Meta has cooked up a new, scarily accurate A.I. video generator

The inevitability of our A.I. slop future creeps ever closer by the day. The tech industry is locked in a race to create new artificial intelligence models that can create supposed “Hollywood-style” video clips. It’s like the space race of the 1960s, except a lot less awe-inspiring. Apparently, Meta just made a big leap ahead of the competition with its new model “Movie Gen,” which is significant for being able to generate video with sound. The model isn’t yet available for users to play with, but Meta shared its research publicly on Friday.

According to a Meta blog post, Movie Gen can “use simple text inputs to produce custom videos and sounds, edit existing videos, and transform your personal image into a unique video.” It can “generate videos of up to 16 seconds at a rate of 16 frames per second,” as well as “high-quality and high-fidelity audio up to 45 seconds.” It can take a user’s personal photos and generate a video that “preserves human identity and motion.” (The example is a woman’s selfie generating a video of her DJing next to a cheetah, for whatever reason.) “Precise video editing” allows users to perform “localized edits like adding, removing, or replacing elements, and global changes such as background or style modifications.” (The examples given here are various animals in natural environments being given silly little outfits.   

In the blog post, Meta says Movie Gen is outperforming similar models in the industry, and if you watch the example videos, they are indeed some of the most chillingly accurate A.I. videos yet. Meta insists that “generative AI isn’t a replacement for the work of artists and animators,” but wants to “help people express themselves in new ways and to provide opportunities to people who might not otherwise have them.” But of course, there are other existential concerns about this technology aside from the way Hollywood will almost certainly someday use it to cut working creatives out of the process. Obviously, this will be used to generate misinformation on a new and scary level. And then there’s this writer’s personal hobbyhorse: the fact that A.I. uses such an excessive amount of energy that it’s already being described as a “major contributor to climate change.” But Meta and its competitors at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and the like apparently care less about those concerns than being the first, best thing on the market, so the rest of us will just have to deal with the consequences.