There has been so much hype over AI for the last couple of years that it is easy to get bored of hearing about it and maybe wish it would just go away. Well, it isn’t going to go away, that’s for sure. It isn’t a passing fad that people will eventually lose interest in, rather it has already become ingrained and interwoven into the very fabric of our society. It is also improving in leaps and bounds and has gone from being a gimmick or novelty to being a genuinely useful tool and to ignore it is to cede a massive advantage to those who embrace it. Two areas where it is improving at a stunning rate are image creation and video creation. A couple of years ago, I used an AI image generator to create a photo of a woman playing a guitar. It was pretty good at first glance but on closer inspection I realised the woman had six fingers on one hand and the guitar had seven strings. She also looked a little cross-eyed. I recently ran the same experiment and the same experiment in Google Gemini and the result blew me away. It was not just what I asked for in the prompt but it was spookily close to what I had in my mind’s eye! I studied it for a long time but was unable to find a single thing that gave it away as AI-generated. It really does look like an actual photo. I’ll let you judge for yourself.
An AI generated image of a Georgian woman in traditional costume playing guitar in the mountains.
AI is very good at generating surreal images too, such as a warthog in a polka-dot bikini riding a unicycle over a hill of fried eggs. And you can get much weirder than that — anything you can imagine and describe in a text prompt, AI will be able to turn it into an image, and generally a pretty impressive one. A really good use for it if you are an indie author or musician would be to create book or album covers. That could save you a lot of money. I haven’t used it for that yet but I certainly don’t rule it out in future. I’m certainly curious to try it — you could let the AI read your book and generate what it thinks is a suitable cover based on the content. That would be fascinating and I am fairly certain the results would surprise me. If you are stumped for ideas it is a great starting point and it might just give you something you decide is good enough to go with.
The latest buzz in AI is around video generation. I tried this with Google’s latest effort, VEO3. In short, it is astonishing! There’s a caveat — the clips it generates are only eight seconds long. That is why social media is suddenly flooded with AI videos of varying quality. Some of them are so good that people are believing what they see is real and commenting accordingly. The days when photos or videos can be considered evidence are long gone. The simple rule of thumb now is that if something looks unbelievable there’s a very good chance it isn’t real and AI is behind it. That’s fine if you tell people your content was generated by AI but sadly more often than not it is used without acknowledging AI to deceive or cause shock or awe. Where VEO3 raises the bar is that it can create realistic videos from text prompts and if you provide dialogue for your characters they will speak it. You can describe the physical characteristics of your characters, the background location, what action should take place and so on. The more detailed your description the better your clip will be, though the AI will do an amazing job of filling in blanks. It can even add appropriate sound effects. It takes care of all the technical things like lighting and colour. Basically, whatever you have in mind, if you can describe it well enough, AI will provide something impressive. Yet this is only a taste of the future. It gives you a glimpse of what might be possible before long — creating entire movies without cameras, locations, props or even actors! Sooner or later an AI will generate a full movie that could be considered Oscar-worthy. At that point the film industry will be in a very different place. What would happen if best film went to an AI generated entry? Who would get the Oscar? It would probably go to whoever created the prompts that generated the AI but you could argue the AI itself should get the Oscar! You have to wonder what the future holds for actors and other professionals in the film industry.
Here is a sample video I created with VEO3. I asked for a meerkat riding a pink bicycle through a village in rural China. I asked it to sing the song “Nine Million Bicycles”. The result was pretty much what I was hoping for other than the fact that the lyrics are spoken rather than sung, though maybe VEO3 did that deliberately to avoid copyright infringement, I don’t know. Listen out for other sounds, in particular the crowing cockerel — AI threw that in itself, it was nothing to do with me!
An AI generated video clip with spoken content, created with VEO3
Finally, I want to get to the point of this article — using AI to write. We have already reached the point where AI can write novels. No doubt there are people out there making a lot of money from churning out books that AI has written for them. Whether they are any good is another matter, but if they are selling then some people won’t care. If your main priority in life is just to make money then AI must seem like a gift from heaven. If, like me, you enjoy writing and get a buzz from the creative process then the idea of letting AI do it for you is horrendous. The sheer joy of seeing your characters take on a life of their own and lead you to places and situations you hadn’t expected is what makes writing so special. I would get zero satisfaction in letting AI do that for me. They wouldn’t be my characters. I would feel no connection to them. It would be pointless. And I won’t do it. Ever. But that’s not to say I won’t use AI at all. There are things it can do much better than me, such as summarise an entire novel in one paragraph, or help with tedious things like keeping track of timelines. There are many other ways it can be useful too and I think of more all the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favour of AI and think it is an amazing thing but I just don’t want it to replace the one thing that gives me most pleasure — the sheer joy of writing.