Google’s AI videos point to machine-generated future

AI’s creative abilities are outstripping its driving skills. While self-driving car technology is going nowhere, there’s been a remarkable explosion in research around generative models, or artificial intelligence systems that can create images from simple text. In just the past week, AI researchers from Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have taken an extraordinary leap forward, developing systems that can generate videos with just about any text prompt one can imagine.
The videos from Facebook-parent Meta look like trippy dream sequences, showing a teddy bear painting flowers or a horse with distended legs galloping over a field. They last about one or two seconds and have a glitchy quality that betrays their source, but they’re still remarkable. The videos generated by Google, of coffee being poured into a cup or a flight over a snowy mountain, look especially realistic.
Google has also built an even more impressive second system called Phenaki that can create longer videos, lasting two minutes or more. Here’s an example of the prompt Google used for one:
“Lots of traffic in futuristic city. An alien spaceship arrives to the futuristic city. The camera gets inside the alien spaceship. The camera moves forward until showing an astronaut in the blue room. The astronaut is typing in the keyboard. The camera moves away from the astronaut. The astronaut leaves the keyboard and walks to the left…”
That’s less than a third of the entire prompt, which reads almost like a movie script with commands such as “camera zooms in.” And here’s the resulting clip, posted on Twitter by Dumitru Erhan, one of Phenaki’s creators at Google Brain:
You may be thinking this is the end of Hollywood as we know it or that anyone with a few brain cells and a computer will soon be able to produce feature-length films. That’s actually along the lines of what the researchers are hoping for. Erhan tweeted that he and his team wanted to empower people to “create their own visual stories… [to] make creativity for people easier.”
It’s hard to see AI-generated videos coming to your local movie theater any time soon. But we’ll almost certainly see them being posted in our social media feeds, particularly on platforms like ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, Instagram’s Reels or YouTube.
TikTok didn’t respond to a question about whether it is building its own AI video-generation tool, but it would make sense for the platform to do so. TikTok’s users love adding stickers, text and green screens to their posts, and the platform accommodates the demand with new tech. In August, it added an AI image generator to its app for creating stylized green screens. Type in a prompt like “Boris Johnson” and TikTok will bring up an abstract image vaguely reminiscent of the former British prime minister.
—Bloomberg