AI video generators have been improving at a staggering speed. That fact is apparent in a new concept video for an imaginary Wonder Woman 3 film. But the 'trailer' also demonstrates how limited the tech still is.
The video mainly involves characters standing around and blankly staring into space. That's perhaps that's not actually million miles away from some real movie trailers, but the piece is attracting a lot of ridicule online (see our pick of the best AI art generators to learn more about generative AI tech).
Shared on X by the Acknowledge AI account and apparently made using Pika, the video feels awkward and uncanny. What are the characters looking at, people wonder? Montages of characters starting pensively into the distance is a fairly regular trope in real trailers. it's used to get in all the main actors's faces while generating the expectation that something BIG is happening. But when it's overused, and done by AI, it's just creepy.
There are plenty of the usual AI glitches too, including repeated characters (a multiverse Easter egg, perhaps?). Voice actor Kat Loveland commented: "Oooh a bunch of still photos that you zoom in and out on bad lip matching. You could literally do this by hand in any movie editing software already. Wow. Such progress! Also, since AI stole all the copyrighted movie images, also breaking the law." "Wow, that was really worth the carbon footprint. Not," the artist Kyle T Webster quipped.
Fans aren't impressed by the suggested relationship between Batman and Wonder Woman. And the piece has also generated the inevitable debate about Gal Gadot’s acting. "It’s funny that the only part of this that works is the AI perfectly emulating the soullessness of Gal Gadot’s acting, one person claimed. "It sounds like Gal Gadot doing an audio book reading not narration for a movie," someone else said.
The piece is unarguably a terrible trailer, but at the same time, I have to admit that not much more than a year ago, we would have been blown away to see AI generate video that's even remotely watchable. Perhaps it's the studios who need to up their game. "Still better than Justice League, The Flash, Shazam 1 and 2, Aquaman 2. Thats how bad DC is right now," one person argued.
For more AI news, see Google's new AI image generator ImageFX, and for real upcoming hero movies, see the stunning Madame Web posters.
