"AI Liu Qiangdong" made its live broadcast debut today, what is the difference between digital people bringing goods?
On April 16, Liu Qiangdong will transform into an AI digital human to appear in the live broadcast of Jingdong App. Nowadays, many "clones" of celebrities and head anchors are active in live broadcast rooms and live broadcast slice accounts, and the "substitutes" created by technology are not rare.
At a time when the competition of live broadcast e-commerce is scorching, digital humans have also become the focus of the live broadcast room to further enhance its competitiveness. Compared with real people, digital humans have low cost, fast replication, 24-hour "standby", and can continue the anchor traffic. So, is digital human live broadcast a leek, and how big is the imagination space of the AI live broadcast format?
JD.com bets on digital people to bring goods
On the evening of April 15th, JD.com announced that JD.com's "No. 1 Procurement and Sales" Dongge AI digital human will start a live broadcast. It is reported that at 6:18 p.m. on April 16, the AI digital human "Procurement and Marketing Dongge" based on Liu Qiangdong will make its debut in the Jingdong procurement and sales live broadcast room. At that time, "Procurement and Sales Dongge" will appear in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Home Appliances and Jingdong Supermarket. According to JD.com's public content, the video is powered by JD.com.
On April 15th, JD.com announced that JD.com's "No. 1 Procurement and Sales" Dongge AI digital human will start live broadcast
From the perspective of layout, JD.com has recently accelerated its investment in the live broadcast business. On April 10, JD.com officially announced that it would invest 1 billion in cash and 1 billion in traffic as rewards to attract more original creators and high-quality content institutions to settle in and increase the layout of short videos. It is reported that Jingdong is still actively preparing for the incubation of top talents, and plans to select the top 100 talents at the end of the year, "hundreds of millions of cash have been invested in the reserve stage alone."
Previously, JD.com launched a large model of Yanxi, and has now been connected to AI products such as Jing Xiaozhi, virtual anchors, and intelligent outbound calls. The cost of Yanxi's virtual anchor is less than 1/10 of that of a real person. With the help of automatic generation of live broadcast copywriting based on large models, one-click configuration of goods, and visual construction of highly flexible live broadcast rooms, it can be efficiently started within 2 hours, and the daily operation energy investment is as low as less than 30 minutes. Not long ago, JD Yunyanxi digital human and real anchors relayed to create a "Sun Never Sets" live broadcast room, driving more than 1 billion yuan of GMV.
E-commerce analyst Lu Zhenwang believes that Jingdong has a large number of self-operated products, it is difficult to hire a large number of anchors to explain, and the cost is also high.
It only takes 3 days from "making people" to taking up the post
In recent years, short video live streaming has become the "standard" in the e-commerce field, and virtual anchors driven by artificial intelligence are a new change in the field of live streaming.
It is understood that according to the graphic dimension of digital characters, there are two types of common virtual anchors: one is a 2D digital person, which collects the image and voice of a real person, and uses relevant algorithms such as lip drive and action drive to produce a digital human image. The other type is 3D digital human, the production of this kind of virtual digital human involves real person scanning, 3D modeling and other technologies, from facial contours to clothing scenes need to be customized, often in the form of animated characters, suitable for the production of virtual IP characters.
The technical staff of the live broadcast center of Qianxun Holding Group said that with the help of today's digital technology, by collecting real human image, language and body data, and then training the collected data to start live broadcasting, the "birth" of an AI digital human anchor with a real image only takes three days at the earliest.
AI Digital Human Anchor Library
From the perspective of the entire industry, digital humans have become the focus of the development of the live broadcast industry. According to iiMedia data, the core market size of China's virtual humans in 2022 will be 12.08 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 94.2%, and it is expected to reach 48.06 billion yuan in 2025. In 2023, the top 5 industries in demand for products in China's AI digital human industry are e-commerce and health, social security and social welfare, education, finance and transportation.
A good business that saves time and effort?
In the eyes of industry insiders, digital human live broadcast is indeed a "good business that saves time and effort". In 2022, platforms such as Taobao and Douyin have already used AI intelligent live broadcast as a marketing tool, and even set up ports for AI smart live broadcast separately.
In July last year, Taobao's head anchor Lie'er Baby appeared in the live broadcast room with 6 digital people in a live broadcast to bring goods, although the makeup and styling of the digital people are different, they are all based on Lie'er Baby.
Lie'er Baby and 6 digital people appeared in the live broadcast room to bring the goods
In May last year, Douyin released the "Douyin Platform Specification and Industry Initiative on AI-Generated Content", which clearly opened up AI-generated pictures, videos and derived virtual human live broadcasts.
