Skip to main content

Meta made DALL-E for video, and it’s both creepy and amazing

Meta unveiled a crazy artificial intelligence model that allows users to turn their typed descriptions into video. The system is called Make-A-Video and is the latest in a trend of AI generated content on the web.

The system accepts short descriptions like “a robot surfing a wave in the ocean” or “clown fish swimming through the coral reef” and dynamically generates a short GIF of the description. There are even three different styles of videos to choose from: surreal, realistic, and stylized.

An artist’s brush painting on a canvas close up

According to a Facebook post by Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, translating written text into video is much harder because of how video requires movement:

“It’s much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they’ll change over time. Make-A-Video solves this by adding a layer of unsupervised learning that enables the system to understand motion in the physical world and apply it to traditional text-to-image generation.”

A young couple walking in a heavy rain

Meta’s AI Research team wrote a paper describing how the system works and how it differs from current text-to-image (T2I) methods. Unlike other machine language models, Meta’s Text-to-Video (T2V) method doesn’t use pre-defined text-video pairs. For example, it doesn’t pair “man walking” with a video of an actual man walking.

If this sounds a lot like DALL-E, the popular T2I application, you wouldn’t be far off. Other T2I applications have rolled out since DALL-E gained popularity. TikTok released a filter in August called AI Greenscreen that generates painting style images based on the words you type.

A fluffy baby sloth with an orange knitted hat trying to figure out a laptop close up highly detailed studio lighting screen reflecting in its eye

AI-generated content has become quite buzzworthy within the last few years. Deepfake technology, machine learning techniques to replace a person’s face with another, is even used by visual effects studios for big budget shows like The Mandalorian.

In July, The Times mistakenly reported on a Ukrainian woman in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war. The problem is she wasn’t real.

The threat of AI probably isn’t a real threat, but projects like DALL-E and Make-A-Video are fun explorations into some of the interesting possibilities.

Editors' Recommendations

David Matthews
David is a freelance journalist based just outside of Washington D.C. specializing in consumer technology and gaming. He has…
I pitched my ridiculous startup idea to a robot VC
pitched startup to robot vc waterdrone

Aqua Drone. HighTides. Oh Water Drone Company. H2 Air. Drone Like A Fish. Whatever I called it, it was going to be big. Huge. Well, probably.

It was the pitch for my new startup, a company that promised to deliver one of the world’s most popular resources in the most high-tech way imaginable: an on-demand drone delivery service for bottled water. In my mind I was already picking out my Gulfstream private jet, bumping fists with Apple’s Tim Cook, and staging hostile takeovers of Twitter. I just needed to convince a panel of venture capitalists that I (and they) were onto a good thing.

Read more
Meta wants to supercharge Wikipedia with an AI upgrade
the wikipedia logo on a pink background

Wikipedia has a problem. And Meta, the not-too-long-ago rebranded Facebook, may just have the answer.

Let’s back up. Wikipedia is one of the largest-scale collaborative projects in human history, with more than 100,000 volunteer human editors contributing to the construction and maintenance of a mind-bogglingly large, multi-language encyclopedia consisting of millions of articles. Upward of 17,000 new articles are added to Wikipedia each month, while tweaks and modifications are continuously made to its existing corpus of articles. The most popular Wiki articles have been edited thousands of times, reflecting the very latest research, insights, and up-to-the-minute information.

Read more
Optical illusions could help us build the next generation of AI
Artificial intelligence digital eye closeup.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it’s actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece of paper. But your brain doesn’t comprehend it like that. Like some low-level hallucinatory experience, your mind trips out; perceiving the static image as the mouth of a black tunnel that’s moving towards you.

Responding to the verisimilitude of the effect, the body starts to unconsciously react: the eye’s pupils dilate to let more light in, just as they would adjust if you were about to be plunged into darkness to ensure the best possible vision.

Read more