AI-generated “mind rot” movies are popping up all around the web and getting quite a lot of consideration. At the moment gaining traction amongst youthful customers, these clips characteristic wild characters, like a shark carrying sneakers and a ballerina with a cappuccino for a head.
One startup driving this pattern is OpenArt, based by two former Google staff in 2022. It touts round 3 million month-to-month lively customers.
The corporate just lately launched a brand new “one-click story” characteristic in open beta, which permits customers to enter a single sentence, a script, or perhaps a tune and switch it right into a one-minute video with a narrative arc. This will embody something from a light-hearted story for TikTok to extra critical content material like explainer movies or music movies for YouTube. OpenArt even envisions this characteristic getting used for promoting.
With One-Click on Story, there are three templates to select from: Character Vlog, Music Video, or Explainer. For a personality vlog, customers begin by importing a picture of their character and getting into a immediate. If a tune is uploaded, the software program understands the lyrics and creates an animation that aligns with the tune’s themes, like illustrating flowers blooming in a backyard.
Customers can edit particular person clips by revisiting the editor’s storyboard mode and tweaking prompts for a extra refined outcome. The platform aggregates over 50 AI fashions, permitting customers to decide on their most well-liked instruments, akin to DALLE-3, GPT, Imagen, Flux Kontext, and Secure Diffusion.
Picture Credit:OpenArt
The purpose of the brand new characteristic is to additional decrease the barrier for changing into an AI creator, a medium that continues to be immensely fashionable regardless of ongoing controversy.
Whereas these instruments could be useful — like utilizing video turbines to rapidly produce content material with authentic characters and narratives — there are quite a few moral points to deal with. These embody imitating different artists’ types, mental property rights, and the hazards of misuse and creating misinformation.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Throughout testing, we seen that the Character Vlog choice might tread into a gray authorized space as a result of kinds of characters it provides — akin to Pikachu, SpongeBob, and Tremendous Mario — which may pose dangers of mental property (IP) infringement. In June, Disney and Common sued AI agency Midjourney over AI-generated pictures.
Customers ought to be conscious that if their movies are discovered to infringe one other’s copyright, the video could also be taken off social media platforms, and if the person is discovered to have contributed to the infringement, they will probably be held liable underneath copyright regulation, which can lead to authorized motion from the copyright holder.
“We attempt to be cautious across the IP infringement,” Coco Mao, co-founder and CEO, informed TechCrunch. “If you add some IP characters, by default, the fashions we use will reject them, and it’s not capable of produce the IP character, however generally it slips.”
Mao added that the corporate is open to speaking to main IP holders to get licensing for characters.
Picture Credit:OpenArt
One facet that OpenArt believes units it aside is its skill to take care of character consistency. It argues that, in contrast to the typical video mannequin that usually depends on easy, standalone clips that customers need to piece collectively right into a cohesive story, OpenArt goals to make sure that each the visuals and the narrative stay constant.
“An issue that quite a lot of AI couldn’t actually deal with effectively is to have the character constant in the identical video…When you don’t have the identical character, then it’s laborious to get immersed within the story,” Mao mentioned.
Trying forward, the corporate plans to iterate on the one-click characteristic by permitting customers to create movies that includes conversations between two totally different characters. One other plan on the roadmap is growing a cell app.
OpenArt operates on a credit-based system. It provides 4 plans, with essentially the most primary costing $14 per thirty days for 4,000 credit, which incorporates as much as 4 One-Click on tales, 40 movies, 4,000 pictures, and 4 characters. The superior plan prices $30 per thirty days for 12,000 credit and consists of as much as 12 One-Click on tales. The Infinite plan is priced at $56 per thirty days for twenty-four,000 credit, and there may be additionally a crew plan out there for $35/month per member.
OpenArt has raised $5 million in funding thus far from Foundation Set Ventures and DCM Ventures, and it boasts a optimistic money movement. Moreover, the corporate mentioned it’s on observe to realize an annual income price of over $20 million.
