Even with money coming in, costs remain high. In January, the company sold bonds to bolster its AI funding, tapping offshore markets for the first time. It’s a reminder that inference, or deploying AI products, isn’t cheap.
Which is precisely why the smartest AI video players are courting corporate clients, not just content creators.
Coca-Cola has now run AI-generated holiday ads two years in a row. The backlash was loud in certain corners of the internet, but consumers ultimately didn’t seem to mind. For advertisers, AI tools like this promise faster production, lower costs and infinite iteration. The fear that AI will hollow out creative work is not misplaced. But if there’s going to be a public uprising, it probably won’t start with the art of selling sugary beverages.
But it may emerge from artists creating the characters people actually love. When I scrolled through the app, I found a carousel of familiar intellectual property, from Barbie to Pikachu, remixed into new creations and widely shared. As Chinese-origin apps scale abroad, outsize scrutiny is guaranteed. Add video, with its built-in potential for deepfakes, fraud and manipulation, and regulators likely won’t be entertained by these tools for too long. Kuaishou would be wise to invest heavily in internal guardrails for copyright protection and potential abuse before being forced to do so.
AI video used to just look fake. Now it looks like a business model. The challenge is that the better Kling gets, the harder it will be for regulators to leave it alone.
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