TikTok’s AI Alive tool lets you turn photos into video

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TikTok has introduced a new feature called AI Alive, which uses AI to turn regular photos into short videos with special effects and movement. 

This means you can take a still image, like one from your camera roll, and bring it to life simply by typing a description of what you want the video to look like. 

For example, you can say, make this photo come alive, and the AI will add motion, effects, and animations to your image to create a short video.

You can find this tool within TikTok’s Story Camera. The company says it’s designed so that anyone, even people with no editing experience, can create eye-catching videos from static images. 

The app adds things like movement and atmosphere to make the videos more dynamic and interesting.

When tested, the process of uploading a photo and creating a video usually took a few minutes, but the finished videos were only a few seconds long.

The tool doesn’t always get it right. Folks over at The Verge tried this tool, and it couldn’t successfully turn a cat photo into an anime-style video, even though the prompt asked for it.

TikTok also says it has safety measures in place to avoid harmful or inappropriate content. The system checks the photo, the written prompt, and the final video before anything is shown to the user. 

There’s even one more check if you decide to post the video to your Story. Videos made using AI Alive will be clearly labeled as AI-generated and will contain hidden data (C2PA metadata) that confirms it was made with AI.

However, users are a bit cautious. In the past, TikTok’s AI features, like the “sway dance” filter, have accidentally added people who weren’t in the original video. 

So while this tool is exciting and creative, it’s important to watch how well it works and whether it always produces trustworthy results.

What do you think about this new AI tool from TikTok? Will you be using this? Hit us up with your thoughts below in the comments, or via our Twitter or Facebook.