Hours after a sweaty brainstorming session kicked off Wednesday night behind the pink door of a nondescript office space in San Francisco’s Mission district, the teams of techies were ready for show-and-tell.
The first AI-generated video flicked on, showing a dramatic confrontation between an octopus and a manatee, set to folksy music. It was a fitting appetizer for the next 13 music videos, which featured — among other absurd scenes — Cinderella ditching Prince Charming to become a hip-hop star; an apocalyptic explosion at the Palace of Fine Arts, set to heavy EDM beats; and an angsty coming-of-age story in which a woman transforms into a wolf.
The presentation was the result of a hackathon-style competition to create AI music videos, organized by Machine Cinema, an L.A.-based group that makes films and art via generative AI technology.
The monthly event — put on for the first time in San Francisco — brought together software engineers, animators, and artists to learn how to use the technology and compete to create the best music video.
“There’s a lot of hype,” said Paul Kunyak, who was on a team with other professional animators. “We’re just here to figure it all out.”
The teams prompted ChatGPT to come up with lyrics, then fed them into the AI song generator Udio, generated images in Midjourney, animated them in Runway, and edited the audio and video clips together – all in three hours.
Participants, who hailed from major tech and animation companies, were there mainly to learn how to test the new tools. By and large, they were awed by the results and tickled by the ridiculousness of the affair.
“If you had told me five years ago that I’d be sitting here generating AI music videos, I’d be like, what are you talking about?” said Joseph Bissell, who works as a technical artist at a Big Tech company.
The technology is no longer a novelty, with major-label artists like Snoop Dogg releasing videos created with Runway and other AI-generation tools.
“It’s overwhelming to do it at home by yourself,” said Fred Grinstein, a film producer and co-founder of Machine Cinema. “The most interesting stuff comes out when creative people start breaking down these tools together.”
Grinstein and entrepreneur Minh Do began gathering groups of friends together in 2022 to tinker with AI technology like Dall-E, Midjourney, and Runway. These meetings developed into events in L.A., Seoul, and Toronto.
The duo believe AI-generated videos will disrupt video production in the same way that YouTube opened up video distribution and hope to democratize the ability to create meaningful and beautiful art.
So which video won the competition? One called “Dog Dreams,” in which electronic J-pop beats played over a truly confounding combination of human-dog hybrids.
Thankfully, it seems furries still exist in the AI-generated future.