Meta announces Movie Gen: an AI engine for creating movies

The Meta company announced this evening (Friday) a new tool for creating movies based on artificial intelligence called Movie Gen, which creates short, high-quality videos from scratch, according to textual instructions, or allows you to edit existing movies and change elements in them intuitively. The announcement came several months after Open AI unveiled its Sora video model.

According to the announcement, Movie Gen is capable of producing high-quality videos that also include artificial intelligence-generated sound. Users can provide textual instructions, and the tool will generate video accordingly, including sound effects, background music, and ambient noises that match the visual content being created. In addition, Movie Gen is able to work with different video formats, including a variable screen ratio, which allows the creation of content suitable for a wide variety of platforms.

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One of the main innovations of Movie Gen is the possibility to combine existing images or video and add new elements to them, or change their style and content items through simple textual instructions. For example, in the video shown during the announcement, a static portrait image of a woman was transformed into a video in which she is seen sitting in a pumpkin field with a drinking glass in her hand. The resulting result is the creation of a dynamic video based on a static image, along with the integration of new content at the user’s request.

Another example provided by Meta involves a simple video of a character running, then changed to different styles – from adding pompoms to her hands to changing the background to a desert background. The changes to the video were made using only textual instructions, which demonstrates Movie Gen’s capabilities to provide exceptional flexibility when it comes to video editing.

Beyond the video creation capabilities, Meta also introduced improvements to the user interface and editing processes of Movie Gen with an emphasis on improved design and simplicity of operation. Despite the tool’s huge potential for creating creative content, there are also concerns from industries such as film, photography and art about the impact of AI tools on the jobs and livelihoods of traditional creative professions. Artificial intelligence is at the center of many industrial struggles, including the famous strike by the writers’ and actors’ unions in Hollywood, which highlighted the impact of artificial intelligence on creative and cultural industries.

Meta stated that Movie Gen’s model was trained on a combination of licensed and public data, but declined to specify exactly which databases were used to train the system. Issues of copyright and the use of databases without authorization raise questions about the transparency and ethics in the use of artificial intelligence, when other platforms have already found themselves in legal problems due to the unauthorized use of content from sites such as YouTube.

The Movie Gen tool from Meta faces several competitors in the field of artificial intelligence for video creation. One of the biggest competitors is Open AI, the advance in the field of artificial intelligence that also created ChatGPT. The company announced in February 2024 its Sora video creation model. Although OpenAI’s model has not yet been released for public use, it has posed a competitive challenge in the field of text-based video creation.