The tech giant is among the many companies building technology that could remake Hollywood — or help spread disinformation.
In February, the artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI unveiled technology called Sora that let people generate photorealistic videos — like woolly mammoths trotting through a snowy meadow — simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen.
Because of concerns over how the technology might be misused, and perhaps the high cost of operating the technology, OpenAI has not yet released Sora beyond a small group of testers. But others companies are racing to release similar technology.
On Friday, the tech giant Meta unveiled a set of A.I. tools, called Meta Movie Gen, for automatically generating videos, instantly editing them and synchronizing them with A.I.-generated sounds effects, ambient noise and background music.
“Video is nothing without audio,” said Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative A.I., said in an interview.
Given a short text description of an image, one tool creates a video. Then, given another description of some sounds, a second tool adds the audio.