DeepMind’s new AI generates soundtracks and dialog for movies

DeepMind, Google’s AI analysis lab, says it’s growing AI tech to generate soundtracks for movies.

In a submit on its official weblog, DeepMind says that it sees the tech, V2A (brief for “video-to-audio”), as an important piece of the AI-generated media puzzle. Whereas loads of orgs together with DeepMind have developed video-generating AI fashions, these fashions can’t create sound results to sync with the movies they generate.

“Video technology fashions are advancing at an unbelievable tempo, however many present techniques can solely generate silent output,” DeepMind writes. “V2A expertise [could] turn into a promising method for bringing generated motion pictures to life.”

DeepMind’s V2A tech takes an outline of a soundtrack (e.g. “jellyfish pulsating beneath water, marine life, ocean”) paired with a video to create music, sound results and even dialogue that matches the characters and tone of the video, watermarked by DeepMind’s deepfake-combatting SynthID expertise. The AI mannequin powering V2A — a diffusion mannequin — was educated on a mixture of sounds and dialogue transcripts in addition to video clips, DeepMind says.

“By coaching on video, audio and the extra annotations, our expertise learns to affiliate particular audio occasions with numerous visible scenes, whereas responding to the data supplied within the annotations or transcripts.”

Mum’s the phrase on whether or not any of the coaching information was copyrighted — and whether or not the information’s creators had been knowledgeable of DeepMind’s work. We’ve reached out to DeepMind and can replace this submit if we hear again.

AI-powered sound-generating instruments aren’t novel. Startup Stability AI launched one simply final week, and ElevenLabs launched one in Might. Nor are fashions to create video sound results. A Microsoft venture can generate speaking and singing movies from a nonetheless picture, and platforms like Pika and GenreX have educated fashions to take a video and make a greatest guess at what music or results are applicable in a given scene.

However DeepMind claims that its V2A tech is exclusive in that it may well perceive the uncooked pixels from a video and sync generated sounds with the video mechanically, optionally sans description.

V2A isn’t excellent — and DeepMind acknowledges this. As a result of the underlying mannequin wasn’t educated on loads of movies with artifacts or distortions, it doesn’t create notably high-quality audio for these. And basically, the generated audio isn’t tremendous convincing; my colleague Natasha Lomas described it as “a smorgasbord of stereotypical sounds,” and I can’t disagree.

For these causes — and to forestall misuse — DeepMind says it gained’t launch the tech to the general public anytime quickly, if ever.

“To verify our V2A expertise can have a constructive impression on the artistic neighborhood, we’re gathering numerous views and insights from main creators and filmmakers, and utilizing this priceless suggestions to tell our ongoing analysis and growth,” DeepMind writes. “Earlier than we take into account opening entry to it to the broader public, our V2A expertise will endure rigorous security assessments and testing.”

DeepMind pitches its V2A expertise as an particularly useful gizmo for archivists and professionals working with historic footage. However, as I wrote in a bit this morning, generative AI alongside these traces additionally threatens to upend the movie and tv trade. It’ll take some severely sturdy labor protections to make sure that generative media instruments don’t remove jobs — or, because the case could also be, total industries.

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