SAN FRANCISCO — In February, artificial intelligence startup OpenAI unveiled technology called Sora that lets 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, tech giant Meta unveiled a set of AI tools, called Meta Movie Gen, for automatically generating videos, instantly editing them, and synchronizing them with AI-generated sound effects, ambient noise, and background music.
“Video is nothing without audio,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, said in an interview.
Given a short text description of an image, one tool creates a video. Then, given another description of some sounds, a second tool adds the audio.
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 into 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.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, sees the technology as a way to accelerate the work of Hollywood moviemakers and online creators. Like OpenAI, it has started testing the technology with a small group of professionals.
(The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
The two companies are among many developing this kind of tool; others include startups like Runway and Pika and tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Though many believe the technology could speed up the work of seasoned moviemakers, it could also replace less experienced digital artists.
Other experts worry that the technology could become a quick and inexpensive way of creating online disinformation, making it even harder to tell what’s real on the internet.
While OpenAI and other companies have been reluctant to release some AI technologies amid concerns about disinformation and other potential risks, Meta has been quicker to share them freely, arguing that the risks are not as great as they may seem.
Al-Dahle said Meta would tag videos produced by the system with watermarks that identified them as being generated by AI. But such tags can be removed.
He also said the company was still testing the technology to better understand what the risks might be and how they could be mitigated.
Meta’s demonstration did not include spoken words. But many companies, including OpenAI, are developing AI technologies that can instantly re-create human voices.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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