AI-generated beer ad contains happy monstrosities and goes viral
AI-generated beer ad contains happy monstrosities and goes viral
Enlarge / A still image of "Synthetic Summer", a beer advertisement generated by the 'IA.
privateisland.tv
While many fear a future where AI-powered media becomes indistinguishable from mainstream media, destroying society and/or civilization in the process, we are not there yet. Exhibit A comes in the form of a surreal AI-generated beer ad that went viral over the weekend.
Title "Synthetic Summer", the 30-second video first appeared on Instagram about a week ago, created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle of a London-based production company called Privateisland.tv. The pair weren't available for comment before this story was published, but judging by the looks of the video, it looks like they likely created it using the new AI model Gen- 2 from Runway, which can create short video clips based on written prompts similar to how Stable Broadcast can create still images.
In the video, over a loud, "All Star" crowd backing track from Smash Mouth, we see mock people partying at a stereotypical American barbecue, sometimes physically merging with impressionist beer vessels. The women laugh, mouths agape. Beer glasses turn into beer cans. The flaming grates achieve columnar fire tornado status and arc across the courtyard. It's a surreal vision of hell that's both familiar and incredibly alien.
Why is this so weird? Currently, AI video generators are still primitive. As their creators train the models, they work from a much smaller set of source material than still image AI synthesis models, and the models are considerably more computationally expensive. . The impressionistic view of beer advertisements likely stems from the absorption of the essence of actual beer advertisements into the Gen-2 dataset. Runway did not disclose the dataset used to train Gen-2, but in the article for Gen-1 (an earlier model), he cited "an internal dataset of 240 million images and a custom dataset of 6.4 million video clips".
We've been experimenting with Gen-2 (which is currently in a closed testing phase), and generating even weirdly alien clips like these still requires human perseverance, going through and deleting many generations to even get a result correct. Even then, the resulting clip is only a few seconds long. In the case of Synthetic Summer, Privateisland.tv generated the clips, selected the best ones, and pieced together the segments into a sequence, adding music and sound effects.
But wait, beer isn't the only product fictionally advertised by the AI for memetic purposes. On April 24, someone called "Pizza Later" tweeted a largely AI-generated video for a fictional restaurant called "Pepperoni Hug Spot" that includes distorted video clips of people eating pizza generated by Runway's Gen-2 . In addition, its creator would have generated the script with GPT-4, used Midjourney for stills and a voiceover by Eleven Labs. They put everything together using Adobe After Effects.
Enlarge / A still image of "Synthetic Summer", a beer advertisement generated by the 'IA.
privateisland.tv
While many fear a future where AI-powered media becomes indistinguishable from mainstream media, destroying society and/or civilization in the process, we are not there yet. Exhibit A comes in the form of a surreal AI-generated beer ad that went viral over the weekend.
Title "Synthetic Summer", the 30-second video first appeared on Instagram about a week ago, created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle of a London-based production company called Privateisland.tv. The pair weren't available for comment before this story was published, but judging by the looks of the video, it looks like they likely created it using the new AI model Gen- 2 from Runway, which can create short video clips based on written prompts similar to how Stable Broadcast can create still images.
In the video, over a loud, "All Star" crowd backing track from Smash Mouth, we see mock people partying at a stereotypical American barbecue, sometimes physically merging with impressionist beer vessels. The women laugh, mouths agape. Beer glasses turn into beer cans. The flaming grates achieve columnar fire tornado status and arc across the courtyard. It's a surreal vision of hell that's both familiar and incredibly alien.
Why is this so weird? Currently, AI video generators are still primitive. As their creators train the models, they work from a much smaller set of source material than still image AI synthesis models, and the models are considerably more computationally expensive. . The impressionistic view of beer advertisements likely stems from the absorption of the essence of actual beer advertisements into the Gen-2 dataset. Runway did not disclose the dataset used to train Gen-2, but in the article for Gen-1 (an earlier model), he cited "an internal dataset of 240 million images and a custom dataset of 6.4 million video clips".
We've been experimenting with Gen-2 (which is currently in a closed testing phase), and generating even weirdly alien clips like these still requires human perseverance, going through and deleting many generations to even get a result correct. Even then, the resulting clip is only a few seconds long. In the case of Synthetic Summer, Privateisland.tv generated the clips, selected the best ones, and pieced together the segments into a sequence, adding music and sound effects.
But wait, beer isn't the only product fictionally advertised by the AI for memetic purposes. On April 24, someone called "Pizza Later" tweeted a largely AI-generated video for a fictional restaurant called "Pepperoni Hug Spot" that includes distorted video clips of people eating pizza generated by Runway's Gen-2 . In addition, its creator would have generated the script with GPT-4, used Midjourney for stills and a voiceover by Eleven Labs. They put everything together using Adobe After Effects.
Enlarge / A still image of "Synthetic Summer", a beer advertisement generated by the 'IA.
privateisland.tv
