Ian Sansabella, a software architect at a New York startup called Runway AI, entered a short description of what he would like to see in the video. “Quiet river in the woods,” he wrote.
In less than two minutes, an experimental internet service generated a short video of a quiet river in the forest. The river’s running water glistened in the sun, passed between trees and ferns, turned corners, and gently splashed over rocks.
Runway, which plans to roll out the service to a small group of testers this week, is developing artificial intelligence technology that can instantly generate a video by simply typing a few words into a box on your computer screen. One of several companies.
Giants such as Microsoft and Google to create a new kind of artificial intelligence system that some believe could be the next big thing in a technology as important as the web browser. It represents the next stage of industry competition involving not only much smaller start-ups. Or an iPhone.
New video generation systems may speed up the work of filmmakers and other digital artists, but they also represent a new and rapid way to create hard-to-detect online misinformation, and what is real on the Internet. This makes it even more difficult to determine whether
These systems are examples of what is known as generative AI, which can create text, images, and sounds on the fly. Another example is his ChatGPT, his online chatbot created by his OpenAI, a San Francisco startup that surprised the tech industry with its capabilities late last year.
Meta, the parent company of Google and Facebook, unveiled its first video-generating system last year, but fears the system could eventually be used to spread disinformation with new speed and efficiency. and did not release it to the public.
But Runway CEO Cristobal Valenzuela said he believes the technology is too important to keep in research labs, despite the risks. “It’s one of the most impressive pieces of technology we’ve built in the last 100 years,” he said. “We need people who are actually using it.”
Of course, the ability to edit and manipulate film and video is nothing new. The filmmaker has been doing it for over a century. In recent years, researchers and digital artists have used a variety of AI technologies and software programs to create and edit videos, often referred to as deepfake videos.
But systems like the one Runway built will eventually replace editing skills with the push of a button.
Runway’s technology generates videos from short descriptions. First, enter a description just like you would enter a quick note.
This works best for scenes that don’t have too much action, such as ‘rainy day in a big city’ or ‘dog with cell phone in the park’. Press Enter and the system will generate a video in 1-2 minutes.
This technology can reproduce common images such as cats sleeping on a carpet. Or you can combine different concepts to generate a weirdly funny video, like cows at a birthday party.
The video is only 4 seconds long and is choppy and blurry if you look closely. At times the images are strange, distorted and disturbing. The system has a way of fusing animals such as dogs and cats with inanimate objects such as balls and mobile phones. But given the right prompts, it makes a video that shows where the technology is headed.
“At this point, if you see high-definition video, you’ll probably trust it,” said Phillip Isola, a professor of AI at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But that will change soon.”
Like other generative AI technologies, Runway’s system learns by analyzing digital data. In this case, photos, videos, and captions that describe what those images contain. We believe that by training this type of technology on increasingly large amounts of data, researchers will be able to rapidly improve and scale their skills. Experts believe that in no time you will be able to create professional-looking mini-movies complete with music and dialogue.
