Exclusive / Video AI company Pika offers new tool to speed up AI video creation - Semafor

Video AI company Pika launched a program to help AI creators make videos faster by using fewer prompts.

The product automates which AI model is used to create a given element in the video and speeds up the prompting process.

Instead of crafting paragraph descriptions from scratch as prompts, users can input basic details of what they want a video to look like and generate an editable, shot-by-shot list. The company is also releasing a suite of apps, including a tool for relighting and one that swaps characters or outfits.

The company — valued at $470 million and backed by Spark Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with individuals like actor Jared Leto and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy — has been playing catch up with others in the AI content creation space, such as Higgsfield AI, which has released feature-length AI-generated films, and is valued at $5.4 billion.

Higgsfield and AI video company Runway both already have their own integrated creator platforms. But Pika says their product stands out in part because it will be available at half the price of competitors’, including Seedance, a text-to-video generation model available across other AI video platforms.

The company is pitching the product as an antidote to what has been for many creatives, a shame-ridden, “cringe” process. “There’s a sense in which [AI] can sometimes rob you of a feeling of authorship or ownership,” said Lindsay Brillson, Pika’s head of brand and content. “We want to make sure that the element of creative control and stewardship still remains.”

AI video generation has improved at breakneck speed over the past few years. And Hollywood studios have started to warm to the technology: A24 has partnered with Google to develop AI-powered filmmaking tools, and Netflix purchased Ben Affleck’s AI-powered filmmaking startup Interpositive.