Written by Kurt Wagner
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. released a new artificial intelligence tool that can generate or edit videos based on simple text input, raising competition with rivals such as OpenAI and Google in the race to develop the world’s most advanced AI technology.
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Meta’s product, Movie Gen, can create a new video up to 16 seconds long based on text input. It may also use such information to create audio or edit an existing video, or use an image to create a custom video featuring a real person.
Movie Gen is only available to some internal employees and a handful of external partners, including other filmmakers, although the social media company – which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – plans to build the product on existing apps sometime next year.
Executives are still debating how best to use the integration, but the goal is for Movie Gen to encourage more people to create or edit video posts, said Connor Hayes, Meta’s vice president of AI production products. “It’s going to be fun to use, useful for creators, ready for full app collaboration, but we don’t have a concrete product plan for what it’s going to look like right now,” he said.
The social media leader is one of the biggest tech companies pushing for AI models that focus on producing videos, which are more complex and expensive to build than those that return AI-generated text. OpenAI supported by Microsoft Corp. has its own video production tool, called Sora, which debuted earlier this year and can create videos up to one minute long, though that technology isn’t available to the public yet. DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, also has a video production tool, called Veo, launched earlier this year.
Meta is waiting to release Movie Gen for several reasons, including technical efficiency. It currently takes “tens of minutes” to create a video based on a text notification — too long for average consumers, who are likely to use this on their phones, Hayes said.
But Meta also “fixes a bunch of really important issues around security and accountability,” Hayes said, including how to handle personalized videos so a user can’t create an inappropriate or offensive video featuring someone else without their permission. “That’s probably going to be the most important problem to solve before we can make personalization available to the general population.” This type of technology has been used in the past to create misleading so-called deepfakes of famous people, including US President Joe. Biden and pop star Taylor Swift, though Meta executives say they are working on ways to “watermark” the creation so people know it was made with AI.
Meta has made AI development a top priority for the entire company, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly talked about AI as a driver of user growth and revenue growth. In the short term, Zuckerberg credited AI with helping improve the company’s content algorithms by showing people the most relevant posts and ads. Ultimately, Zuckerberg said he believes AI will play an even bigger role in powering its apps and other future wearables produced by Meta, such as smart glasses.
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First published: October 04 2024 | 8:51 PM IST