We Just Saw The Future of AI-Augmented Live Performance 🎥

The future of AI is... live performance... from human actors? A new demo from Runway has us rethinking the marriage of man and machine

Author

AI 4Humans
15 Oct

Today on AI For Humans The Newsletter!
Runway’s generative video applied to live performance
How AI may ruin society in order to save it 🤔
The new best AI video model is.. free??
Plus, our can’t-miss AI feature of the week!

Welcome back to the AI For Humans Newsletter!

On the heels of their deal with Lionsgate, Runway CEO CristĂłbal Valenzuela is making the rounds to media outlets discussing the future of Hollywood + Tech.

But the demo that caught our attention came from a live talk he gave at a Bloomberg conference, where they discuss using AI to augment an actor’s performance.

This is yet another example of generative AI coming for at least a part of Hollywood production — the mo-cap suit. Watch out Andy Serkis!

The real level up here is not what this is but who can do it. We’ve talked on the pod for some time about the idea that Generative AI tools are “raising the floor” for all creatives and allowing much smaller teams to make high quality content.

Is this as good as what WETA Digital could do? Not even close. But, if the creative is good and the effects are just good enough, I’d still watch the hell out of it.

We, as humans, connect with great storytelling and we’re about to get so many more stories that some of them will be incredible. Maybe quite a few.

Case in point, our favorite AI filmmaker NeuralViz dropped a new video last week and we’re still buzzing about how good it is.

“The Church of Z” is an epic alternative-history tale involving a cult, a fake documentary and an entirely strange gumball corporation. He uses the limitations of tools like Hedra (which is great but often gives you 4:3 square videos) to make it look like older TV and therefore much more believable. And he’s able to use these tools to make this entire video by himself in a single week.

It’s getting interesting out here folks. See you next week!

-Gavin & Kevin

3 Things To Know

How Gen-AI Could Aid Nearly Every Facet of Society
In stark contrast to the theatre of Cybertaxis and human-controlled robots, the CEO of Anthropic penned an essay discussing the near-future good AI could do for society. It’s good. So good we made a video about it. It comes at a time when silicon valley is hell-bent on manifesting our forthcoming AI deity at any cost, because it will surely wash away the sins we committed to get here? Right?

The New Hailuo Image-To-Video Is Scary Good (And Free)
Chinese AI company Minimax’s recently introduced image-to-video model is as good as any on the market today, and they’re giving it away for free. It comes at the same time that TikTok parent company ByteDance announced v2 of their own generative video platform. We still have some concerns around these Chinese models and their problematic training data, but they’re very technically impressive.

Thor minion image + a basic prompt: character holds up hammer and flies into the sky

Runway’s New First-And-Last Frame Feature
You can now set both the first and last frames of a Runway generated video, providing greater control over the generation. Think of this as image keyframes, defining checkpoints within a video generation. It’ll help small productions create more cohesive scenes, and large productions bring previs or storyboards to life.

We đź’› This - ChatGPT Canvas

What it is: A recent ChatGPT launch is putting Google Docs and MS Word on notice, and we can’t stop talking about it. It’s simply the best AI writing experience we’ve had to-date.

Why we love it: Having a conversation with an AI assistant alongside the document is a big upgrade. But the floating UI options feel like magic, and the sort of thing that ought to come standard in every document editor.

Polish the rough bits, change the length of a section, even rewrite it to a specific grade level, from kindergarten to graduate.

Hear ye, hear ye!

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