The Reality of AI Video Tools with Cost, Speed, and Expressiveness
Chinese IT giant Tencent is upending the advertising industry paradigm. According to Nikkei on May 9, 2025, Tencent officially launched a video advertisement production tool based on its self-developed AI virtual human technology in the Japanese market. This technology works with AI "talents" replacing conventional advertising models, an automated solution comprehensively handling script writing, facial expression performance, and video editing from advertising scripting through final editing.
Complex elements like model recruiting, filming studio booking, and post-production editing are significantly eliminated, with actual cases showing advertising production costs reduced by approximately 90%+. The AI talent technology shown in Japan is so sophisticated that even visually it's difficult to distinguish human from AI. In a dental product advertisement, a female AI talent naturally says "whitening, breath care, gum support — all included." The script is written by a GPT-family language model, voice by TTS (Text-to-Speech) technology, and facial expressions and movements by deepfake-based motion synthesis — the entire advertisement generated without a single physical shoot.
Industry impact: advertising production costs that previously reached millions of yen now drop to tens of thousands of yen, enabling small and medium businesses and new brands to produce high-quality videos. But challenges: rapid reduction of creative roles (real models, actors, screenwriters); copyright and authenticity controversies about AI-generated content; consumers finding it difficult to distinguish whether the person in an advertisement actually exists. Global trend: Meta testing "AI celebrities" on its platform; Google combining DreamFusion and SynthID for simultaneous deepfake generation and detection; Korean startups ScatterLab and Clever launching AI announcer and instructor solutions. Tencent is pursuing an "AI model studio" platform strategy providing this technology externally as SaaS. "The future of advertising is being built by people who don't exist — AI talents becoming brand faces, performing emotions, explaining products. Faster, cheaper, more — but simultaneously requiring new standards for trust and authenticity." "Is the person in that advertisement you just saw okay even if they don't actually exist?"
