Like rival Google, Amazon has also launched an AI-powered video generator, though it's currently only aimed at advertisers and has somewhat limited functionality.
Amazon today announced at its Accelerate conference that Video Generator can turn a single product image into a few-second video clip in just a few minutes. The company said Video Generator can create “custom” AI-generated videos that “showcase the features of your product” at no extra cost.
Jay Richman, Amazon's vice president of advertising, said in a statement that Video Generator, which is currently in beta for some advertisers in the U.S., will be fine-tuned over time before being released more widely.
“Video Generator is another important innovation that leverages generative AI to inspire creativity and deliver even more value to both advertisers and shoppers,” said Richman. “We are committed to delivering generative AI applications that enable advertisers to create visually compelling and high-performing ads.”
A related new feature announced today, Live Images, generates short animated GIFs from still frames. Also in limited beta, it's part of Image Generator, Amazon's AI-powered image generation suite for marketers.
Amazon has provided few technical details about the video generator and live imagery. For example, it's not clear how long the clips produced will be or what their maximum resolution will be. We've reached out to the company for more details and will update this post if we hear back.
While Amazon is moving into generative video, other companies are also releasing their own video generation technologies: AI video startups Runway and Luma released APIs last week, and Google is integrating its flagship video model, Veo, into YouTube Shorts.
As with all generative AI technologies, there are risks associated with using these tools.
Video generation models are trained on huge numbers of video samples and then “learn” patterns from these videos to generate new footage. Some vendors train their models on copyrighted videos without permission from the owners or creators, exposing users to intellectual property lawsuits if these models “spit out” copyrighted still images.
Amazon is one of several generative AI vendors that have said they will protect customers accused of copyright infringement with media generated by their models under their AI Indemnification Policy. We reached out to the company to ask whether its video generators and live images are covered by that policy.
Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit over the legality of training on copyrighted content, one thing is clear: generative AI video tools threaten to upend the film and TV industry as we know it. A 2024 study commissioned by the Animation Guild, the union representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, predicted that more than 100,000 jobs in the U.S. entertainment industry will be destroyed by generative AI by 2026.