Another day, another random AI functionality, that’ll have a level of novelty value, but probably doesn’t add a heap in terms of day-to-day utility.
But it could be fun, I guess, so…
Today, Google has launched a new element within its Flow AI creation tool, which enables you to animate still images.
Yes, you can make your dog talk, because who hasn’t wanted to hear what their dog is thinking at one time or another?
Except, it won’t be what your dog is thinking, it’ll just be whatever you ask the AI tool to make it say. Which could facilitate some interesting, entertaining uses.
As explained by Google:
“To help get the most out of Flow, starting this week, you can add speech to your clips in Flow when using Frames to Video. This feature lets you bring your own images to use as the starting frame of a video clip. Veo 3 already lets you add sound effects and background noise to these clips, and now you’ll be able to generate speech as well.”
To be fair, there is actually a range of ways that this could be used, and it could spark new content trends in social apps, similar to how Google’s Veo AI video generation tool has already led to a range of new clips.
You’ve likely seen the AI bigfoot videos, or the “day in the life of a Stormtrooper” clips, which are short generated from text prompts in Veo.
There have been some entertaining uses of Google’s AI video generator, and you can see how the capacity to animate still images will produce the same.
Though there has also been an influx of offensive content created through the same, primarily using racist or ableist tropes as the central punchline for short video clips.
That will also be enabled by still image animation.
But maybe brands will be able to use this to give more personality to their product shots, maybe there’ll be new ways to tap into content concepts through AI means, while tying back into your branding and promotion goals.
It could lead to some interesting experiments, and depending on the results it produces, it may well see a whole lot of new users trying it out.
The new AI image animation element is available in the latest version of Flow.
