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Someone once famously said, “Video killed the radio star.” Forty-one years after that song helped launch MTV, the question is, in 2022, what will artificial intelligence do for the video maker?
Seattle’s Jacob Kolker is already answering.
Kolker, managing director at the Allen Institute for AI startup incubator, is one half of King//Kolker, a rock-electronic duo that also features Los Angeles-based filmmaker Nick King.
These days, the pair make music together remotely from their respective homes, and their YouTube channel has had some success, attracting nearly 800,000 views across four music videos.
It opens up a new world of creativity that is trapped in people’s minds.
The latest video (above) is for the song “Moment,” and it’s a high-tech creation by Kolker over the weekend. The video, posted on Monday, quickly racked up 150,000 views, perhaps due in part to the unique nature of its production.
Kolker had private beta access to DALL-E 2, a new system from San Francisco AI research lab OpenAI, which improves on the previously released DALL-E 1.
DALL-E 2 can take simple natural language statements and turn them into realistic images or works of art. The technology, designed to enhance visual expression and teach people how AI sees our world, is illustrated in this YouTube video – where you can see what the art of a koala bear riding a motorcycle looks like.
“With the limited equipment we had and zero production budget, since this was a side project, we tried to find creative ways to make music videos,” Kolker said.
For “Moment,” a song about the many chapters in a person’s life, Kolker and King wanted to use animation after shooting earlier videos on an iPhone for fun.
Using DALL-E 2, Kolker wrote it as a “cyberpunk portrait of a blue-haired teenage girl with her mother and father”. The system generates images that match those criteria, eventually providing a single frame of color video that shows more than 200 different “pictures” stitched together by Kolker.
“It was an exciting time to bring together my two worlds of technology and AI and music,” Kolker said.
In an age of Instagram, TikTok and all kinds of technology, Kolker’s creative rapid-fire imagery seems to make sense, even if it feels like a strange evolution from the heyday of MTV and generation-defining cinematic music videos, from “fun” to “smells like teen spirit” and the like.
But as a part-time creative, Kolker says he doesn’t have the tens of thousands of dollars to hire a professional illustrator or creative house to create his own image. And he sees the technology as a breakthrough similar to the iPhone 15 years ago, allowing people to create incredible photos with a device in their pocket.
Kolker says of DALL-E 2, “It opens up a whole new world of creativity that’s trapped in people’s minds, whose art deserves to be seen, but who don’t have the production budgets that other people do. Very powerful.”
It’s time for an update from MTV’s hit songs…
AI excited the video star,
In my mind and in my car,
We can’t go back, we’ve come too far.
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