We have all seen and marveled at the whacky and impressive images that text-to-image AI tools like DALL-E have been creating. There are many of these tools available at the moment including an impressive tool created by Meta and a more basic offering that comes in the form of a TikTok filter. Now, however, Meta has taken the idea a step further and has released a new text-to-video tool. Let’s check it out.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced via Facebook post that the Meta AI team has developed a new AI video generation tool called Make-A-Video. The post includes a host of weird example videos to marvel at and Meta has also released a homepage for the tool and the research paper the AI team published to explain how they have done it.
The new tool works in a very similar way to the now much more common text-to-image systems. You simply type in short descriptions such as “a teddy bear painting a self-portrait”, “a baby sloth with a knitted hat trying to figure out a laptop”, “a spaceship landing on mars”, and “a robot surfing a wave in the ocean” and the tool gets to work. It then sets about creating short GIFs that match the prompt.
The tool also has three settings to choose a style for the video to be made in, which are Surreal, Realistic, and Stylized. Zuckerberg used his Facebook post to explain the unique challenges that come with trying to create video from text as opposed to static images:
“It’s much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they’ll change over time. Make-A-Video solves this by adding a layer of unsupervised learning that enables the system to understand motion in the physical world and apply it to traditional text-to-image generation.”
Of course, new technology like this does not come without associated risks and challenges. As AI becomes capable of doing more and more amazing and exciting things such as creating video from mere word prompts, it is important to ensure that safeguards are put in place to ensure it is used safely. Let’s see how this one develops.
In other recent Meta news, the company has handed over control of a prominent AI framework to the Linux Foundation.
