I couldn’t get my hands on Zhipu AI’s Ying or ByteDance’s Jimeng outside of China. But I spent some time playing around with Kuaishou’s and Shengshu’s offerings, and the results showed fleeting moments of mind-boggling promise.
NIGHTMARISH AI CLIPS
Still, most of the videos I generated were very brief clips of uncanny content that struggled with human faces, movement and basic principles of physics. It’s still in its infancy, but these clips felt useless, and just more fodder for a hype-over-performance thesis.
My favourite creation was a realistic grey-striped tabby cat eating a bowl of ramen in outer space from Kling (my prompt was: “Can you make a realistic video of a grey-striped tabby cat eating ramen in outer space?”), but it added a creepy human hand to help the kitty slurp the noodles with chopsticks.
Vidu gave me an incredibly lifelike shot of two lovers in the cinematic style of legendary director Wong Kar Wai, but it also removed clothing (from the shoulders up) in my own headshot when prompted. (When I asked the Kling tool to remove my jacket and shirt from a photo of myself it did not obey my prompt command).
Kuaishou has said that it will use Kling to make a fantasy short film, but it’s hard to picture this being anything remotely watchable with the technology as finicky as it was when I used it. A clip I made of a woman breakdancing was nightmarish. An animated video I generated had a beautiful background but an incomprehensible figure flying over it.
It also took me roughly five minutes to generate a five-second clip, so imagine how many hours it would take to make a longer video, not including the painstaking post-production and editing.
Source: CNA
