The quality is quite high, but an observation is the direction they're taking these models correlates heavily to the usage demand of China vs the West. Specifically, they're immensely focused on t2v for action / high effect shots. There's one human reference shot in the entire release page, and that one doesn't focus on dialog at all.
For filmmakers I've talked to in the US, one of the biggest demands they have is v2v where they can carry over an actor's performance and insert it into whatever world they want. The movie market in China is somewhat different though - it's heavily oriented towards high action / high special effect movies. Consider this list of hollywood movies that have flopped in the US, but did great in China:
Warcraft (China: $225m box office, US: $47m)
Resident Evil (China: $159m, US: $27m)
xXx: Return of Xander Cage (China: $164m, US: $44m)
Pacific Rim: Uprising (China: $99m, US: $59m)
One read of this is that action movies / visual spectacles translate more universally than dialog-based movies. Another read is culturally China prefers that type of content in general. I suspect that for Bytedance, their focus is on action / special effects because thats where they see the demand.
Seedance 2.5 looks amazing, but MiniMax H3 is going to be open weights within 24 hours: https://fal.ai/minimax-h3. According to the ComfyUI team, it should even work acceptably on mid-range consumer GPUs like the 3080.
I'd honestly take the slight quality hit for more control and lower costs.
This seems extraordinarily good to me, compared to what I've seen before. Their washing machine advert example seems like it's as good as anything else on social media. I'm shocked by the quality and the coherence they're able to maintain, I assume it's really good at using those reference images they mention in their prompts. I think the only one that's noticeably bad is the concert hall, where the first few seconds show almost empty stalls and then toward the end it shows a full audience, and that audience also looks a bit off.
This will make longer (~30s) narrative add creation a lot better and more interesting at a reasonable price tag--roughly $7 best I can tell. Looking forward to trying it out.
I don't think audio, image or video generation should exist. I haven't seen enough positive applications to justify the amount of harm these tools are being used to cause.
Now they cause harm because there's people that may believe a fake video is real. But people is developing skepticism about what they see in videos and learning to think that they may be generated, before taking them as true.
For everything that exists, there are people who think it shouldn’t exist. Fortunately, society doesn’t ban everything that disagrees with some people, and even more fortunately, we now live in a multipolar world where what is available doesn’t depend on the whims of a single pseudo-moralistic government.
If in the future they can create a reward model to aid with creating super human levels of appeal tailored to me, I would considered it one of the best technologies ever made. I'm not sentimental about the source, pretty videos and pictures make me happy
Yes, it is awesome. Funny we got this level of capability now and we all take it in our stride. Growing up in the 80's I loved futuristic scifi, feels like I am in it now. And even I am 'just' taking it in my stride.
Where can you actually get access to these models that isn't an outright scam? All the sites that promised to have Seedance 2 turned out to be scams. Does anyone know how to actually use it, and is it available to run yourself?
You know what, in my previous life as a filmmaker I could've only dreamed of such a thing. Filmmaking is an art form which you cannot do alone. Outside of a lot of time and money, you need cooperation of a number of people and each day of production you end up accumulating a set of compromises to your vision. Your taste is what makes you tolerate that or not, and it's exhausting. It matters if you're the author since at the end of the day it's your name on it, not the crew (as much).
Now that we have these tools, I don't know but I am absolutely disinterested in it. Not that it doesn't feel right or anything, but I'm just not excited enough even to want to try to materialize some of my "big game" stuff. Closest thing I'd compare it with is like when you pirate a bunch of games and you play none as a result of abundance.
The thing is, it has the same essential property that you don't control it any more. The problem with these tools is the lack of fine grained control means there is no room for you to express your individual creative input. Your total input is a few sentences of a prompt, then the AI did all the creative part. If the creative input is what you enjoyed, it is actually not that much more (or even less) here than it was with traditional film.
This is a matter of effort and direction and not an inherent flaw of the tools. Look at Apple's recent image tools to change perspective. Tools to improve artistry are improving.
I often see this kind of passive-aggressive characterization of the process with AI that's meant to bait people who obviously are expressing their creativity with these models.
I hope no one will fall for it: even when you emphatically reply "I spent the last year building the pipelines I use" it'll still be treated as equivalent a couple of sentences relative to the old ways.
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At the end of the day, the painful lesson some people are (re)-learning is that creative expression doesn't have to be tied to any specific process. A lot of people fall in love with creative expression + process... but some fall in love with just the process, and some fall in love with creative regardless of the process.
AI does not favor those of us who loved the process (that's me with coding), but it's definitely capable of allowing new people to experience what it's like to have creative input in your mind and see it expressed outside of your mind.
Was just going to say... Even if all AI gives me is the opportunity to bring my visions to life even somewhat terribly... That's a lot better than I'd be able to do without it. Which is for them to go nowhere. I'll take it.
it seems perfect for that - maintaining coherence over 30s-1min type window is achievable and so many ads are built on unrealistic premise to begin with.
To me, just reducing the cost alone seems secondary, far more important is putting the actual creative and marketing people directly in control of the output. Maybe the end result still gets sent to a pro studio for final production, but letting the true stakeholders directly create what they want could be a killer app. It may also be a terrible idea, like Homer Simpson's car - but that won't stop it being successful.
