Pictured above: Soumil Singh.
A Harvard University graduate from New Zealand has developed the world's first AI that can create images and videos for social media platforms from basic text descriptions of users.
The technology, called Unfaze.ai, is set to be the first to use AI to fully automate the creation of short-form video content for both individual content creators and brands.
The AI video generation technology is designed to help individual creators and influencers grow their social media followings, but also aims to reduce the barriers thousands of small businesses face in accessing social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube to organically promote their products.
The new AI will enable users to generate short videos complete with images and narration within minutes using just basic text prompts describing their content idea.
While the current version of the technology allows for the production of entertaining content for individual creators, a new suite of features set to be released in the coming weeks will make the platform the first to enable companies to use generative AI models to create images of their products in multiple contexts and then turn those images into short-form video content.
Following a surge in the development of text and image generators, AI-generated video is now seen as the next frontier, attracting billions of dollars from investors. While there are no video creation tools from OpenAI or Google yet, startups like Unfaze are moving quickly to secure market share before global tech giants release their own business and consumer products.
Industry experts say the market potential for this technology is huge, especially for the fastest-growing social media platforms such as TikTok, which has 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide and is available in more than 160 countries. The app's users are expected to grow by more than 64% to more than 1.8 billion by the end of 2024.
Once seen as a platform solely for dance trends and viral videos, research shows that around 54% of businesses now use TikTok to promote their brand, posting an average of nine times per month. However, 25% of businesses cited barriers to consistently creating content, appealing to a wider consumer base, and producing high-quality videos, with many reporting they struggle to increase engagement rates.[1][2]
Unfaze.ai founder Sumir Singh, who left New Zealand seven years ago to study applied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University in Boston before launching a Silicon Valley start-up, said while TikTok's engagement rate is 93% higher than other social media networks, the need to create huge amounts of fresh content is resource-intensive and too costly, creating a barrier to access for many New Zealand content creators, influencers and small businesses.[3]
He said producing a single video can take an agency weeks to complete and cost thousands of dollars, but recent advances in machine learning mean that content creators can simply “instruct” artificial intelligence to produce video content to their specifications.
“What we know about these social media and video platforms is that they rely heavily on large amounts of fresh content to keep users aware and engaged.
“With traditional tools, you have to come up with an idea, write a script, collate all the images and video snippets, and figure out how to put it all together. Instead, now you can upload an image of your product, tell our AI your idea and with the press of a button, it will generate one or multiple versions of your video, and even automatically schedule and post it to your social media accounts.
“On apps like TikTok, model content allows businesses to post content that can grow their reach organically, meaning they don't have to pay extra every time someone watches or clicks on a video.”
“In this model, campaign costs are concentrated in the production of each piece of content. To get effective results, you need to test multiple different versions, and even then, you can’t reuse videos indefinitely.
“This is one of the reasons why many businesses don’t have a short-form video content strategy and instead rely on paid media advertising platforms.
“But by using AI to remove this constraint, even the smallest New Zealand businesses with low budgets can effectively increase their organic traffic and get themselves in front of a global audience of millions.
“We believe this technology has the potential to be transformative for thousands of small and medium-sized businesses around the world, giving them near-unlimited access to video content that can be used to market their products,” he said.
The company has received millions of dollars in backing from investment funds in the US and New Zealand, including Y Combinator, the world's top accelerator and the original investor in Airbnb and Dropbox.
Singh said the company has already raised $5.5 million and will use the funding to further its technology development and support the release of its video creation software, scheduled for July 2024, on its existing online platform.
The research will bring us closer to producing AI-generated videos that are indistinguishable from manually created content, he says.
“This really is the Holy Grail of video production, and given how quickly AI is evolving, I expect we'll get to this stage within months, not years,” he says.
