Meta announces Movie Gen, an AI-powered video generator

A new AI-powered video generator from Meta produces high-resolution footage including sound, the company announced today. The announcement comes several months after competitor OpenAI unveiled Sora, its text-to-video model – although public access to Movie Gen is not yet available.

Movie Gen uses text input to automatically generate new videos and edit existing footage or still images. The New York Times reports that the sound added to the videos is also AI-generated and the images are matched with ambient noise, sound effects and background music. The videos can be generated in different aspect ratios.

According to Meta, Movie Gen can not only generate new clips, but also create custom videos from images or record an existing video and modify various elements of it. An example shared by the company shows a statue of a woman; The added video shows her sitting in a pumpkin patch and sipping a drink.

Movie Gen can also be used to edit existing footage and change the style and transitions or add things that weren't there before. In an example shared by Meta, a relatively innocuous video of a seemingly illustrated runner is edited in different ways using AI: In one image, he is holding pom-poms. In another, the background was edited to represent a desert. In a third, the runner wears a dinosaur costume. Changes can be made via text prompts.

Nearly two years after powerful AI image and video generators hit the mainstream, AI companies have continued to advance the technology: in the last six months alone, major tech companies like Google and OpenAI have been working on similar tools alongside smaller startups. OpenAI's Sora, first announced in February, has still not been publicly released; This week, a co-leader who worked on the video generator left the company to join Google.

Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, writes in Threads that the company “[isn’t] “I am ready to launch this as a product soon” as it is still expensive and the generation time is too long.

Creatives such as filmmakers, photographers, artists, writers and actors are also concerned about how AI generators will impact their livelihoods, and AI has been a central part of several strikes, including the historic joint Hollywood strikes by the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America (WGA) last year.