Google has recently announced significant upgrades to its native artificial intelligence (AI)-powered image generation model, Imagen 2, unveiling two innovative capabilities at its annual Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas.
Originally designed as an enterprise-focused product within the Vertex AI developer platform, Imagen 2 has been enhanced to provide additional functionality. Alongside its existing capabilities for creating logo elements and other visual resources for companies, Imagen 2 now boasts the ability to generate short videos, up to four seconds in length.
The newly introduced video generation feature, dubbed ‘Text-to-live image’ by Google, enables Imagen 2 to produce dynamic videos from text prompts. These videos offer a variety of camera angles and motion, providing users with engaging visual content. According to reports, the generated videos will feature 24 frames per second and deliver a resolution of 360×640 pixels, with Google expressing intentions to further enhance these metrics in the future.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, emphasized the potential of animated images to enhance user engagement, highlighting the quality of Imagen 2’s generation capabilities, which are on par with other industry offerings such as Runway AI and Pika 1.0.
Addressing concerns about deepfakes, Google assures users that Imagen 2 has undergone extensive testing and does not exhibit the same issues encountered by other platforms. Additionally, images and videos generated by the AI model will be labeled using Google DeepMind’s SynthID technology for added protection and transparency.
In addition to video generation, Imagen 2 has also been equipped with inpainting and outpainting capabilities. This feature enables users to edit specific parts of an image without the need to regenerate the entire content, offering a more efficient approach to image manipulation. Similar features are also offered by industry competitors such as Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3.
Google’s continuous innovation in AI-driven image generation demonstrates its commitment to advancing technology and providing valuable tools for enterprises seeking to enhance their visual content creation capabilities.