An AI startup called Luma recently launched a new AI-generated video product called "Dream Machine." On the website, the company pitches the tool as:
…An AI model that makes high quality, realistic videos fast from text and images. It is a highly scalable and efficient transformer model trained directly on videos making it capable of generating physically accurate, consistent and eventful shots. Dream Machine is our first step towards building a universal imagination engine and it is available to everyone now!
If that sounds like a bunch of AI-generated marketing copy gibberish — well, it is! But that's not all, folks. As a proof-of-concept, the company released a trailer (above) for a fully AI-generated movie called Monster Camp. On the surface, it mostly just looks like an uncanny valley ripoff of the Monsters, Inc. franchise, complete with all the weird hallucinations.
But look a little closer and … wait, is that Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc?!
Yes, the Dream Machine straight-up hallucinated one of the exact copyrighted characters that was presumably fed into its machine-learning algorithm in the first place. Oops?
From The Verge:
Was it fed a prompt asking for animation in a Pixar style? Is it trained on material that includes the Disney studio's work? That general lack of transparency is one of the biggest concerns about these kinds of models, as Dream Machine joins OpenAI's Sora, Google's VideoPoet, and Veo as one of the many text-to-video AI tools shown off in recent months.
Luma hyped its Dream Machine model as the future of filmmaking, featuring "high quality, realistic shots" created simply by typing prompts into a box. Watching videos showing cars racing down a dissolving highway or an awkwardly narrated sci-fi short, you can sort of see why bullish fans of this tech were quick to call it a novel innovation.
An AI video tool just launched, and it's already copying Disney's IP [Charles Pulliam-Moore / The Verge]
