Midjourney just launched the company’s first video generation model, a web-only system enabling users to animate any image into 5-second clips — coming just days after Disney and Universal sued the company for copyright theft.
V1 transforms images through either automatic animation or manual prompts, where users can describe specific camera movements and actions.
Each job creates four 5-second clips extendable to 20 seconds, priced at 8x image costs — which Midjourney says is 25x cheaper than rivals.
Being I2V only and having no audio capabilities like Veo 3, V1 won’t compare directly to top rivals — but is definitely an interesting start to the company’s future holodeck vision.
A new study from MIT just found that students using ChatGPT for essay writing showed significantly weaker brain activity and memory retention compared to those writing unaided or using traditional search engines for research.
• Researchers divided 54 Boston-area students into three groups, tracking their brain activity via EEG while they wrote SAT essays over four months.
• One group utilized ChatGPT for writing, another used Google for web search, and the third group used no resources at all.
• The ChatGPT group displayed the weakest neural connectivity and performed worse across all three categories of neural, linguistic, and scoring.
• Brain-only writers showed the strongest neural networks across creativity, memory, and processing regions throughout all sessions.
While a small study and spanning just one specific task, the results show the concerning tradeoffs that the convenience of powerful LLMs can bring. With AI tools quickly being integrated across the education system, this research shows how early dependence could potentially have a costly impact on developing minds.