Meta, which owns Facebook, said on Friday it had created a novel AI system dubbed Movie Gen. This new generation AI solution is aimed at creating videos and audio in response to user input and is claiming to be a direct rival to media generation technologies offered by OpenAI and ElevenLabs.
Capabilities of Movie Gen:
The supported features include the development of videos that seem like real-life videos, such as animals swimming and even surfing, and movies from real photos of individuals.
For instance, the tool may illustrate individuals engaged in activities such as painting or any other artistic work. Besides video, Movie Gen can also create background music and sound effects that perfectly match the video content of the creations.
Meta also illustrated how the model can be used for editing videos. In one instance, it moves pom-poms into a man’s hands while rollerblading through the desert; in another, it turns a dry parking lot with rain puddles that splash while a man skateboards. The videos that can be created through Movie Gen can only be created in not more than 16 seconds, and for the audio, not more than 45 seconds.
Comparisons and Blind Tests:
Meta also provided information from blind tests between Movie Gen and its AI model and models from startups like Runway, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Kling, stating that the results were positive.
These tests are especially relevant because generative AI is becoming increasingly popular in the creative field. Products like Sora from OpenAI are being praised for their ability to generate cinematic content from text inputs.
Implications for the Entertainment Industry:
The appearance of AI tools such as Movie Gen occurs at a time when Hollywood and the entertainment industry, in general, are looking for ways to integrate generative AI into filmmaking.
AI presents possibilities to improve and optimize manufacturing, while the apprehensions remain that AI needs copyrighted resources in training, including without a license. This has bred further discourse on the moral and legal issues that surround ‘fake news’ media generated by AI, such as concern about keepsakes use in political areas in the U.S., Pakistan, India, and Indonesia.
Meta’s Approach to Movie Gen:
But Movie Gen’s creator and Meta, renowned for its FB-supported instant messenger, are being more careful with the new project. Although its series of big models called Llama is accessible to developers, Movie Gen will not be released for public use.
However, the company has not publicly disclosed the list of domains for which the tool might be useful; it is experimenting with the tool in cooperation with content creators and the entertainment industry. Meta has informed Movie Gen that it will be integrated into its products by sometime early next year, 2025.
To accomplish this, Meta used licensed and open-source datasets while training Movie Gen to produce the best results. Nevertheless, the company has not released information about the risks it assessed before introducing this model.
