I Converted My Photos Into Short Videos With AI on Honor’s Latest Phones. It’s Weird

As midrange telephones designed to plug the gap between flagships, the Honor 400 and 400 Pro won’t ordinarily entice a lot consideration. However these gadgets—unavailable in the US—are among the many first to characteristic Google’s image-to-video AI generator, primarily based on its Veo 2 mannequin (now out there to Gemini subscribers). Constructed into Honor’s Gallery app, it allows you to choose a nonetheless picture out of your digicam roll to convey it to life as a five-second video.

After a lot experimentation with completely different images, from landscapes to household and pets, I’m impressed and weirded out. Like every AI device, it has the potential to be good or dangerous, relying on the way you wield it, and the outcomes veer from flawless to freaky. It’s a neat trick, and it’s coming to the cellphone in your hand quickly.

Faux Images

Faking images is nothing new—the medium is always evolving. Synthetic intelligence has been smoothing wrinkles and enhancing skies for years. None of your photos are real, particularly these you shot together with your cellphone and edited to submit on social media. However we’re pushing past making a pretend bokeh background blur or dialing up the colours of a sundown. Creating totally pretend movies from nonetheless photos looks like a brand new excessive and a brand new low.

The method is simple. Open the Gallery app on the Honor 400 or 400 Professional, select the Create tab, faucet Picture to Video, and choose considered one of your images. Select a 9:16 or 16:9 side ratio for portrait or panorama, then hit begin. You’ll want to be related to the web. Every five-second video took round 30 seconds to create, however a pop-up message warns me they will take as much as two minutes. There’s no room to enter a immediate, so you’re left on the mercy of regardless of the AI decides to do.

I started with images of my spouse and youngsters. The primary few movies have a significant uncanny-valley really feel. In a single picture, my spouse is masking her mouth, and the AI animates her shifting her hand and speaking, however the mouth it pastes in is totally fallacious. A lot to her horror, it provides my daughter a collection of facial tics. The video of my selfie comes out properly and would certainly idiot anybody who doesn’t know me, however my spouse says she will be able to inform it’s not me as a result of I by no means make facial expressions like that.