September

Yesterday, Meta’s AI Research Team announced Make-A-Video, a “state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text.”

We’re pleased to introduce Make-A-Video, our latest in #GenerativeAI research! With just a few words, this state-of-the-art AI system generates high-quality videos from text prompts.

Have an idea you want to see? Reply w/ your prompt using #MetaAI and we’ll share more results. pic.twitter.com/q8zjiwLBjb

— Meta AI (@MetaAI) September 29, 2022

Like he did for the Stable Diffusion data, Simon Willison created a Datasette browser to explore WebVid-10M, one of the two datasets used to train the video generation model, and quickly learned that all 10.7 million video clips were scraped from Shutterstock, watermarks and all.

In addition to the Shutterstock clips, Meta also used 10 million video clips from this 100M video dataset from Microsoft Research Asia. It’s not mentioned on their GitHub, but if you dig into the paper, you learn that every clip came from over 3 million YouTube videos.

So, in addition to a massive chunk of Shutterstock’s video collection, Meta is also using millions of YouTube videos collected by Microsoft to make its text-to-video AI.

Here’s a little mystery for you: there are multiple reports of a mysterious voice grunting, moaning, and groaning on American Airlines’ in-flight announcement systems, sometimes lasting the duration of the flight — and nobody knows who’s responsible or how they did it.

Actor/producer Emerson Collins was the first to post video, from his Denver flight on September 6:

The weirdest flight ever.
These sounds started over the intercom before takeoff and continued throughout the flight.
They couldn’t stop it, and after landing still had no idea what it was. pic.twitter.com/F8lJlZHJ63

— Emerson Collins (@ActuallyEmerson) September 23, 2022

As AI-generated art platforms like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion explode in popularity, online communities devoted to sharing human-generated art are forced to make a decision: should AI art be allowed?

On Sunday, popular furry art community Fur Affinity announced that AI-generated art was not allowed because it “lacked artistic merit.” (In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned.) Their new guidelines are very clear:

Content created by artificial intelligence is not allowed on Fur Affinity.

AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists’ work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.

Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don’t believe it’s in our community’s best interests to allow AI generated content on the site.