Earlier this year, Meta previewed Movie Gen, an AI video editing tool that looks impressively realistic (at least in the sample clips it released). However, at the time, Meta said it was still a research project, with no immediate plans to make the features available to users.
But now it looks like Movie Gen could be coming to Instagram soon. Instagram’s top executive Adam Mosseri posted a short video previewing the kind of seamless AI editing that will eventually be possible, saying the company is “hoping to bring it to Instagram next year.”
In the clip, Mosseri says Meta is “working on some really exciting AI tools” for video creators. “You should be able to do whatever you want with your videos,” he says. “You should be able to change your outfit, or change the context you’re sitting in, or add a chain — anything you can think of.”
During the short clip, Mosseri’s background and outfit change several times, including a brief shot where he looks like a Muppet-inspired character. During the clip, the transitions look very smooth without obvious AI artifacts.
Of course, this won’t necessarily be the case once Movie Gen is actually available and videos of its capabilities won’t be entirely controlled by Meta. But if it works like Mosseri’s teaser video, it could open up some interesting possibilities for Instagram creators.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Meta is teasing the feature just days after OpenAI released its video generation model to subscribers. Meta has repeatedly said that it wants its AI assistant to be the “most used” in the world and in an update published today, the company said Meta AI has “approximately” 600 million monthly users.
Unfortunately, Mosseri didn’t indicate when the Movie Gen features might actually arrive on Instagram, other than sometime in 2024. But he added that there will be “more to come” from the company.
Meta has removed its AI-generated profiles from Facebook Instagram, the company has confirmed, after the AI characters prompted widespread outrage and ridicule from users on social media.
The AI-generated profiles, which were labeled “AI managed by Meta,” were set to launch in September 2023, rolling out alongside the company’s celebrity-branded AI chatbots (also discontinued). Meta doesn’t appear to have updated any of these profiles for several months, and the pages went largely unnoticed until this week, following an interview published by the Financial Times with Meta’s VP of generative AI, Connor Hayes.
In the interview, Hayes talked about the company’s goal to eventually fill its services with AI-generated profiles that can interact with people and “act in the same way that accounts do.” Those comments drew attention to existing fMeta-created AI profiles and, well, users weren’t exactly impressed with what they found.