Meta announces AI-based tool for generating video from text

Facebook parent company Meta Thursday announced Make a Video, an online tool that generates short movie clips based on a text description.

Why it matters: Text-to-still-image AI systems, including DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and rival projects from Google, Meta and others, have advanced with great speed over the past year. Now, Meta appears to have won the race to extend AI-based content creation to videos.

Details: As with the still-image generators, all people have to do is describe something they want to see in a verbal prompt and the system returns a visual result — in this case, a video.

• Make a Video can also create videos from images or take existing videos and create new ones that are similar, Meta said.
• Meta is not yet making the tool available for public testing but plans to do so by November.

The big picture: AI image generators have wowed observers, but they also raise significant concerns regarding ownership, privacy, the data sets they're based on and the impact their advent may have on artists' income and employment.

What they're saying: "We want to be thoughtful about how we build new generative AI systems like this," Meta said in a blog post. "We are openly sharing this generative AI research and results with the community for their feedback, and will continue to use our responsible AI framework to refine and evolve our approach to this emerging technology."

Go deeper: The Washington Post tells the story of research work at OpenAI that pioneered much of this new field.