Tech giants seem to have figured out that the hack to get mainstream attention from consumers towards their AI products is AI-generated photos and videos.
Meta has launched Vibes, an AI video feed in its Meta AI app. The feed will feature short-form, AI generated videos. Interestingly, the videos themselves will be generated by Midjourney, with whom Meta had earlier partnered, and Black Forest Labs. Meta said that it was still developing its own models ‘behind the scenes’, but was releasing these products in the meantime with collaborations with other companies.
“You can create from scratch, remix what you see, or just scroll through to check out videos from the creators + the visual artists we’ve been collaborating with,” Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said.
Meta released a video of what the Vibes feed would look like. It did seem like something created with Midjourney, with dreamy and aesthetic visuals. There was a focus on scenes which could only be generated by AI, such as an astronaut riding a bicycle, or whales floating in the air.
Thus far, AI companies have used AI-generated images and videos to garner new users with varying degrees of success. ChatGPT had started things off with its Ghibli trend which had caused the app’s usage to zoom in markets like India. Google too has had its Ghibli moment with Nano Banana, which has similarly gone viral — it has made Gemini the top app on the iOS App Store, and has been used to generate 5 billion images, which is nearly one image for every human with internet access on the planet. xAI too had tried to so something similar with Grok Imagine with Elon Musk pushing the feature heavily on X, but it didn’t quite see the same degree of adoption.
Meta now seems to be creating a similar video feed. The feed is in the Meta AI app, and if it proves to be popular, could help with the app’s downloads. But the Vibes feed is also an admission of how far behind Meta is with its AI models — instead of using its own models, like other labs, it has had to rely on third-party providers to power its videos. It remains to be seen if the Vibes feature takes off, but there seems to be growing consensus in Silicon Valley that the way to the AI consumer’s heart is through images and video.