The tech giant is among the many companies building technology that could remake Hollywood--or help spread disinformation.
This video’s A.I. prompt: “The camera is behind a man. The man is shirtless, wearing a green cloth around his waist. He is barefoot. With a fiery object in each hand, he creates wide circular motions. A calm sea is in the background. The atmosphere is mesmerizing, with the fire dance.”
In February, the artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI unveiled technology called Sora that let people generate photorealistic videos--like woolly mammoths trotting through a snowy meadow--simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen.
Because of concerns over how the technology might be misused, and perhaps the high cost of operating the technology, OpenAI has not yet released Sora beyond a small group of testers. But other companies are racing to release similar technology.
On Friday, the tech giant Meta unveiled a set of A.I. tools, called Meta Movie Gen, for automatically generating videos, instantly editing them and synchronizing them with A.I.-generated sound effects, ambient noise and background music.
This is the prompt used for the audio: “Rustling leaves and snapping twigs, with an orchestral music track.”
“Video is nothing without audio,” said Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative A.I., said in an interview.
A demonstration included short videos--created in minutes--of a man in a poncho standing over a waterfall, a snake slithering through a forest and a person riding an all-terrain vehicle across the desert. Each included music as well as sound effects.
The new system also let people upload photos of themselves and instantly weave these images to moving videos.
It generates 16-frame-per-second videos that last for up to 16 seconds. In some cases, these videos are flawed. During one demonstration for The New York Times, when asked to generate a video of a dog in a park talking on a cellphone, it mistakenly grafted a human hand onto the phone.
