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Generative-AI-powered video editing is coming to Instagram

Instagram on iPhone against a colorful background.
Bryan M. Wolfe / Digital Trends

Editing your Instagram videos will soon be as simple as typing out a text prompt, thanks to a new generative AI tool the company hopes to release in 2025, CEO Adam Mosseri announced Thursday.

The upcoming tool, which leverages Meta’s Movie Gen model, will enable users to “change nearly any aspect of your videos,” Mosseri said during his preview demonstration. Those changes range from subtle modifications, like adding a gold chain to his existing outfit or a hippo in the background, to wholesale alterations including swapping his wardrobe or giving himself a felt, Muppet-like appearance.

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Meta debuted Movie Gen in October to compete with the likes of Runway’s Gen 3 Alpha and OpenAI’s Sora. Designed to “produce custom videos and sounds, edit existing videos, and transform your personal image into a unique video,” Movie Gen incorporates many of the company’s earlier multimodal efforts with Make-A-Scene and Llama to provide users more control over what it outputs. “These models can reason about object motion, subject-object interactions, and camera motion, and they can learn plausible motions for a wide variety of concepts,” Meta wrote in October, “making them state-of-the-art models in their category.”

The demonstration video certainly appears impressive, displaying minimal distortion to Mosseri’s digitized outfits as he gestured and spoke, though none of the effects were on screen for more than a moment. OpenAI’s Sora promised similarly spectacular results when it was first announced in February but has since failed to live up to expectations with its official release. Whether the performance Movie Gen showed off Thursday translates to what users will actually receive next year remains to be seen.

As the multimodal capabilities of large language models have steadily matured, we’ve seen text-to-video AIs rapidly proliferate over the past year. Movie Gen will likely face significant competition in 2025 as more of these tools come to market, though its ability to generate both video and audio from a user’s prompts, as well as edit and personalize clips, are sure to work in its favor.

Andrew Tarantola
Former Computing Writer
Andrew Tarantola is a journalist with more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine…
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