Last week, artificial intelligence startup Luma released a series of videos created using its new video generation tool Dream Machine, which the company describes as a “highly scalable and efficient Transformer model trained directly on video.”
The only problem? At approximately 57 seconds, the trailer produced by Dream Machine monster camp — an animated story about furry creatures traveling to an overnight camp — featuring Pixar Animation Studios’ Mike Wazowski, who is still recognizable, if slightly tainted by artificial intelligence Monsters, Inc. Many people noticed that multiple characters and their overall aesthetic look borrowed from the series, and questions quickly started pouring in.
Are you prompted for Pixar-style animations? Is it trained on material that includes Disney Studios work? A general lack of transparency is one of the biggest concerns with such models, as the Dream Machine joins OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s VideoPoet and Veo as one of many text-to-video artificial intelligence tools showcased in recent months.
Luma promotes its Dream Machine model as the future of filmmaking, featuring the ability to create “high-quality, photorealistic footage” simply by typing prompts into a box. Watch videos of cars hurtling down dissolving highways or sci-fi shorts with clunky narratives, and you’ll understand why optimistic fans of the technology are quick to call it a novel innovation.
Currently, Luma encourages people to sign up and play Dream Machine for free, but the company also has “Pro” and other tiers that charge users for more features. We reached out to Luma for comment on the source of the Dream Machine training footage, but have not received a response as of press time.
Disney has yet to publicly comment on what Luma is doing, and the company may not even be aware. But at a time when there’s been a push for more transparency into the datasets that power AI tools like the one Luma is building, things like monster camp It’s hard not to think that the generative AI ecosystem is prone to plagiarism.