The entrepreneurs behind the Myspace social network and gaming company Jam City have shifted their focus to generative AI and web3 with a new venture, Plai Labs, a social platform that provides AI tools for collaboration and connectivity. Plai Labs has released a free text-to-video generator, PlaiDay, which will compete with other GenAI video tools from the likes of OpenAI (DALL-E 2), Google (Imagen), Meta Platforms (Make-A-Video) and Stable Diffusion. But PlaiDay hopes to set itself apart by offering the ability to personalize videos with selfie likenesses.

“If you’ve ever wanted to see a video of yourself (an animated version of yourself, that is) flying over the Grand Canyon or battling intergalactic enemies, PlaiDay makes it possible,” writes TechCrunch, explaining that all users need to do “is upload a selfie and type a few words, generating a short-form video that you can share with your friends and followers.”

At present, PlaiDay AI videos are limited to three seconds long, but the company intends to expand that, and is also developing audio capability. In response to a demo based on the parameters “English Bobby, 1800s style, streets of London,” TechCrunch concedes the results aren’t “life-like,” but “PlaiDay does a decent job of conveying realistic facial expressions” and “the people in the background are walking relatively smoothly.”

The startup, which has been gearing up for the past year, “is the latest venture of entrepreneurs Chris DeWolfe, Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto,” writes VentureBeat, wich reported in January that the company announced a $32 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The text-to-video generator can be tried at PlaiDay’s Discord server, and the company plans to make it available via an app that is already downloadable at the App Store.

While Plai Labs was initially launched to create blockchain-based games like “Champions Ascension,” spun off from Jam City, it then branched out into artificial intelligence apps, launching its first generative product with PlaiDay.

VentureBeat says there will be more GenAI products to come, explaining that PlaiDay is built on a proprietary AI platform internally codenamed Orchestra. “While the company is currently using Orchestra as an internal platform, Plai Labs plans to share the development platform with the world in the coming months,” VentureBeat writes.

“This is just the very beginning of what we see as the future of storytelling,” co-founder Benedetto told TechCrunch, noting that “once you can start putting yourself into these [AI] videos, you really start to tell your own stories.”