Tech giant Meta has unveiled a partnership with horror film production company Blumhouse to road-test its latest AI video tool. The program, known as Movie Gen, was announced earlier this month though Meta said it was still being developed and would not be added to publicly available products until next year. Meta announced that it had been working with filmmakers from Blumhouse - known for producing franchises like “Paranormal Activity”, “The Purge” and “Insidious” - to refine and improve the tool.

Oscar-winner Casey Affleck, who was also given early access to Movie Gen, praised it in a promotional video as “more like a collaborator than it is like a tool”. The advance of AI was one of the flashpoints during last year’s writers’ strike in Hollywood, where creatives feared that studios would use AI tools to create scripts or even replace actors. But Blumhouse founder Jason Blum said he welcomed the chance to test the program while it was still being developed.

Leigh Wannell and Mike Flanagan attend Blumhouse at New York Comic Con at Jacob Javits Center.

“These are going to be powerful tools for directors, and it’s important to engage the creative industry in their development to make sure they’re best suited for the job,” he was quoted as saying in a Meta blog post. Meta also released a sleek three-minute video packaged like an advert made by filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty, framed around the idea that he should “hate” AI because it was going to wreck his industry.

Chaganty revisited a series of snippets he had filmed when he was a youngster, using Movie Gen to add aliens, or change the location from the countryside to Manhattan, or make it appear like he was in a bank vault rather than his family home. “I hate AI, but with a tool like this... I dunno... maybe I would’ve just dreamt a little bigger,” the voiceover concludes. Meta has hailed Movie Gen’s ability to create videos with sound from short prompts or photos as a major breakthrough, though the tool is still limited to 16-second clips. — AFP