AI is the future. But so are we.

I’m investing a lot of time now in AI video and audio storytelling. AI is not perfect but it’s getting there. And we’re learning what it’s good at and what it’s not.

The good news is this, as far as things stand today, the most important element in AI storytelling is the human element. But let’s start with the positive, and it’s a big positive.

Imagination took a big leap

It’s not that working with AI has made me more imaginative, it’s that I feel less inhibited to think big than I might have done in the past.

Budget is always a concern in video production, even if you’re on a big budget. And we that budgetary concern can limit the imagination. What people often don’t tell you is that AI can be time-intensive, to get a professional result, but compared to the old way of producing material, it’s so much cheaper.

So, this enables you to think bigger, take narrative leaps which used to be prohibitive, take the viewer on a journey that’s even more stimulation.

Let me give you a simple example. There’s an acupressure mat, favoured by David Beckham and Pink. I made an ad for it that featured what people who used it were saying, that when you first got on it was painful, but after twenty minutes it felt like you were floating in clouds.

Below, you can see how I treated the idea in the ad made before AI, and how I treated it after AI.

What’s currently missing in AI video?

The “human nuance” as I call it, is the one thing that AI isn’t reproducing very well.

The still images are getting remarkably lifelike and detailed, the video pictures are losing that AI sheen, and AI sound can even soundtrack an entire video and be believable.

But what AI isn’t great at is taking the years of experience in our artistic journey, and our human experience, and putting it in a video. As somebody put it, AI is trained on what has already been done yesterday, not what needs to be done tomorrow.

But to give you an idea of how real we’re getting, here’s a little ad I made with AI video. The budget is a fraction of what it would cost normally…

Vision is everything

You might have seen a lot of sci-fi videos using AI. Oh and cats, of course.

But what’s really exciting about AI is the adaptability. Let me give you a real world example of an experiment I undertook.

When I was a nipper (young chap), I used to love documentary-dramas about history. History is notoriously difficult to make exciting on TV, hence lots of shots of modern London when talking about something that happened in 1642.

So I wondered to myself whether I could use AI to have fun with history. I came up with the idea for History’s Afterlife, a YouTube channel that imagines what historical figures would say to each other if they met.

It’s not groundbreaking but it’s the sort of thing that could NOT be made without AI, without spending a lot of time and money. Here’s an episode.

The future

No idea what the future holds. But, as they say, it’s the journey that’s important. And in this case, it really is.

I know there’s a lot of doom and gloom around in the creative community but I’m quite excited.

If you’d like to chat about AI and storytelling, let’s have a chat.