Meta has announced Movie Gen, its new prompt-based video and image generation platform, in the most Q3 2024 manner possible — with a cute animation of a baby hippo bumbling around. However, you don’t need to know who Moo Deng is to peer over Meta’s fence at their shiny new toy.
Peering, at least for now, is all that is possible but several interesting claims make us keen to get hold of the platform. Meta reckons its new AI-powered functions can turn a single image into a customised and functional video. That could be awesome or terrible, depending on what’s being rendered.
Movie Gen X
Every AI-interested company from Microsoft to Meta claims to have the most advanced agent with the shinest features and there’s little difference here. Meta reckons that Movie Gen beats out competitor products when evaluated by humans — a specific but important distinction, we feel. If everything the company is waving around proves accurate, Movie Gen might even prove useful for more than a tech demo.
The platform is supposed to generate video or images from prompts (which all its competitors can do) while setting “a new standard for immersive AI content” (the implication being that others are lacking). The text-prompted examples Meta provides are certainly slick, as are similarly executed video edits. Giving a runner a set of pompoms or changing the background with a line is more time-effective than learning how to use a video editor. Explaining to a manager that they can’t just lay off the entire editing team because Meta made a thing will be considerably more difficult.
But the ability to upload an image and use it as the basis for a custom creation will really thrill (or horrify). In theory, users could place anyone in any situation. This scenario will tell you a lot about your general outlook on life and can probably accurately pinpoint where you are on the optimism/pessimism spectrum. The added ability to include custom music and sound effects could turn Movie Gen into a serious contender for your time.
If and when it’s released to the public. Meta hasn’t said when or how regular people might use it. That announcement has been saved for another day, assuming it comes at all. When it does, have fun explaining to your HoD that yes, those designers really need to remain employed.