Is it just me or are these video models only actual use case is misinformation and spam? Sure they show us quirky and whimsy samples on the release page, but does anyone really believe that?
I think that will remain the use case of these tools as long as it is still so easy to tell they don't represent reality very well. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe we're not ready for a world where any video longer than a brief clip is indistinguishable from reality.
Also, much of the promotion of these tools come from a population of people unhappy with the current state of the real content creation industry that use real footage and real people because AI movie promoters see traditional media as mainly propaganda machines anyway, so these tools sort help level the playing field.
There are thriving Ai video communities who are trying to replicate big budget productions with indie resources. Look up Gossip Goblin. There's a parallel explosion of memes at the same time, like Balenciaga Harry Potter
Only if you don’t think about it for more than two or three seconds. Then you remember deepfake revenge porn and elon musk style child sexual material.
I get entertainment value out of watching the videos other haves created. I hear of educators creating educational value from the videos they make as it allows them to make higher quality explanations.
I've been having some similar thoughts lately about some application spaces being more harmful than others.
Coding, for example, seems somewhat benign, because code has to fulfil clear metrics: Either it works or it doesn't. Either it performs or it doesn't. As long as you are able to provide those metrics, you can to some extent treat it as a black box without losing much from a system view (lifecycle, long-term maintenance, keeping things working, broader qualified efficiency like re-use are of course other stories).
But on the other hand, delegating decision-making and thinking to models feels plain harmful to me. I have so many stories around me from office settings these days: "We have to pre-pone meeting XYZ, and we don't have enough time to prepare, so I made this AI analysis <power point deck>". This was then mis-prompted to fit a foregone conclusion, no one has time to do it or capacity to refute a 2000 word slop deck (except by slopping back), and crazy stuff becomes plan of record. This is really going to be a problem for organizations ...
It's just you. Any director, storyteller, or filmmaker can see the potential here to realize scenes that simply wouldn't be possible otherwise. But indeed there's plenty of slop coming out too.
For filmmakers I've talked to in the US, one of the biggest demands they have is v2v where they can carry over an actor's performance and insert it into whatever world they want. The movie market in China is somewhat different though - it's heavily oriented towards high action / high special effect movies. Consider this list of hollywood movies that have flopped in the US, but did great in China:
Warcraft (China: $225m box office, US: $47m)
Resident Evil (China: $159m, US: $27m)
xXx: Return of Xander Cage (China: $164m, US: $44m)
Pacific Rim: Uprising (China: $99m, US: $59m)
One read of this is that action movies / visual spectacles translate more universally than dialog-based movies. Another read is culturally China prefers that type of content in general. I suspect that for Bytedance, their focus is on action / special effects because thats where they see the demand.
I'd honestly take the slight quality hit for more control and lower costs.
What kind of harms do you have in mind?
If in the future they can create a reward model to aid with creating super human levels of appeal tailored to me, I would considered it one of the best technologies ever made. I'm not sentimental about the source, pretty videos and pictures make me happy
This feels like the serious inflection point for high quality full length feature film productions using this tech.
Now that we have these tools, I don't know but I am absolutely disinterested in it. Not that it doesn't feel right or anything, but I'm just not excited enough even to want to try to materialize some of my "big game" stuff. Closest thing I'd compare it with is like when you pirate a bunch of games and you play none as a result of abundance.
Weird-ass times.
I hope no one will fall for it: even when you emphatically reply "I spent the last year building the pipelines I use" it'll still be treated as equivalent a couple of sentences relative to the old ways.
-
At the end of the day, the painful lesson some people are (re)-learning is that creative expression doesn't have to be tied to any specific process. A lot of people fall in love with creative expression + process... but some fall in love with just the process, and some fall in love with creative regardless of the process.
AI does not favor those of us who loved the process (that's me with coding), but it's definitely capable of allowing new people to experience what it's like to have creative input in your mind and see it expressed outside of your mind.
To me, just reducing the cost alone seems secondary, far more important is putting the actual creative and marketing people directly in control of the output. Maybe the end result still gets sent to a pro studio for final production, but letting the true stakeholders directly create what they want could be a killer app. It may also be a terrible idea, like Homer Simpson's car - but that won't stop it being successful.
Also, much of the promotion of these tools come from a population of people unhappy with the current state of the real content creation industry that use real footage and real people because AI movie promoters see traditional media as mainly propaganda machines anyway, so these tools sort help level the playing field.
Coding, for example, seems somewhat benign, because code has to fulfil clear metrics: Either it works or it doesn't. Either it performs or it doesn't. As long as you are able to provide those metrics, you can to some extent treat it as a black box without losing much from a system view (lifecycle, long-term maintenance, keeping things working, broader qualified efficiency like re-use are of course other stories).
But on the other hand, delegating decision-making and thinking to models feels plain harmful to me. I have so many stories around me from office settings these days: "We have to pre-pone meeting XYZ, and we don't have enough time to prepare, so I made this AI analysis <power point deck>". This was then mis-prompted to fit a foregone conclusion, no one has time to do it or capacity to refute a 2000 word slop deck (except by slopping back), and crazy stuff becomes plan of record. This is really going to be a problem for organizations ...