philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Do AI video-generators dream of San Pedro? Madonna among early adopters of AI’s next wave

Whenever Madonna sings the 1980s hit “La Isla Bonita” on her concert tour, moving images of swirling, sunset-tinted clouds play on the giant arena screens behind her.

To get that ethereal look, the pop legend embraced a still-uncharted branch of generative artificial intelligence – the text-to-video tool. Type some words — say, “surreal cloud sunset” or “waterfall in the jungle at dawn” — and an instant video is made. ...

Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela said while some see these tools as a “magical device that you type a word and somehow it conjures exactly what you had in your head,” the most effective approaches are by creative professionals looking for an upgrade to the decades-old digital editing software they're already using. ...

“The common thread of a lot of use cases is people use it as a way of augmenting or speeding up something they could have done before." ...

“What diffusion models do is they reverse that process,” said Phillip Isola, an associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They kind of take the randomness and they congeal it back into the volume. That's the way of going from randomness to content. And that’s how you can make random videos.” ...

Generating video is more complicated than still images because it needs to take into account temporal dynamics, or how elements within the video change over time and across sequences of frames, said Daniela Rus, another MIT professor who directs its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ...

“I still believe in humans," said Waibel, the CMU professor. ”I still believe that it will end up being a symbiosis where you get some AI proposing something and a human improves or guides it. Or the humans will do it and the AI will fix it up."

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