Text to Video matures?

This is the first Saturday newsletter where I aim to do a deep dive into something AI related, be it a tool, news item or topic, in the hope of providing you with something interesting and valuable.

Today, I want to introduce you to a new tool that I have just started using that has blown my mind. I have been playing with several text to video tools this year and it seems that, very much like everything else AI, it gets better each week. The tool I’m going to talk about is Invideo AI. I had tried out Invideo studio earlier in the year, and whilst useful, it seemed quite clunky to get any output (but maybe that was me). When I heard that they had released an AI first version, I was curious but not especially excited given my previous encounter. Wrong. Very wrong as it turned out. Here’s my post on X earlier this week (click on the image below to start the video):

Now the amazing thing about this is that it took me less time to do my bit - the text - than it took you to watch the video. I told Invideo AI that I wanted to create a short video about the rise of ChatGPT in the time since its launch in November 2023 to now and then think about what the next year would look like.

I then told it that I wanted the voice to be Old Husky British Male and that the music should be mindful or something similar. That was it. Three minutes max. What you can see above is unedited, although there is an option to do just that. It took about five minutes to render the video once I pressed the button to start. In that time, Invideo wrote the script, chose the music, recorded the voiceover, chose the stock imagery and video file and made sense of the storyboarding. Oh, and then pulled it all together into what you see above. Is it perfect? Not by a long way. The script is a bit clunky and it probably ends a bit abruptly for my taste. I’d probably change the voice and the tempo of the music. But. Ai is in its extreme infancy as is this tool. Imagine what this will be like in a year. One year ago now, I had probably just been introduced to image generation and been equal parts amazed by the concept and disappointed by the output. Video was a pipe dream. A year later, images are photorealistic and incredible whilst video is moving forward apace. No wonder we had half of Hollywood on strike for a good part of this year.

I listened to a podcast earlier this year by somebody who is right in the middle of all that is happening with AI. He said, with some conviction, that text to Hollywood style movies was just around the corner. Think of the implications of that going forward.

I’ll leave you with a question: are there any areas of the creative realm that will be untouched by AI in the coming year?

See you next week and thanks to everybody for their comments on the news led Wednesday edition. Follow me on X for more AI goodness!