AI-generated media has long been a subject of concern for people who believe that it could spell the end of civilization. However, a recent viral beer commercial has shown that we are not quite there yet.
The surreal 30-second video titled “Synthetic Summer” was created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle of London-based production company Privateisland. tv. The video, set to a raucous crowd backing track and Smash Mouth’s “All-Star,” features surrealistic images of people partying at a stereotypical American backyard barbecue, merging with impressionistic beer vessels and flaming grills achieving columnar fire tornado status.
The video was likely created using Runway’s new Gen-2 AI model, which can make short video clips based on written prompts similar to how Stable Diffusion can create still images. Privateisland. tv pieced the segments together in a sequence, adding music and sound effects. The beer commercial has raised questions about the limits of AI-generated media. The paper for Gen-1 cited “an internal dataset of 240M images and a custom dataset of 6.4M video clips” for training the model.
The beer commercial generated varied reactions from Twitter users. One user commented that “the video seemed like someone added LSD to the beer,” while another user joked, “It’s a portrayal of how AI will view us in the future.”
Another Twitter user remarked that the commercial is similar to most commercials people usually ignore while doing other things.
Lastly, a user commented that “the video looked like hell.”
All in all, all the comments hold some truth to them.
The fact that AI video generators are still primitive and require human persistence means that people are still behind the wheel of these alien works. Moreover, the generative AI still has a long way to go before it can autonomously create memetic works that could dazzle the masses with society-altering memes.