ByteDance released a video AI on Monday. It’s called Boximator and it’s meant to be a better way to control characters in generated video.
But that is not what is interesting here.
Boximator allows users to ‘draw’ boxes around subjects and then define their motion paths. If you want a character to walk from left to right, you draw a box and a line. The AI does the rest.
Why it matters: Control is the final frontier for generative AI. Up until now, we have been ‘slot machine’ prompting. You pull the lever and hope for the best. Boximator is a move towards the ‘steering wheel’.
It also signals that ByteDance (TikTok) is pulling ahead in the commercial application of video models. While OpenAI shows us polished movies with Sora, ByteDance is building the tools that creators will actually use to edit their content.
Precision is the new speed.
