Why it matters: There's grave and justifiable concern about AI's potential for abuse. But the flip side is that tools like Runway's are unleashing all manner of artistic creativity and giving rise to new AI-generated art forms.
Driving the news: Runway just granted public access to its image-to-video model, Gen-1, and, in a more limited release, to its text-to-video product, Gen-2.
- Gen-1 is available on a mobile app that lets users take or upload a picture or video and instantly generate a short video clip based on it — applying filters like "Claymation" or "Cloudscape."
- Gen-2, which Runway says is the first publicly available text-to-video product, is available now in limited form via chat platform Discord (and will soon be available more widely).
- These fun and highly preliminary features are just a small, public-facing snapshot of the powerful suite of back-end tools available to video professionals who've been drawn to Runway's products like catnip.
Backstory: Runway was a co-creator of Stable Diffusion, a breakthrough text-to-image generator.
- Runway's creative suite has been a loosely kept secret among filmmaking cognoscenti, who use it to save countless hours on editing tasks traditionally done by hand.
- The company's AI Magic Tools let users edit and generate content in dozens of ways — by removing backgrounds from videos, erasing and replacing parts of a photo, or blurring out faces or backgrounds, for example.
- Its tools — and others, like ChatGPT — are "democratizing content creation" and "reducing the cost of creation to almost zero," he said.
by Jennifer A. Kingson, Axios | Read more:
Images: Aïda Amer/Axios; Runway AI
