AI-m I Right? AI-ght?

Intrigued by the sudden explosion of AI “products” (if that’s the right word), I decided to play around with some things, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. And the results were…well, okay.

Trying out ChatGPT followed my reading of an article about sci-fi magazines having a surge of AI-written short stories which, from what I could tell, were not great. I had also just spoken with a friend who had generated a children’s story with the site.

I tried a variety of prompts, with varying results. Since I’m working on a short film about a Doomsday weapon, I thought a poem about a post-apocalyptic world might be good. So I typed a prompt (“Write a 500 word monologue in the style of Shakespeare about nuclear war”), and in a few seconds ChatGPT produced an adequate rhyming poem on the topic. My friend Mike, a high school English teacher, responded to it with, “Interesting to think that if a ‘famous’ person wrote that, we would consider it valuable…but because an ai wrote it just now, it’s not.”

To continue the experiment, I had DALL-E generate art for a lone figure in a post-nuclear apocalyptic landscape. It produced four possibilities but one seemed the best fit. After reading the poem (with another tool, BIGVU, since I guess I need to update my system to have my Mac do recorded text-to-speech), I exported the video and imported the audio into GarageBand for audio editing and music, and then imported that audio track into Adobe Premiere for video editing.

After adding titles, I exported the video for a YouTube upload. To make it clearer I added captioning which turned out to be fairly simple. Uploaded and done!

You can watch the “Naught But Death” here. Not the greatest video, but a nice experiment.

More about the usefulness of AI creation in my next post.