While scientists all over the world express their fears about the future of AI development and its unclear impact on our society, we have clear evidence that the technology is still quite far behind. The greatest example is an AI-generated beer commercial which turned out so bad that it went viral over the weekend. It basically proves that we are not at the stage where AI-generated media becomes as intelligent as human creators and indistinguishable from traditional media. So, no taking over human civilization in the near future for sure.
The 30-second video titled "Synthetic Summer" was created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle, from the London-based production company, Privateisland.tv. The duo likely used Runway's new Gen-2 AI model, which creates video clips based on short written prompts, similar to Nvidia’s text-to-video generator.
The video starts showing a rowdy crowd partying at a stereotypical American backyard barbecue. Typical for beer commercials, right? Unfortunately, this description can’t express the monstrosity of each AI-generated frame. Carbon-copy people with indistinguishable features and weird limbs merging with blurring beer cans and setting themselves on fire from time to time during the clip… Definitely, not the result one would expect to see from such a promoted technology as artificial intelligence.
Even generating such alien-like clips still requires human involvement, as they need to run through and discard many generations to get an acceptable result. Privateisland.tv generated the clips, selected the best ones, and placed the segments together in a sequence, adding music and sound effects.
The video is not the only AI-generated ad for a made-up product circulating on social media and being openly made fun of. "Pizza Later" tweeted an AI-generated video for a fictional restaurant called "Pepperoni Hug Spot" on April 24. The creator reportedly generated the script with GPT-4 model, used Midjourney for still images, and a voice-over by Eleven Labs. They compiled it all together using Adobe After Effects.
Summing up, we can say these pieces show that generative AI still has a long way to go before it can work autonomously and create quality content. Right now its works simply supply the masses with memes.
To be honest, after all the gloomy predictions about AI surpassing humans, such fails provide some semblance of comfort.
Even though AI video generators are still primitive, in our opinion, scientists should focus on more important fields for the use of artificial intelligence e.g. developing AI-powered solutions for healthcare.
