Privateisland.tv
Many fear a future where AI-generated media will become indistinguishable from traditional media, destroying societies and civilizations in the process, but we are not there yet. Exhibit A takes the form of a surreal, AI-generated beer commercial that went viral over the weekend.
The 30-second video titled “Synthetic Summer” was created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle of London-based production company Privateisland.tv and first appeared on Instagram about a week ago. The pair weren’t available for comment until this article was published, but judging by the look in the video, it seems likely they were made using her new Gen-2 AI model from the runway. Stable Diffusion can create still images.
Set to a raucous crowd backing track and Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” the video sees a simulacrum of people partying at stereotypical American backyard barbecues, sometimes with Impressionist beer containers and physics. are fused together. The woman spreads her jaw and laughs. Beer glass transforms into canned beer. The flaming grill becomes a tornado of columnar fire, arcing across the yard. It’s a surreal vision of hell that’s both familiar and strikingly alien.
why is that so weird? Currently, AI video generators are still primitive. When the creator trains the model, he for still images is working from a much smaller set of source material than an AI synthetic model, which makes the model significantly more computationally expensive to run. The impressionistic view of beer commercials may come from absorbing the essence of real beer commercials into the Gen-2 data set. Runway has not published the dataset used to train Gen-2, but the Gen-1 (previous model) paper states that it “has an internal dataset of 240 million images and 6.4 million A custom dataset for video clips”.
We’ve experimented with Gen-2 (which is currently in the closed testing phase), and it takes human persistence to generate weirdly alien clips like this, and we get OK results. Because many generations are run and discarded. Yet the resulting clip is only a few seconds long. For Synthetic Summer, Privateisland.tv produced the clips, selected the best clips, spliced the segments into a sequence, and added music and sound effects.
But wait, beer isn’t the only product that AI is making fictional ads for meme purposes. April 24th, someone called “Pizza Later” A mostly AI-generated video for a fictional restaurant called “Pepperoni Hug Spot,” which includes a distorted video clip of people eating pizza generated by Gen-2 on the runway.Also, its creator We used GPT-4 to generate the scripts, used Midjourney for still images, and narrated by Eleven Labs.They used Adobe to piece everything together after effects.
Definitely wasted 3 hours of my life making this today… everything from audio to video to images is AI. Assemble in After Effects. See below for details
— Pizza Later (@Pizza_Later)
Both these human-initiated and human-constructed works show that generative AI has a long way to go to autonomously captivate the masses with social-changing memes. People are still behind the wheel of these alien creations. perhaps.
Still, neither video matches the purity and majesty of AI-generated Will Smith eating spaghetti. It will forever live in our minds as the first AI-generated video meme nightmare.
