A few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced Vibes via an Instagram video, and it’s now fully rolled out to US and UK customers. I thought I'd give it a go and the results were a lot of fun, but perhaps not always in way that Meta intended them to be...
Right now, AI video seems to be going social. Grok can already make AI video, and OpenAI recently released Sora 2 as a mobile app. Vibes is Meta's answer.
Vibes comes as part of the Meta AI mobile app, which is now available for download in the UK and the US on mobile platforms. Vibes allows you to make, edit, remix, and share short-form AI-generated or enhanced videos on your mobile phone, as well as explore your Vibes feed – a never-ending wall of other people’s AI videos that you can flick through or even remix yourself.
When creating a Vibe, you have the option of uploading a picture from your Photos app and letting Meta generate a video based on it, or you can upload a video from your phone and remix it with different filters that change the background or add general silliness, like clown masks and anime effects
Alternatively, you can create an entirely AI-generated video from a prompt, just like you can in apps like Sora or Gemini using Veo 3. All your Vibes can be shared across your Meta AI, Instagram, Facebook stories, and Reels.
Get vibing
I thought I’d give Vibes a go, so I logged in, and it found my Instagram ID, and I was up and running straight away.
The Meta AI app has now effectively been hijacked by Vibes. As soon as you launch it, it instantly starts pushing you new AI videos. The first thing I thought I'd try was remixing them.
Remix is actually a lot of fun – if you come across a video of a dog on a skateboard, for example, you can remix it to add anything you want, like say a cat chasing it, or put them in space. You're really only limited by your own imagination.
It was when I tried generating my own AI videos that things started to go off the rails a little. To make a new video with Meta AI, you first need to generate an image of the scene you’ve described, and then you can animate it.
I asked for “a girl in Paris,” and it created four possible variants of a scene of a woman sitting on a wall looking at the Eiffel Tower. I chose one and tapped Animate, then typed, “A seagull lands on her and knocks her off.”
In just a few short seconds Meta had generated my video. There she was, looking at the Eiffel Tower, then suddenly a seagull landed on her head, exactly as requested. But that’s when things went sideways.
As she started to teeter, her hair flew off in the other direction, and as she fell rather dramatically off the wall, she left her legs behind! The whole thing was ridiculous, but I have to say, I haven’t laughed that much in ages.
Falling off a surfboard
Meta’s approach to video generation also lets you create videos of public figures doing whatever you want them to, within reason. So, if you want to see Mark Zuckerberg falling off his surfboard, you can make it happen.
There are obviously still a few flaws with Meta’s approach to generating AI video from scratch. It feels like it’s from the era of AI, where people had the wrong number of fingers and their limbs bent in freakish ways, while newer video models like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have moved the conversation on.
But Vibes isn’t meant for professional use. It’s just a bit of fun, and it’s free. Even if things go hilariously wrong from time to time, it’s still fun to use. We’re still at the beginning of the AI video revolution and enjoying its new turn towards social media. We’re just starting to explore what’s possible, and seeing how the different tech giants are differentiating their approaches is really interesting.
Vibes is available as part of the new, upgraded Meta AI app, available from the Apple and Google app stores on your mobile device, and works in the US and UK.
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