I know pretty much nothing about video. I mean, other than recording a basic video with my phone.
But I heard text-to-video is the newest hot thing in generative AIs, and wanted to try out one, just to see what we are dealing with.
I typed "text to video AIs" in Presearch, and took the first non-ad result, which was Fliki.ai.
Made a free account, which gives me access to 5 minutes of credits per month. I'm not sure when these credits will be used because I created a video that should have used some credits. Maybe the credits accounting is updated at the end of every day or something.
Anyway, as I was saying, I created a test video from an idea, as it is called on Fliki. Instead of an idea, one could use alternative options like a blog post, a Powerpoint presentation, a tweet, or a product to start with. Or even create a blank file. But why would you use this tool, if not for the AI?
The idea I fed the AI was very basic: "enjoyable walk on the beach". Three words and 2 fillers. With that, it created a 1 minute+ video, with several scenes, a female voice-over (changeable), and a subtitle throughout the whole video piece.
Background audio of the video, the script, and videos (I chose stock video, but could have been AI-generated art) on every scene could have been changed, and I even changed a few scene videos that didn't exactly match what I had in mind. It used, for example, a video of winter scenery in one of the scenes, probably because two people were walking in the video.
Screenshot from inside Fliki.ai
More scenes can be added, deleted, or their order changed.
So, what was the AI's part? Everything. I just gave it the idea "enjoyable walk on the beach". The audio track, voice-over, script, and video selections for scenes, and subtitles, were all done by the AI, after a few seconds of processing.
Yes, I've done a few tweaks afterward, and that wouldn't pass for a professional video without someone who knows what he's doing operating the software, but it shows the power of this tool (and others like it).
Screenshot from VLC media player on my laptop
Here's something I remarked while checking out its menu. It has something called "voice cloning", available for premium users: 2 minutes of you talking and it can say anything using your own voice. The problem I see here is if someone starts cloning other people's voices and using them to say whatever they want (and I've seen these kinds of incidents start to multiply).
We are at a time in history when generative AIs change at an exponential rate and will have a profound impact on all of us, the economy, and society. Be ready!