Instagram invites creators to alter videos with new AI editing tools

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AI Puppets: A recently introduced AI “research model” is nearly ready for production, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced. The possibilities seem endless – just like the likelihood that the photo-sharing service may soon become a bot-fueled affair, we presume.

Mosseri recently teased new editing features that will soon be available for Instagram videos. Users will be able to leverage Movie Gen, Meta’s AI-powered video generation model, to make substantial edits to the videos they upload to the platform.

Movie Gen is Meta’s early AI research model, Mosseri said, but it will likely be available to Instagram users next year. The model can change nearly any aspect of a video using a simple text prompt. The brief teaser posted by Instagram’s CEO shows Movie Gen’s ability to alter the subject’s outfit or background environment, add new objects to the scene, and more.

For example, a teaser shows Movie Gen transforming Mosseri into a puppet and adding a gold chain around his neck, all while keeping the rest of his outfit unchanged. These effects appear seamless and visually coherent, with no noticeable artifacts or distortions in the (very) short video clip.

When Movie Gen was introduced last October, Meta highlighted its ability to generate realistic video and audio content based on users’ text prompts. While the model won’t be released for external development, it will become a core tool for social network “creators.”

AI models trained for video generation are usually introduced with a very specific selection of successful creations, while the nightmarish failed results are properly hidden in the backstage. OpenAI introduced Sora to much fanfare, but the very first productions of the AI service didn’t exactly take the world by storm. Community feedback was overwhelmingly negative in most early cases, but we’ve heard it’s gotten significantly better in a matter of months.

Instagram isn’t the photo sharing network it once was, as the platform has been invaded by bots and fake accounts over the past couple of years. Meta doesn’t seem concerned with the growing, blatantly clear bot issue, though. The company has other priorities now, like cloning users’ personalities into AI-powered chatbots that can improve “engagement” with uninterested strangers.