The Next Wave of AI Video Slop
The Cost of Creative Continues to Drop
OpenArt.ai is another one of those platforms that now offer most of the image and video generation models. They’ve just added a feature that allows users to create an entire short film or music video from 1 image and 1 initial prompt. While it’s driven by a few templates and they want you to start with one of their custom characters, you could generate your own. The tool will then write a series of prompts for you, place your consistent character in a series of scenes, generate dialog, add lip-synching and music, and assemble the whole thing as file for you to share…in a couple of minutes. If you were on their cheapest plan ($14/month), this would blow through 25% of your credits, or about $3.50.
To be fair, this is a very accessible and equitable method that will allow a whole new range of people to be creative (kids will love it). And, perhaps, not everything it produces will be AI slop. However, if you see a whole new wave of kitschy video hitting your social feeds next week, this will probably be the origin. What’s astonishing to me is that only four months ago, I was exposing my students to every cutting edge tool we could get our hands on, and it took six weeks of trial and error to produce anything close to this. The world is changing rapidly. Check it out
Lightning Courses From Maven are Free!
I just attended “Lead AI Projects Without Technical Skills” with Lauren Vriens on Maven, along with 200 other people. It was great, it was on Zoom, it was free. It was a great use of my time. Do you feel the need to level up your AI skills, but you lack the time/attention span to sit through another class? Maven has a ton of free Lightning courses on AI, and I’ll definitely be taking more. Check it out
My MCP for UX Designers Article was Picked Up by UX Collective!
In yesterday’s newsletter, I shared a HTML/CSS presentation on MCP that I vibe coded with Claude. Well, I kept that momentum going and turned it into an article and submitted it to the editors at the UX collective (500k subscribers!) Check it out
Stone Carving Robots
We frequently talk about existential dread in my classes as my students wonder if they will ever be able to catch up with AI (probably not), and worry about it’s ethical implications. Sometimes I tell them to double down on analog skills; if you’re really good a making something, there will always be a place for you. Oops, wrong again.
Using an $8 million round of venture capital funding, the 2-year-old company is turning this aging warehouse into a modern stonecutting factory capable of quickly producing highly detailed decorative facades, museum-grade marble sculptures, and towering stone monuments. And if founder Micah Springut gets his way, the company will soon be trying its robotic arms at an even grander project: reinventing the way buildings get built.
Cringe-worthy Corporate Moment of the Week
Hey Microsoft, perhaps it’s insensitive to use AI generated art in the midst of massive layoffs. Almost as bad as the manager that suggested laid off employees turn to ChatGPT for solace. Source
Vibe Coding for Beginners
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know that I’ve been on a ‘Vibe Coding’ sprint lately. And when I say ‘Vibe Coding’, I really mean prototyping, not transforming yourself into a programmer. If you’re just getting started, this article from Inc. has some helpful tips. Check it out
How Far Has Runway Come in Two Years?
In September of ‘23, I blew through a bunch of credits from Midjourney and Runway to make a mini documentary about Joan of Arc. I added audio from Eleven Labs and considered myself a genius for what I had accomplished. Yesterday, I re-generated a set of new clips with Runway’s Gen4 model and mapped it to the original audio and combined the two.
That’s it for today. I wanted to say a huge Thank You to all my new subscribers! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a professor of Graphic Design in Seattle and I love researching and writing about AI tools. If you ever have a question, or would like me to do a deeper dive on something, send me a message!
You can also buy me a coffee☕