TikTok’s New “AI Alive” Feature Brings Your Still Shots To Life

A few days after Google announced Gemini’s image-to-video converter was headed to the Honor 400 family, TikTok has responded and democratised the technology for its audience with a feature it calls “AI Alive” that’ll turn any static photos you give it into “dynamic, immersive videos directly within TikTok Stories.”

TikTok frames up

The short video sharing app has largely avoided the excessive addition of AI features in a way that companies like Meta and X haven’t. This should prove to be a fun addition for its younger user base, who are always looking for ways to make their videos stand out and go viral.

The feature’s only caveat is that it’s only available on TikTok Stories, which disappear after 24 hours. It looks like the video sharing titan is only tentatively rolling out the feature for now, perhaps testing it out by watching users experiment with some (very) short-lived content first.

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To access the feature, users must head to the Story Camera, choose a still from the Story Album, and press the “AI alive” option after uploading the picture. The app will suggest prompts to get you started, or users can write their own, and watch the app do its thing. The result is both entertaining and highly Uncanny Valley-coded.

“To help prevent people from creating content that violates our policies, moderation technology reviews the uploaded photo and written AI generation prompt as well as the AI Alive video before it’s shown to the creator,” TikTok said, noting that any AI-generated videos using the technology would be slapped with a label displaying such “to bring transparency to how the content was created.”