Meta Unveils ‘Movie Gen,’ Tool That Creates 16-Second AI-Generated HD Videos
Meta has just unwrapped a new potential tool for — or threat to — Hollywood.
The internet giant, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, on Friday announced Movie Gen: a new AI tool that based on a text prompt can create realistic-looking videos clips (with synchronized AI-generated audio) that are up to 16 seconds in length at 16 frames per second. According to Meta, Movie Gen also can generate personalized AI videos using a single photo. Meta said it is still testing Movie Gen and did not provide details on how or when it would be available publicly.
More from Variety
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO and chairman, shared a video created by Movie Gen of himself doing leg presses — transported into different fake milieus, including one scene in which he’s dressed as a Roman centurion — on Instagram. “Every day is leg day with Meta’s new MovieGen AI model that can create and edit videos. Coming to Instagram next year,” Zuckerberg wrote.
A rep for Meta said, “While Movie Gen is purely AI research today, the models are essential to helping us build AI features that give you new ways to create and share highly engaging content on Facebook and Instagram.”
Meta shared multiple clips created using Movie Gen, including a surfing koala, a baby hippo swimming in a river (a nod to internet meme-celebrity Moo Deng), and a “woman DJ” spinning records. The company didn’t detail what sources of data it used for Movie Gen, saying only, “We’ve trained these models on a combination of licensed and publicly available data sets.”
“Whether a person is an aspiring filmmaker hoping to make it in Hollywood or a creator who enjoys making videos for their audience, we believe everyone should have access to tools that help enhance their creativity,” Meta said in a blog post announcing the tool.
Here’s a 10-second clip of the swimming baby hippo generated by Movie Gen:
Other similar text-to-video systems include OpenAI’s Sora (which is not available publicly yet either). The advent of realistic-looking gen-AI video platforms has alarmed some in the media and entertainment biz, including Tyler Perry — who, citing Sora specifically, said he was suspending a planned $800 million expansion to his Atlanta studios.
Meta outlines more technical detail for Movie Gen in a 92-page research paper, available at this link.
Here’s Zuckerberg’s Instagram post with video created by Movie Gen:
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
