While many worry about a time in the future when artificial intelligence (AI)-generated media is essentially the same as traditional media, destroying civilization and/or society in the process, this time is still a ways off. A bizarre AI-generated beer commercial that went viral over the weekend serves as Exhibit A.
The 30-second film, titled «Synthetic Summer,» was made by Helen Power and Chris Boyle of the London-based production company Privateisland.tv and debuted on Instagram approximately a week ago. The two declined requests for comment prior to the publication of this article, but based on the appearance of the video, it seems likely that they produced it using Runway’s new Gen-2 AI model, which can produce brief video clips in response to written instructions similarly to how Stable Diffusion can produce still images.
In the video, which is set to Smash Mouth’s «All Star» and a boisterous crowd backing track, we witness fictitious partygoers enjoying a conventional American backyard cookout, occasionally physically fusing with fictitious beer cans. Ladies chuckle while gaping. Cans of beer change into glasses of beer. Grills that are on fire become columnar fire tornadoes and arc across the yard. It is an astonishingly strange and simultaneously familiar surrealist depiction of hell.
Why is it so strange? AI video generators are still in their infancy at the moment. Compared to still picture AI synthesis models, the models’ designers have a much smaller amount of data from which to train the models, and running the models costs significantly more money. The impressionistic perception of beer advertisements is probably the result of Gen-2’s data set capturing the essence of actual beer commercials. Although Runway has not revealed the data set used to train Gen-2, it did mention «an internal dataset of 240M images and a custom dataset of 6.4M video clips» in the paper for Gen-1 (an earlier model).
Generating even bizarrely alien films like this still requires human tenacity, going through and discarding numerous generations to reach even a passable outcome. This is something we’ve experimented with with Gen-2 (which is now in a limited testing phase). The final clip is barely a few seconds long even then. For Synthetic Summer, Privateisland.tv created the clips, picked the finest ones, and then put the pieces in order while incorporating music and sound effects.
Wait, there’s more than just beer being advertised in fiction by AI for memetic purposes. On April 24, a user going by the handle «Pizza Later» uploaded a video that was primarily artificial intelligence (AI) generated and had distorted video clips of individuals eating pizza made by Runway’s Gen-2 for a fictional eatery called «Pepperoni Cuddle Spot.» Additionally, according to reports, the script was written using GPT-4, Midjourney was used for the still images, and Eleven Labs provided the voiceover. They combined everything using Adobe After Effects.
Definitely wasted 3 hours of my life making this today… Everything is AI from the VO to the video and images. Assembled in After Effects. More info below. pic.twitter.com/CXv6gWM8gj
These human-initiated and human-assembled works demonstrate that generative AI still has a ways to go before it can automatically dazzle the populace with memes that change society. We may be able to find some solace in the fact that people are still operating these alien machines. Maybe.
The AI-generated Will Smith eating spaghetti, which will always be remembered as our first AI-generated video meme nightmare, is still superior than both videos in terms of its purity and majesty.