, and there is no way for us to actually use it because the content produced is copyrighted. Unable to find a home, we serve more business customers who need Everything must be unique."

Chen Yin, an employee currently engaged in interior design in a design company, also mentioned that after the rise of AI, the boss asked all employees to start using AI and said, " If you don't learn, you will be unemployed." She sees him more as an "assistant who can work 24 hours a day." Chen Yin lamented: "One year has passed, and I haven't seen how much money our company has made through AI, and I haven't been eliminated."

Whether AI can make money is full of uncertainty, but what is certain is that more and more people are learning AI technology. Students who signed up for the Ye Bodhisattva course include young college students, designers who want to keep up with the forefront of the industry, mothers who want to create a side job through AI painting, and even some elderly people, who all hope to gain more through AI. possibility.