AI’s creative capabilities are outpacing its driving prowess. While self-driving car technology isn’t going anywhere, there has been an explosion in research around generative models, or artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can create images from simple text. In the span of a week, AI researchers at Google from Meta and Alphabet have gone ahead and developed systems that can generate video with just about any text prompt one can imagine.
Meta’s videos look like trippy dream sequences: a teddy bear depicting flowers or a horse galloping across a field. They last about a second or two and have a fishy quality that betrays their source, but they’re still doable. Videos made by Google, of pouring coffee into a cup or flying over a snowy mountain, look particularly realistic.
Google has also created an even more impressive second system called Fenaki that can create videos that are two minutes or longer. Here’s a sign Google used for one: “Too much traffic in a futuristic city. An alien spaceship arrives in a futuristic city. The camera goes inside the alien spaceship. An astronaut in the blue room.” The camera moves forward until shown. Astronaut is typing into keyboard. Less, which reads like a movie script, and the resulting clip, posted to Twitter by Dumitru Erhan, one of Fenaki’s creators at Google Brain. remarkable. You might be thinking that this is the end of Hollywood as we know it or that anyone with some brain cells and a computer will soon be making movies. It’s actually along the lines of Google’s idea, which Erhan tweeted to empower people to “create their own visual stories… [to] Make creativity easy for people.”
It’s hard to see AI-generated videos in your local movie theater anytime soon, but they will be posted to social media feeds, notably TikTok, InstaReels, and YouTube.
TikTok users love to add stickers, text and green screen to posts and the platform has new technology for the same. In August, it added an AI Image Generator to its app for a stylish green screen. Type in a prompt like “Boris Johnson” and TikTok will bring up an abstract image reminiscent of a UK politician.
What happens when the machines not only recommend the videos that keep us scrolling, but are also more hands-on in making them? Many of us love watching footage of cute cats and people tripping over themselves, so an algorithm that can produce funny stumbling blocks or fake montages of scary kittens, as long as they appear real, Till then they will attract viral hits with little work.
Content creators on TikTok, and the platforms themselves, have all kinds of incentives to take advantage of tools that can bring out video at scale, cheap and easy. For the rest of us, the result will be social media feeds that are more machine-driven than ever.
Already powered by AI and recommendation algorithms, AI videos will add to the self-reinforced feedback loops that scratch our cognitive itch.
The second concern is misinformation… but social media platforms are trying to weed out fake content, and both Google and Facebook are refusing to release their video-making tools because of the potential for abuse. Google said its own system had produced videos that were biased against women, even when it tried to filter out such stereotypical results. Google researchers said that until the issue is resolved, the model or its source code will not be released.
Of course, soon you’ll be able to use these tools with few restrictions, thanks to organizations like Sustainability AI. The British startup released an image-generation tool last August that allowed anyone to create cool art, as well as fake photos of celebrities, politicians and war zones, something the big AI companies banned. I tried the device and in seconds was able to cook up pictures of former President Donald Trump playing golf with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Stability is working on a video-generation tool that it plans to release publicly when it’s ready.
But while greater access to such tools will lead to more counterfeit content, it will also mean more people are aware that the tools exist. They are more likely to suspect that the ‘photo’ of President Joe Biden punching an older woman is AI-generated. That’s the hope anyway.
As related what these devices will do for the content of people’s daily diet. Google researchers argue that their tools will enhance human creativity. But when making video is so easy that you don’t even have to think about it, is it really harnessing our imagination? Maybe not in every case. Coupled with the recommendation engines that drive so much of what we see online, geared toward generating clicks makes our future more machine-guided—and, arguably, not very creative. Is.
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