This AI video generator can melt, crush, blow up, or turn anything into cake

AI video maker Pika Labs has joined the recent flurry of new and upgraded tools by releasing Pika 1.5, a refreshed model with a bunch of new features. These visual effects, or “Pikaffects,” as the company calls them, come about a year after Pika 1.0’s initial debut. The timing of the release, right after rival models like Runway Gen-3, Hotshot and Luma Labs’ Dream Machine 1.5, suggests that the competition to dominate AI videos is far from over, even as people await a wider release of OpenAI’s Sora. model.

Pika 1.5 increases photorealism and gives users more camera control, with some pretty impressive results. But the Pikaffects are definitely the showstoppers, with bizarre changes in physics that seem to blend into the reality of the video, even though they would be impossible to film in real life. A new button in the Pika interface opens the list of options for what to do with objects in the video. So maybe you want to see a dog blow up like a balloon and float away, a castle melt like butter, a sandwich get crushed, a car explode, or a kitten get squashed. You can do all of the above using buttons with the appropriate verbs on them. It doesn’t come out of nowhere either. The buttons cause hands to come in and squash the cat, or a hydraulic press to crush the sandwich.