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On Monday, Runway, an AI startup, released what it contends is one of the highest-fidelity AI-powered video generators yet. Runway AI video generation, called Gen-4, is rolling out to the company’s individual and enterprise customers.
The brand claims it can generate consistent characters, locations, and objects across scenes, maintain “coherent world environments,” and regenerate elements from different perspectives and positions within scenes.
“Gen-4 can utilize visual references, combined with instructions, to create new images and videos utilizing consistent styles, subjects, locations, and more,” Runway wrote, “all without the need for fine-tuning or additional training.”
Investors, including Salesforce, Google, and Nvidia, support the company. It offers a Runway AI video generation suite, including AI video tools and video-generating models like Gen-4. It has strong contention in the video generation, particularly from OpenAI and Google. The company has struggled to differentiate itself to appear better, striking a deal with a major Hollywood studio and earmarking millions of dollars to finance films using AI-generated video.
Runway says that Gen-4 allows users to generate consistent characters across lighting conditions using a reference image of those characters. To craft a scene, users can provide photos of subjects and describe the composition of the shot they want to generate.
“Gen-4 excels in its ability to generate highly dynamic videos with realistic motion as well as subject, object, and style consistency with superior prompt adherence and best-in-class world understanding,” the company claims in its blog post. “Runway Gen-4 [also] represents a significant milestone in the ability of visual generative models to simulate real-world physics.”
Like all video-generating models, Gen-4 was trained on many examples of videos to “learn” the patterns in these videos to generate synthetic footage. This was adopted in the Runway AI video generation; hence, the company refuses to say where the training data came from, partly out of fear of sacrificing competitive advantage. However, training details are also a potential source of IP-related lawsuits.
It should be noted that Runway currently faces litigation by artists against it and other generative AI companies that accuse the defendants of training their models on copyrighted artwork without permission, even before it launches the Runway AI video generation. In reacting, Runway argues that the doctrine known as fair use protects it from legal repercussions. However, their fate has yet to be determined by the court.
Moving forward, Runway is said to be raising another round of funding that would value the company at $4 billion. According to The Information, Runway hopes to hit $300 million in annual revenue this year following the launch of products like an API for its video-generating models.
However, the lawsuit against Runway shakes out, as generative AI video tools threaten to upend the film and TV industry as we know it. A study conducted in 2024, commissioned by the Animation Guild, a union representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, found that 75% of film production companies adopting AI have reduced, consolidated, or eliminated jobs after incorporating tech. The study also estimates that by 2026, more than 100,000 U.S. entertainment jobs will be disrupted by generative AI.
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