Gerard Cole
Appearances
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
So I worked on this film with a close friend of mine and producer named Gerard Cole. He works here at The Wall Street Journal, and he's a seasoned audio and video journalist who just really has become obsessed with testing and playing with AI video tools. We started on this project probably at the end of March. I sort of challenged Gerard. I said, hey, we'll make a film.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
I think we should try to make something that's like a real film. We come to this place for magic.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
I mean, like a two minute short film. It's not Spielberg here. And what was so crazy about it is that every week there would be new tools that would come out. The companies keep getting in touch and saying, well, actually, we have a new update next week. So you might want to hold off on publishing that video or you might want to hold off because we have a new tool that you can test.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And so in May, Google announced VO3, which is their third version of their video model. They also announced a new tool called Flow, which makes it easier to edit with AI video.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And so we kind of had to like uproot the project a little bit to get this going, but this stuff is moving so fast that every night we'd go to sleep, we'd wake up in the morning and there'd be new AI video tool that we thought we should try. The one that has gotten a ton of buzz over the last couple of weeks is Google VO. And this is from Google, this is VO3.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
What they did here with VO3 is they just created a new model that really blew people away. Previously with AI video, not only did you kind of have some weird wonkiness to some of the visuals and maybe things didn't look as realistic, but also there was no audio to them. And now with VO3, you can put in a prompt. You can say, a woman working out alongside a robot. And now with VO3, you have audio.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
When I see the woman boxing with a robot, you hear grunting. You hear sounds of the robot's mechanics. You hear punching sounds. You hear all kinds of audio to make the scene come to life.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
Yeah, it feels a lot more real. And I said, okay, well, what if we can see if we can actually tell a story here? We really wanted to see if that was possible. And we learned very quickly, it is possible. It's just really hard and time-consuming. The film itself is about my, if we want to say that I'm me in this film, getting a sort of a humanoid robot.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And these robots were designed to make people and humans more efficient.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
because I thought, okay, maybe we can have some fun playing off of this idea that AI is all about making us efficient in our jobs and in everything else. I'll let people watch, but the robot lives with me. We have some good times together. We have some not-so-good times together. He really wants me to keep working.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And then I can't ruin the end, but, you know, let's just say I come out on top at the end.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
Hmm. OK, fine, I'll do it. But I don't know. It's not usually how it works with with movie interviews. But yeah, I mean, in the end. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. I get frustrated with this robot and I had no other choice, but I have to reprogram him.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
But I will say there was a lot of constraints to making this. And so you'll notice when you watch everybody, you'll see like the robot doesn't talk, right? The robot has a voice, but it doesn't have mouth movements. And so that was one of the constraints we had. And you'll see, I never talk. Like my mouth never moves in the piece. Because we had that technical constraint.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
You can't really have the dialogue work very well between two people. You can't really make that consistent. And so when you watch with an eye for the technical constraints, you can really see like, oh, yeah, they kind of had to make something that was like this.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
Yeah, no, and I'll take you through as simply as I can, but it is pretty complicated. So we decided we wanted to have two characters, me, and I exist in real life, and this robot, which does not exist in real life. And so we created these digital versions of the characters. The robot named Max, or OptiMax 5000, we created using an AI image generator called MidJourney.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And so we kind of iterated in that. We worked through, okay, what does he look like? What does he look like? And so we finally landed on some images we liked. As for me, I took a bunch of photos of myself, different angles. And so then we went into Runway, which is an AI video generation tool, and we uploaded those photos.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And then we said, OK, create a scene where you see the robot working out alongside Joanna and make it in a suburban background with houses on a paved street. And so then the runway would spit out what we would call the first frame of that. And so we'd have an image, and then we would take that image, and we'd put it into VO, Google's tool, and say what we wanted the motion to look like.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And here's where things got really complicated, and Gerard really did a lot of this work. But... you really have to give the model very specific instructions on what you want to be done. And so he worked alongside Google's Gemini, which is their large language model, to really craft detailed prompts of what we wanted the videos to look like.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
And so these were long texts, like hundreds of words that you would put in with the photo and the text into Google VO, tell it what we'd want it, and out we would get a bunch of videos. And we'd pick from those videos what would look the best for the scene.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
What was crazy was how mixed the reviews were. A lot of people wrote in saying they were blown away and they could not believe how real it looked. They laughed because we played a lot of bloopers. So there was a lot of people that really enjoyed watching this.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
But then there was a very loud and vocal group that just hated this. Here are some of the reviews that I read on X or on TikTok. Wow, that was just awful.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
They're mad at AI video. They're not mad at my AI video. They're mad at AI video in general for existing.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
You can also see in the quality right now, it's not really Hollywood level.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
That's the goal of many of these AI companies. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's where it really gets interesting. So some will say, like, look, this is a moment to democratize video tools, right? Those folks who aspire to be filmmakers, well, they can now just do this. They can sit in front of their computer and they can make things that they once never would have been able to make before.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
But then you have the other side of this where what might we see on the big screen that might actually be AI generated. And so we've seen a bunch of AI film studios and production houses start popping up. The goal is for the makers, the Googles, the runways of the world to be working with Hollywood.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
Their hope is to start working with film studios to generate stuff that will end up in the films we see on the big screen or the small screen, whatever you watch your Netflix on.
Today, Explained
AI Video Killed the Video Star
You go into a little booth that's a 360-degree camera, and you're asked to do 30 different expressions.