Make-A-Video: AI system that generates videos from text

True, but the attention layers still need to be able to look at all the shots - for example to make sure the background of a room shown at the start of the movie is the same as the background of the same room at the end.

Obviously you could do 'human assisted' movie making where humans decide the storyboard and make directions for each shot, and then that isn't necessary.

That is a non-sequitor.

If you took an average working-class, "blue collar" person from hundreds of years ago, they would speak very differently from how those books are written.

With DALL-E for pictures and this for video, I'm starting to wonder if Neal Stephenson was onto something when he wrote Fall, or Dodge in Hell.

I know it's not the most loved Stephenson book, but bear with me (spoilers warning). The book features a couple of major plot points that feel increasingly prophetic:

- A global hoax, carefully coordinated, convinces a good chunk of the world that Moab has been destroyed by an atomic bomb. This is managed via a flurry of confusion, thoughtfully deployed pre-recorded video footage, social media posts, and paid actors who don't realize the scope of the hoax at the time. Naturally, a massive chunk of the population refuses to believe that Moab still exists even after the hoax is exposed.

- A group of hackers deploy and open source a massive suite of spambots that inundate social media and news sources with nonstop AI-generated misinformation to drown out real-world conversations about a topic. This is used specifically to drown out real conversation about a single individual as a proof of concept, but soon after has repercussions for the entire net...

- Thanks to exactly this kind of spambot, the "raw" unfiltered internet becomes totally unusable. Those with means end up paying for filtering services to keep unwanted misinformation out of their perspective of the internet. Those without means... either don't use the internet, or work in factories where human eyes filter out content that can't be filtered by AI.

I worry that exactly these kinds of developments are speeding us faster and faster down the road to a dystopian world where the "raw" internet is totally unusable. Right now, stuff like captcha and simple filters can keep out a lot of low-effort bot content on sites like Hacker News and niche forums (I think of home barista, bike forums, atlas, etc). Sites like Reddit are losing the war against bots and corporate propaganda; comment sections across the rest of the internet lost that war long ago, and just didn't realize it.

But those filters and moderators can only keep up with the onslaught of content for so long. What happens when GPT is used to spew millions of comments and posts at a forum from millions of ephemeral cloud IPs? And when DALL-E creates memes and photographic content? And when Make-a-Video enables those same spambots to inundate YouTube and Vimeo? It's clear that captchas are not long for this world either.

Will we see websites force more and more users to authenticate as a "real human" using their passport and government-issued ID? Maybe a Turing or Voight-Kampff test? And what does it mean when there's no longer a way to participate on the internet anonymously? As far as I can tell, limiting a site to only real human users doesn't guarantee quality -- all you have to do is look at Facebook to understand that. And somehow, despite being an incredibly easy target for bots and spam, niches of 4chan retain (racist, insane, and confusing) traces of genuine thought and conversation.

The internet has been such a valuable tool in my life, and I still love browsing blogs, forums, etc. to learn about unique people doing unique things. What happens when human-generated content is hard to come by and near impossible to distinguish from promotional AI garbage? I fear for my ability to discover new content in that world.

>> spam the internet with thousands and thousands of souless generated videos

Unfortunately, that's already happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7oiHtYCo0w

From what I can see, YouTube has done quite a bit of work to cleanup YouTube Kids, but it's kind of an arms race.

There's this worrying issue in AI ethics discussions where most people seem to assume the problems and dangers of AI are still off in the future, that as long as we don't have the malicious AGI of sci-fi stories, then AI and "lesser" algorithmically generated content isn't harming society.

I think that's not true at all. I think we've seen massive damage to social structures thanks to algorithmic feeds and generated content, already, for years now. I don't think, just because they aren't necessarily neural-network-based, doesn't make them something to not worry about.

So I don't see AI as a particularly, different, worrisome problem. It's an extension of an already existing, worrisome problem that most people have ignored beyond occasionally complaining about election results.

Very exciting to see the field progressing so quickly. I wonder how quickly it's going to move forward from here. Will we be generating coherent audio to accompany these videos soon? Will we have multi-scene videos in the next year? Ones with coherent plot? Can we get there just by scaling up, or are other advances needed? Excited to see what comes next!