Video generation is all the rage right now. While last month was all about Google’s Veo 3, which has already threatened to deepfake all of YouTube, make incoherent action movies, and automate game development, the fun (or horror) hasn’t stopped there. Just this week, OpenAI announced that it’s making its Sora video generation model available for free via Bing, which is big news for anyone that’s interested in testing out a video generator but doesn’t actually feel the need to pay for one yet. And it’s not all about the big two, either—there are apparently other AI companies that saw what Veo 3 was putting down in the world of AI slop and said, “Hold my beer.”
One of those companies is called Captions, which just launched its own video generation model called Mirage Studio that it says can “generate expressive videos at scale” and create “actors that look and feel alive.” To translate: it looks like Mirage Studio is designed to be the perfect model for AI-generating social media slop, and semi-convincing AI social media slop at that.
Introducing Mirage Studio.
Powered by our proprietary omni-modal foundation model.
Generate expressive videos at scale, with actors that actually look and feel alive. Our actors laugh, flinch, sing, rap — all of course, per your direction.
Just upload an audio, describe the… pic.twitter.com/x6naqtlmLh
— Captions (@getcaptionsapp) June 2, 2025
Mirage Studio seems, unlike Veo 3, to be almost singularly geared toward “content creation,” which is to say videos that might appear on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. As Captions puts it, Mirage Studio is “built for marketers, creative teams, and anyone serious about crafting great narrative videos.” It works by uploading an audio clip and then either describing a scene to generate or dropping in a “reference image.” Once all of that is in there, you just select a few parameters, and boom, you generate the video.
If this sounds like an easy AI-ified way to steal the likeness of content creators or actors, I’m here to report that that’s exactly what it is. As proof, I took some of Gizmodo’s content from my colleague Kyle Barr (sorry, Kyle), who got to check out the Switch 2 recently, and turned his work into a Twitch-like abomination delivered by this guy with a blue mohawk. It’s hard to say who Mirage Studio is stealing from (aside from us), but I’d hazard a guess and say it’s clearly trained on videos from YouTube, Twitch, and other streaming platforms.
To make the video, I did exactly what Captions said: I took a video from Gizmodo’s Instagram page, threw it into the AI slopifier, selected my “actor,” and waited for Mirage Studio to melt it down inside its generative belly and spit it back out. After an excruciating 10 minutes of waiting for a three-second preview, I finally got a little clip of what Kyle’s video would look like if delivered by a blue-haired Twitch streamer, and then I got to generating the video in full. The results are about exactly what I might expect from an AI video generator of this caliber.
I turned @KyleBarr5‘s Switch 2 video on Gizmodo into AI slop with @getcaptionsapp. Sorry, Kyle, and everyone with eyeballs. pic.twitter.com/fXpbcAI6Lv
— James Pero (@jamestpero) June 4, 2025
At a very cursory glance, it did an okay job, but the more you watch, the more it unravels. The narration is mostly fine since it basically stole Kyle’s delivery and regurgitated it, but there are hazy edges around the perimeter of the video and other small visual distortions. Also—my personal favorite—a spontaneous appearance of purple ectoplasm toward the end, which I assume is some kind of hallucination of an object from another video that Mirage Studio stol—er—borrowed from. It’s a little sloppy and more than a little lazy, but it’s also (unfortunately) more than a little discouraging.
It’s pretty clear from this small demo that the AI slop train is coming, and there’s little we can do to prevent it. Outside of implications on content and the deluge of mindless social media chum we may encounter as a result of video generators, there are also big questions we need to unpack about intellectual property—questions with answers that don’t seem to be forthcoming anytime soon. Hollywood actors have already urged regulators en masse to set a framework for this sort of thing, but as is the case with most tech policy, it seems they’re content with being reactive as opposed to preemptive.
In any case, Mirage Studio is just further proof that video generators are coming (or they’ve already arrived), and that’s probably great news if you want to churn out some BS video for clicks, but for anyone that puts time and effort into making content, it may be time to buckle up because things are about to get, well… sloppy.
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