Sometimes, events have a way of taking strange turns, and first impressions of a product do not always tell the full story. Such was the case for me when it came to the somewhat infamous AI platform Grok. Before this point, I knew Grok as that unhinged AI that tended to say some pretty awful things on X that would also argue with posters on that social media platform. I never imagined that I would ever use it for anything. That was, until I remembered that DeviantArt existed and decided to open an account on the art-sharing platform.
Along with providing another platform to share my photographs and AI generations, DeviantArt also includes access to its own suite of AI tools. The main platform is its in-house implementation of a Stable Diffusion-based image generator called DreamUp. The other main element is a page with access to a variety of video-generation tools, one of which is Grok. I decided to give it a try, and was quite impressed with the results. Grok’s video quality is able to match or possibly exceed anything that Sora was capable of.
First Test Batch of Videos on DeviantArt
In addition, the version available on DeviantArt was only a taste of the full capabilities of the platform, and I decided to try out the “full” Grok app. There are some differences, as Grok does not feature persistent characters like Sora did, but it does have a workaround for that. While the DeviantArt version has a limited length for prompts, the main app does not, and decent results are possible from an accurate description of a character. In addition, the app also allows you to upload a reference image for a video. Thus, I can use a screenshot from an old Sora video to get a character’s face exactly right. I’ve tried it with just a solo scene with Elyssa so far, but I also intend to see how it can handle multiple references for multi-character scenes. The app’s other main “party piece” is an “Extend” feature that can lengthen a video from 10 seconds up to 30 seconds in 10-second intervals, a great feature for dialogue-heavy scenes.