Pikadditions Morph Your Reality Into AI Video

The lastest update from Pika.art lets you add AI into your videos with stunning results

Author

AI 4Humans
11 Feb

Today on AI For Humans The Newsletter!
We’re in love with Pikadditions
Every AI ad from this weekend’s Super Bowl
And a new report on AI usage by industry
Plus, our can’t-miss AI feature of the week!

Welcome back to the AI For Humans Newsletter!

Jon Finger is an amazing AI creator and filmmaker and specializes in posting videos where he’s interacting with AI characters. And he’s very good at it.

This week he posted about Pika.art’s new Pikadditions feature and, as you can see below, he’s proven that we’ve taken yet ANOTHER big step in the world of AI video.

Pikadditions basically allows you to take a video that you shoot (or ostensibly from somewhere else), add in an AI character and then seamlessly blends the two together. And, to be honest, it’s kind of magical.

For my first experiment, I took a simple video of myself sitting on the couch in my home and grabbed an image of Death Note’s Ryuk and combined them into this:

The process is dead simple (upload an image and a video) and then either use their templated copy for the prompt (which specifically asks to “come up with a natural and engaging way to fit the object into the video”) or write your own and send it away. Right now, the free gens are taking FOREVER but stick with it long enough and they’ll show up.

Why does any of this really matter? This might seem like a toy for now but what we’re looking at is one of the first examples of a truly powerful consumer-based VFX platform. The biggest thing this allows for is consistent characters and easy mixed reality AI video. For now, it’s still just for small shots but you really can start to tell stories with this sort of thing already. Check out the lil video I made with some weird dude who showed up at my house.

Go give it a shot right now and @ us to let us know what you make!

See you Thursday!

-Gavin (and Kevin)

3 Things To Know

The Super Bowl Nearly Overflowed with AI
It wasn’t quite the Crypto Bowl, but Sunday we got 5 ads for AI products:

  • Google - Punched us right in the feels with a Gemini-driven mock interview

  • OpenAI - Altman called it “an ode to the history of technology, and human potential” - a cool visualization but a bit lifeless

  • Meta - Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt, and Kris Jenner walk into an art gallery (with Meta Ray Bans on)

  • Salesforce - Matthew McConaughey wants you to use AI for turn-by-turn airport terminal directions

  • GoDaddy - They probably take the cake here with a very funny ad featuring Walton Goggins’ Google Glasses

Perhaps the more interesting question: which ads used AI in the production process? Holland America used AI imagery to promote time-traveling boats, but everywhere you looked Sunday from the cel shading in player photos to Seal seals it was hard not to see where AI could be used.

Altman Calls Out Looming Job Displacement
“Three Observations”, a new post on Altman’s blog: 1) AI prices fall 10x every 12 months, 2) Linear increases in intelligence benefit society exponentially, and 3) The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of resources used to train and run it. But the bit most people are calling out is an acknowledgement that “…the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up.” It’s a concern that’s getting more real by the day.

Anthropic Report Spills Who’s Using AI in their Job
An interesting paper on what types of work Claude is being used for, relative to the percentage of US workers who do that work. Software development usage is off the charts, but entertainment & media folks come second, with a whopping 10% of Claude usage falling into this category despite it only representing 1.4% of the US workforce.


Already a leader in AI software dev, Replit now launched a mobile app to… make mobile apps. And it actually works really well. 10 interesting examples here rounded up by Min Choi.

It points to a future where building software is trivial. One of those skills kids take for granted, the notion that everyone’s a software developer!

But similar to creative tools, putting the tool into someone’s hands is very different from creating something worthwhile.

So… we made a marble racer. But it got here in just two prompts. Two prompts!

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