AI Videos Are Freaky and Weird Now. But Where Are They Headed?

The short videos give the impression of a flipbook, jumping shakily from one surreal frame to the next. They're the result of internet meme-makers playing with the first widely available text-to-video AI generators, and they depict impossible scenarios like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson eating rocks and French president Emmanuel Macron sifting through and chewing on garbage, or warped versions of the mundane, like Paris Hilton taking a selfie. This new wave of AI-generated videos has definite echoes of Dall-E, which swept the internet last summer when it performed the same trick with still images. Less than a year later, those wonky Dall-E images are almost indistinguishable from reality, raising two questions: Will AI-generated video advance as quickly, and will it have a place in Hollywood? ModelScope, a video generator hosted by AI firm Hugging Face, allows people to type a few words and receive a startling, wonky video in return. Runway, the AI company that cocreated the image generator Stable Diffusion, announced a text-to-video generator in late March, but it has not made it widely available to the public.