We are officially in the era of AI.

Where only a few months ago, it seemed we were blissfully frolicking through the internet’s pastures, unaware of our apparently AI-free existences, now it feels like there’s a new bot roaming at every corner.

ChatGPt has well and truly queued up a song at the zeitgeist karaoke, prompting everything from dire warnings to viral creations, including an AI-generated 24-hour sitcom based on Seinfeld, and in its wake, plenty of other language model AIs are popping up, including from Google, Microsoft, Amazon and more.

Announcing GPT-4, a large multimodal model, with our best-ever results on capabilities and alignment: https://t.co/TwLFssyALF pic.twitter.com/lYWwPjZbSg

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) March 14, 2023

Now, a text-to-video AI generator has arrived, by the name of ModelScope text2video. Launching just last week, it’s the very first such model to become publicly available (although there are a few others hot on its heels).

Developed by DAMO Vision Intelligence Lab, a research division of the Chinese tech corporation, Alibaba, the lab created the model as a public test case. As the name suggests, you input text and it turns it into a video.

Old joke about agnostic technologists building artificial super intelligence to find out if there’s a God.

They finally finish & ask the question.

AI replies: “There is now, mfs!!”

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2023

It’s fairly crude in its current form – you have to wait a few minutes for the video to load (that’s if it doesn’t throw up an error message claiming “the application is too busy”, which it seems to do most of the time), and the videos it does come out with are pretty glitchy, all emblazoned with a haphazard Shutterstock watermark.

Primeras pruebas con la demo del primer text2video open source, Modelscope.

A cat dancing breakdance pic.twitter.com/w4QrMnftbD

— David Garrido (@PhotoGarrido) March 19, 2023

All in all, it kind of feels like we’re living through the AI equivalent of dial-up. But that hasn’t stopped people from making the most of this new tool, putting their weird human minds to work to generate bizarre videos, which have subsequently been going viral.

One such example is the Will Smith spaghetti video, which has now achieved internet fame after being posted to Reddit three days ago (internet time moves fast). The unholy video shows the actor hoeing into questionable-looking spaghetti with the ferocity of a starved animal, while his face and body warp all over the place. Guy just can’t catch a break.

"Will Smith eating spaghetti" generated by Modelscope text2video

credit: u/chaindrop from r/StableDiffusion pic.twitter.com/ER3hZC0lJN

— Magus Wazir (@MagusWazir) March 28, 2023

In response to the video, one Reddit user theorised: “It is because A.I has never eaten food since its creation. This is a projection of how hungry A.I will eat food once they learn how to eat. Imagine starving for years and finally getting food.”

Whatever it is, it now is a thing that exists. You can try ModelScope text2video for yourself over at Hugging Face. Godspeed.