Fast and cheap
Artists are often the first to experiment with new technologies. But the immediate future of generative video is defined by the advertising industry. The route is done Frost to explore how generative artificial intelligence can be built into its products. The company makes video creation tools for businesses looking for a quick and cheap way to create commercials. Waymark is one of several startups, along with firms like Softcube and Vedia AI, that offer on-demand video advertising for customers in just a few clicks.
Waymark’s current technology, launched earlier this year, combines several different AI techniques, including large language models, image recognition and speech synthesis, to create video ads on the fly. Waymark also drew on its large data set of non-AI commercials created for previous clients. “We have hundreds of thousands of videos,” says CEO Alex Persky-Stern. “We picked the best of them and taught them what a good video looks like.”
To use Waymark’s tool, which it offers as part of a tiered subscription starting at $25 a month, users provide their business’s web address or social media accounts, and it kicks in and collects all the text and images it can find. It then uses this data to create a commercial, using GPT-3 OpenAI to write a script that is read aloud by a synthesized voice over selected images that highlight the business. A one-minute commercial can be created in seconds. Users can edit the output if they want by customizing the script, editing images, choosing a different voice, and so on. Waymark says more than 100,000 people have used its tool so far.
The trouble is, not every business has a website or images to draw from, Parker says. “An accountant or a therapist may have no assets at all,” he says.
Waymark’s next idea is to use generative artificial intelligence to create images and videos for businesses that don’t already have them — or don’t want to use the ones that do. “This is the direction of creation Frost“, says Parker. “Create a world, an atmosphere.”
Frost there is an atmosphere, for sure. But it’s also junk. “It’s not a perfect medium anyway,” says Rubin. “It was difficult to get some things from DALL-E, like the emotional reactions on the faces. But other times it made us happy. We would say, “Oh my God, this is magic happening before our eyes.”
This hit and miss process will improve as the technology improves. DALL-E 2, which was made by Waymark Frost, was released just a year ago. Video creation tools that create short clips have only been around for a few months.
The most revolutionary aspect of this technology is the ability to create new shots at any time, says Rubin: “With 15 minutes of trial and error, you’ll get the shot that fits perfectly into the sequence.” He remembers cutting the film and needing individual shots, such as a close-up of boots on a mountainside. With DALL-E he could just summon it. “It’s mind-blowing,” he says. “That’s when it started to be an eye-opener for the director.”
