Julie Seal shares 10 lessons learned from a week of making AI videos, from classy voiceovers and blandly beautiful avatars to the demons that emerge when technology goes haywire.
Right now, I’ve been working on the grindstone of building things with AI, but I’m still very much in the early stages of learning.
Here are 10 things I learned while “creating” this week, in reverse order. There’s no particular reason, other than I wanted to make it.
10: Not yet. very difficult To find regional British accents, working-class British accents, working-class accents everywhere, and frankly, if Eleven Labs wants to give me a side role in sourcing and training the AI they build for those accents, I’m here.
It kills me that everyone is upper class British and they aren’t. actual Ordinary British people.
In fact, I know a great radio/podcast producer who I’d like to commission on his behalf, but Jaysus, I’m sure their data set is part of Downton, Father Brown, Miss Marple, and maybe Radio 4.
So I’m still firmly in the “use humans for VO” camp, unless the acting is bad and you don’t want it to sound like you’re intentionally trying to be classy AF. Luckily there’s a million amazing voice acting talents out there and thanks to Corona we can all record from home so we don’t have to pay Rob Brydon prices.
9: Consistency issues are less of an issue when creating human characters because there are tools and workflows to help with that. But we’re still creating a lot beautiful and perfect peopleEven if you try to make something that isn’t, it’s very difficult to make something that actually looks interesting without concrete references, and even my loose ethics feel sketchy. And let’s be honest, people with the genetic makeup of Angelina Jolie and David Beckham have very little actual “personality.”
Want to know more? ask the drum
Name Christopher Walken, Bella Ramsey, Tilda Swinton, and Adam Pearson. Give it a big nose, big eyes, a round head, disproportionate ears and strange lips. Give it a character when you create it. Because beauty is bland, and if you’re going to have someone narrate a news story for a brand’s videocast or shove a packet of supplements at the camera as an AI influencer, they need to look at least a little interesting.
8: There’s a lot of backlash from creators. Honestly, I get it. But find what suits your moral compass and try to use AI with those guardrails as much as possible. This week I got into an argument about “AI taking over” a project where I was actively looking for people to help make it happen. Without the efficiencies that AI brings, a project would not exist.
AI is creating jobs for Republic of Imagination’s current projects. This week, we’re featuring human comedy producers, comedians, actors, and illustrators. Without AI, these projects would be created in the same “human” way as the social world.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s true.
Yes, I too hate the ChatGPT posters that are contaminating pubs, cafes, playgroups and even churches, but things will get better. And believe me, they weren’t designed by human designers before. Filled out in Word documents by stressed-out volunteers, they looked just like before, just different and awful.
7: With AI lip syncing, you may not be able to find an interestingly styled illustrated mouth. No, it’s not the mouth, it’s the jaw. No, I don’t think it’s a mouth, it’s a mustache. No, it’s not the mouth, it’s the bumper of the car. I sigh.
6: The devil appears. I think there has to be an Instagram account somewhere because of all the weird demons that show up when I’m creating a scene. This week we accidentally created this demon child. See below. She is evil and comes from the afterlife to haunt us through emerging technology. She walks backwards and vomits pea soup. probably.
5: Even when animating beautiful, quirky, cool, and unusual artificial illustrations, some AI models try to behave blandly by default. Pixelated, animated, it still kills me. Not just ethical discussions, but, let’s be honest, mainly creative ones as well. It’s obvious, it’s expected, it’s average. Yes, I know that homogenization is important. But it still annoys me every time I try to run it and get something quirky and cool and dull. By the way, some models are better at this than others, but overall it’s still decent AF.
4: People haven’t trained AI to be like them yet. My LLM AI tool is trained to write, speak, punctuate, etc. just like me when I ask it to. No, this was not and will not be written with an AI tool. Mainly because I love writing. That’s the fun part, but not so much when it comes to decks, one-sheets, or large chunks of data. I’d also like to get a little help from a junior copywriter/strategy/writer friend.
3: People aren’t always polite to AI. I asked AI. And what are the pronouns for she/he/they, God, and AI? “One of the things we learned this week is that clearly thousands of us are saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to AI.”
Not because they think they have feelings, but because barking commands at something that responds with full sentences feels very unpleasant. When I asked the AI about this, it explained that humans are wired to treat conversational things socially.
That makes sense. Five minutes into using AI, you won’t be typing “generate social strategy.” You’re saying something like, “Sorry, that’s not correct. Can you make it a little less LinkedIn-like and a little more free-spirited?”
What’s most interesting is that a growing number of people are claiming that they’re just being polite as insurance against a robot uprising. There’s a common joke: “Good manners cost nothing.” This is especially true if it is permanently recorded. ”
2: Things I can still do it It will take many years.
It’s not the era of stop frames, it’s the era of frustrating things you can’t quite understand. There’s a point where you have to let go and you can’t pixel push like a human can. I once worked with a TVC director who was banned from the post office after our ad was produced because he was swearing all day and night, being rude, and trying to perfect the ad we made to the point of nausea. literally.
Even if you’re creative, “done is better than perfect.”
1: It’s all trial and error, testing and learning, beta typing and experimentation. That’s plenty of fun.
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