Li Miao (pseudonym), the person in charge of Douyin's local life service provider "Big Fish Life", revealed that although the conversion efficiency of digital humans is very low, it is better because the threshold for replication is low. "We sell a system to merchants that has features such as fixed speech settings, unlimited background switching, and real-time interaction. ”
In Li Miao's view, the live broadcast of digital humans has long working hours and covers a wide range of fields, even if the transaction rate in the live broadcast room is lower than that of the real anchor, but once it is rolled out to form a matrix-style large-scale communication, the income is still considerable. "Digital people don't need to rest, and they are very cheap, and many businesses will use them in self-broadcasting. Li Miao said.
Compared with the high cost and lack of stability of high-quality live anchors, digital humans can fill the blank time of live broadcast after the live broadcast of real people, realize the continuous exposure of the brand on the platform, accelerate the weight increase of the live broadcast room, and increase sales. At the same time, digital humans can also avoid negative public opinion caused by slips of the tongue during live broadcasts.
Zhao Zhenying, a researcher at the National Engineering Laboratory for E-commerce Transaction Technology, pointed out that to a certain extent, digital twins can effectively reduce the risk of live broadcast for merchants and reduce the cost of live broadcast for merchants. "The most important thing is that the digital human fits the anchor himself in terms of image, tone and speech, and to a certain extent, it is also continuing the anchor's traffic. ”
It may be difficult for consumers to develop emotional identification
However, replicating real anchors requires technology and addressing consumers' psychological expectations. This kind of business model built with low-cost replication logic, although it is fast in efficiency, does not mean that every consumer buys it.
Similar to AI digital human live broadcast, live broadcast slicing and other methods also take advantage of the IP effect of the anchor, by copying the anchor's real body, editing the live broadcast footage, and opening an account with the anchor's name to grab traffic and seek conversion. In March this year, Zhu Zixiao did not say a word in the live broadcast room, and "chicken feet gnawed from morning to night" was on the top of the Weibo hot search. The cutout technology can embed the eating and broadcasting videos of Internet celebrities into the live broadcast room, although it liberated Zhu Zixiao himself, but it made many users feel deceived and mistakenly thought that Zhu Zixiao was a live broadcast.
Zhu Zixiao's eating video is embedded in the live broadcast room
"Compared with the self-broadcast of merchants, the live broadcast of talent emphasizes more on character design and content, and forms a spiritual and emotional connection with fans, so it can explain why some talents are not highly converted, but fans are very sticky. A business executive of a leading live broadcast platform pointed out.
To a certain extent, this also means that whether it is an AI digital human or a copy of the live broadcast screen of the talent in the form of a slice, it is difficult to truly replace the emotional identity generated by real people when they interact with fans in real time in the live broadcast room, and the incremental basis of the "replica" is based on the long-term precipitation of the talent and the live broadcast organization.
Chaos is frequent, and the industry is looking forward to standardized development
In addition, as digital humans are applied in multiple scenarios, there are more and more market chaos.
Some low-cost digital humans have entered the market, in addition to the effect is too fake, the user experience is not good, etc., but also triggered the scam of "digital human source manufacturers" and "digital human agents", and many people have been cut leeks by some bad digital human agent manufacturers.
Recently, a number of businesses reported that they joined the "AI intelligent system" joint venture project of a cultural media company in Shanghai, and the promised "digital human 24-hour live broadcast" could not be realized due to technical and other reasons, and the income of most of the operation was almost zero, and the franchise fee of tens of thousands of yuan was not refunded.
Some companies sell up to 100,000 yuan of "digital human agent" services, claiming that "as long as you pay to become an agent, you can distribute digital human technology to lower-level buyers layer by layer, without any qualification review, and you can also set prices at will. However, many consumers of agency services pointed out that not only did they not make any money, but they were also repeatedly banned from the live broadcast room, and the agency fees could not be recovered.
Zhai Wei, executive director of the Competition Law Research Center of East China University of Political Science and Law, believes that it should be regulated from the following three aspects: First, under the guidance of the industrial sector, it is necessary for the upstream suppliers of the digital human industry chain to be guided by the needs of downstream users, incubate diversified digital human products, and promote the balance of supply and demand and the survival of the fittest in this field. Second, industry associations for AI technology services can explore the establishment of industry norms on digital human agents, formulate a "negative list" of agency behavior, and carry out forward-looking "soft law" governance in this emerging field. Third, regulatory authorities, platform enterprises, consumer protection commissions and other organizations should form a joint force of "social co-governance" to jointly deal with the inducement and misleading behavior of operators in the field of digital human agency to users, and jointly curb the trend of digital human agency alienation becoming illegal pyramid schemes.
According to the analysis of industry insiders, with the strengthening of supervision and the improvement of technical level, digital human virtual anchors will promote the development of related industries in the direction of standardization, refinement and intelligence with a content production model with low input, high output and long battery life.
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