Meta introduces Movie Gen, an AI-powered video generator

Meta’s modern artificial intelligence-based video generator generates high-resolution footage with sound, – the company announced today. The announcement comes months after rival OpenAI unveiled Sora, its text-to-video model — although public access to Movie Gen has yet to be made available.

Movie Gen uses the text you enter to automatically generate modern videos, as well as edit existing materials or photos. Recent York Times reports that the sound added to videos is also generated by artificial intelligence, matching the image to ambient noise, sound effects and background music. Videos can be generated in different aspect ratios.

In addition to generating modern clips, Meta claims that Movie Gen can also create custom videos from images or take existing videos and change various elements of them. One example provided by the company shows a still photo of a woman’s head; the added video shows her sitting in a pumpkin patch and having a drink.

Movie Gen can also be used to edit existing footage and change styles and transitions or add things that didn’t exist before. In one example shared by Meta, a relatively innocuous video of an illustrated runner is edited using artificial intelligence in various ways: in one frame, he holds pom-poms. In another, the background was changed to depict a desert. In the third, the runner is wearing a dinosaur costume. Changes can be made using text prompts.

Nearly two years after AI’s powerful image and video generators entered the mainstream, AI companies have taken the technology further: In just the past six months, major tech companies like Google and OpenAI have been working on similar tools along with smaller startups . Sora OpenAI, first announced in February, it has still not been released to the public; this week’s co-host working on a video generator left the company and joined Google.

Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, writes in Topics that the company “[isn’t] ready to release it as a product anytime soon” because it is still pricey and the generation time is too long.

Creators such as filmmakers, photographers, artists, writers and actors are also concerned about the impact of AI generators on their livelihoods, and AI has been central to several strikes, including the historic Joint Hollywood Strikes organized by the Screen Actors Guild – American Television Federation and Broadcast Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America (WGA) last year.