TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has unveiled its new AI text-to-video generator in China in the form of a new app called Jimeng AI.
In direct competition with Sora, from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Jimeng AI enables users to generate short-form videos through text prompts – similar to the generative AI technology made popular by Sora after its release in February.
Jimeng AI offers a monthly subscription to the app for $9.65 (approximately £7.57 / AU$14.68), or $92.00 annually (£72.20 / AU$139.96), enabling users to create 168 AI videos per month. The technology has been developed by ByteDance-owned Faceu Technology and is available on both Android and the Apple App Store for Chinese users.
Similar to its rivals, Jimeng AI uses text prompts to make short videos that supposedly match the description given by the user. Jimeng means "dream" in Chinese, and could be used for a range of content from entertainment and marketing to education.
Examples of the technology from its website range from the beautiful to the downright bizarre, including tropical moonlight woodlands and Renaissance cats in gold silk dresses. The written prompts are in Chinese, which is a feature only available on a limited number of AI video-making tools.
Jimeng promises that with a single prompt "you can also make creative changes to existing pictures, customize the image features of characters or subjects, and achieve background replacement, style association, style preservation, posture preservation and other operations to meet the creative needs of various scenes."
Jimeng AI is the latest in a flurry of recent AI technologies in China. Kuaishou is one of China's largest video services, and it released its Kling AI word-prompted model to a global audience in late July. Its beta version is available to everyone worldwide, requiring only an email address.
Also introduced last month was Ying, from Chinese AI start-up Zhupi AI, quickly followed by the Vidu app, launched by another start-up Shengshu. If TikTok's success is anything to go by, though, ByteDance's take on AI video may become the most popular of them all.
Take a look at our guide to the best AI image generators and, if you prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, check out the best video editing software.
