It feels like we're at a tipping point for AI video generators, and just a few months on from OpenAI's Sora taking social media by storm with its text-to-video skills, a new Chinese rival is taking social media by storm.
Called Kling AI, the new "video generation model" is made by the Chinese TikTok rival Kuaishou, and it's currently only available as a public demo in China via a waitlist. But that hasn't stopped it from quickly going viral, with some impressive clips that suggest it's at least as capable as Sora.
You can see some of the early demo videos (like the one below) on the Kling AI website, while a number of threads on X (formerly Twitter) from the likes of Min Choi (below) have rounded up what are claimed to be some impressive early creations made by the tool (with some help from editing apps).
As always, some caution needs to be applied with these early AI-generated clips, as they're cherry-picked examples, and we don't yet know anything about the hardware or other software that's been used to create them.
For example, we later found that an impressive Air Head video seemingly made by OpenAI's Sora needed a lot of extra editing in post-production.
This is wild.Chinese AI KLING is breaking the Internet while OpenAI Sora is sleeping.People with access are already generating AI videos and short films.The videos look insane.1. "Zootopia Grand Prix"pic.twitter.com/pmCZctsMtTJune 9, 2024
Still, those caveats aside, Kling AI certainly looks like another powerful AI video generator. It lets early testers create 1080/30p videos that are up to two minutes in length. The results, while still carrying some AI giveaways like smoothing and minor artifacts, are impressively varied, with a promising amount of coherence.
Exactly how long it'll be before Kling AI is opened up to users outside China remains to be seen. But with OpenAI suggesting that Sora will get a public release "later this year", Kling AI best not wait too long if it wants to become the TikTok of AI-generated video.
The AI video war heats up
Now that AI photo tools like Midjourney and Adobe Firefly are hitting the mainstream, it's clear that video generators are the next big AI battleground – and that has big implications for social media, the movie industry, and our ability to trust what we see during, say, major election campaigns.
Other examples of AI generators include Google Veo, Microsoft's VASA-1 (which can make lifelike talking avatars from a single photo), Runway Gen-2, and Pika Labs. Adobe has now even showed how it could soon integrate many of these tools into Premiere Pro, which would be give the space another big boost.
None of them are yet perfect, and it isn't clear how long it takes to produce a clip using the likes of Sora or Kling AI, nor what kind of computing power is needed. But the leaps being made towards photorealism and simulating real-world physics have been massive in the past year, so it clearly won't be long before these tools hit the mainstream.
That battle will become an international one, too – with the US still threatening a TikTok ban, expect there to be a few more twists and turns before the likes of Kling AI roll out worldwide.
