Meta shaken (not stirred)

License to Celebrate: 007 turns 60

The world's most famous fictional secret agent celebrated his 60th birthday yesterday. To honor Mr 007’s big anniversary, Christie's started a two-part auction of Bond props and memorabilia on the 15th of September. The live auction took place on the 28th, and the whole thing finished yesterday, the 5th of October, famously known as James Bond Day, and the date of the world premiere for the first Bond film Dr. No, held in 1962.

Both the anniversary and the auction drew a lot of attention, mainly because of its star item - a specially built Aston Martin DB5, one in 8 stunt cars built for the 2021 Bond movie No time to Die. To make it even more prestigious - allegedly, it’s the only stunt car by Aston Martin and EON productions to have been put up for sale.

The final price? Almost 3 million pounds. Worthy of the price tag? Every Bond fan would probably say - absolutely. 

Among other lots, you could find the Triumph Scrambler stunt motorcycle, used in No Time To Die, the Q Jet Boat, used in Pierce Brosnan’s The World is Not Enough, a Faberge-style egg from the 1983 Roger Moore movie, Octopussy, but also posters, costumes, and clothing items, all requiring Mr. Goldfinger’s spending power.  

"Everybody loves James Bond. Every one of us has grown up with James Bond to some extent. Everybody has that memory from childhood, from when you saw the repeated James Bond on TV, when you went to the opening of a new film. So it just resonates with everybody," says Adrian Hume-Sayer, Christie's Director and Head of Sale.

The nicest part? More than 6 million pounds raised at the auction were divided among 45 charities. 

Done, Mr. Bond. Well done.

No time to create nightmares

Nope, this picture you just saw isn’t an actual picture from the auction. Who would’ve guessed it, right?!

This picture is the work DALL·E, one of the most known AI-based image generation tools, which enables anybody to create strange, unique, and sometimes beautiful artworks based on text prompts. These tools scout the web for images from across the web and then sample and merges them into new artworks.

But Meta decided to ask the question: what if we could take it further? What if we could create videos the same way?

So they did just that.

Here’s an example from Meta.

Here are the prompts they used.

Top left: A dog wearing a superhero cape flying through the sky. 

Top right: A spaceship landing on Mars. 

Bottom left: An artist's brush painting on a canvas close up, highly detailed. 

Bottom right: A horse drinking water.

The clips above are examples of Meta’s new Make-A-Video AI system, which essentially enables people to create videos from text prompts, launched on the 29th of September. 

“[Make-A-Video] uses images with descriptions to learn what the world looks like and how it is often described. It also uses unlabeled videos to learn how the world moves. With this data, Make-A-Video lets you bring your imagination to life by generating whimsical, one-of-a-kind videos with just a few words or lines of text.”

We totally cannot see this being used for creating harmful content, defamation, misrepresentation, or inducing nightmares at all.

As Meta says, the system is still evolving, and they “iterated on filters to reduce the potential for harmful content to surface in videos.”

This also may be one of the reasons why meta is still not releasing Make-A-Video to the public just yet, and why we had to use DALL·E at the beginning of the segment. Despite the public unavailability, this innovation has already generated a lot of mentions across the web.

This technological advancement is impressive, but who do these tools actually benefit? This would definitely belong go in the “funny stuff I share with friends” category, but it could actually help brands as a means to create video content for campaigns and social posts.

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*All metric screenshots are taken directly from Mediatoolkit, a media monitoring tool.