Facebook parent company Meta just released an AI system that automatically generates video clips of anything you can imagine—and all it needs from you is a simple text prompt.
It’s called Make-A-Video, and it’s part of a category of tools called “generative AI” that businesses need to be paying attention to.
What it is
Meta’s Make-A-Video is an AI system that automatically generates video clips from text prompts. That means you type in a prompt (say, “a horse drinking water”), and the AI system automatically generates a video of that very thing. It can even generate the video in different styles (things like “surreal” or “stylized”).
- Once the system makes you a video, you can even generate variations of the ones you like for near-unlimited creative possibilities and variations.
- Today, Make-A-Video generates short snippets without audio, though we expect that to change as the technology progresses.
- Make-A-Video is not yet publicly available, but we expect that to change in due time, in a similar fashion to other generative AI tools like DALL-E 2, which went through a public testing period before being commercially released.
Why it matters
In Episode 20 of the Marketing AI Show, Marketing AI Institute founder/CEO Paul Roetzer and myself discussed why Make-A-Video matters for every person in marketing and business today.
- You will soon be able to create almost anything you want using AI. “What’s happening is we’re moving towards this ‘text-to-everything’ environment, where we’re going to be able to prompt a machine to create anything we can imagine,” says Roetzer. That means expect a world where anyone, regardless of skill level, can create videos, images, text, code, and much more simply by typing into a prompt window using the words they already know.
- The technology to do so is already here. “It’s really important for people to realize we’re not talking about 3-5 years out,” says Roetzer. “ We are talking about stuff that is here right now.” One example: Today, any marketer of any skill level can go use a machine to write a blog post paragraph-by-paragraph on any topic, adding AI-generated images as they go.
- Marketers and business leaders need to pay attention to this now. It’s not just about video. Or content. Or images. Recent rapid advances in AI language models already enable futuristic-sounding use cases that most marketers and leaders are not paying attention to. Things like: Chatbots that perfectly mimic celebrities (or your customers). Synthetic versions of people (such as your CEO) that engage with humans in a completely realistic way. “There are zero technical obstacles to doing these things today,” says Roetzer.
What to do about it
You can’t yet use Meta’s Make-A-Video, but you need to start understanding the category of AI tools it belongs to: generative AI. Here are a few ways to do that.
- Sign up for a generative AI tool like DALL-E 2 and begin testing it out to see what’s possible.
- Get the book. We talk more about the bigger picture opportunity for marketers, business, and AI in our book Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business.
Check out the full episode:
If you want to learn more about this and other important AI topics in the news, check out the full episode of the Marketing AI Show Episode 20: The AI Bill of Rights, Building AI-Driven Companies, and Meta’s Make-a-Video.
Mike Kaput
As Chief Content Officer, Mike Kaput uses content marketing, marketing strategy, and marketing technology to grow and scale traffic, leads, and revenue for Marketing AI Institute. Mike is the co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing and the Future of Business (Matt Holt Books, 2022). See Mike's full bio.