“AI Talks” is a series from the Huntsville Business Journal on Artificial Intelligence and its applicability to the world of business. Each month, HBJ plans on bringing you interesting topics led by our contributing expert writer, Carl Holden.

This has also introduced another “writer” to our journal: Artificial Intelligence itself. Using Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), we plan on bringing our readers an “article” written directly by AI.

While AI cannot currently write a news article with fully original sources, this series hopefully will introduce our readers to the nuances of Artificial Intelligence in the modern age of business. The first article in this series is written from our contributing expert writer, Carl Holden. One the next page, you can find an article using ChatGPT.

Exploring the boundaries of Artificial Intelligence with space, education, and content creation

As someone who works in marketing, I’ve done my fair share of social media posts, blogs, and videos on a wide variety of topics. It’s hard not to work in Huntsville and avoid the subject of defense or space. It’s called Rocket City! Over the last dozen years, I’ve lost count how many of those pieces of content were related to space and rockets.

As someone who needs to make content, I have seen firsthand that we are on the precipice of incredible content creation. At this point, AI can generate believable text, photos, video and even music. It’s impressive technology yet most innovations in modern AI are only one to two years old.

Most people I meet do not realize the amazing content you can create with relatively no creative skill. Someone creative like myself used to have a major advantage in knowing design and the tools to create, but the barrier to entry into creative works isn’t dropping, it’s disappearing.

To illustrate this point, I’ve generated a minute video with AI – watch it here: https://youtu.be/4dAo-mRx-iI

Here’s the amazing fact about this video: Every part of the video is AI.

All of the video is generated by RunwayML. I simply described some scenes and it gave me four previews. I then chose a preview picture and highlighted sections and told it how to animate those portions of the images. It still requires human direction as AI video is very prone to “hallucinations”.

In AI text, hallucination refers to when it makes up a fake answer instead of saying it does not have a solution. Video AI hallucinations resemble more of the traditional use of the word, a visual mixing of uncanny or unsettling motions. However, as you can see, it’s getting way better. Hallucinations are easier to control when the movement is smaller. That’s why most AI videos you watch are in slow motion.

The human-sounding male voice is not real and is generated from a site that costs $20 per month. Over the years, I have hired dozens if not hundreds of voice over jobs. I must admit that we use AI voice if we have a small project with limited budget, like a social post. The untrained ear doesn’t know the difference.

Even the music isn’t real. It’s actually two tracks, one of an eerie space hum and then a slight orchestral background. I simply said what kind of music I wanted and then combined a few tracks.

It’s not a perfect video, but here’s the kicker: if you remove the time it took waiting for the video to generate, this project was produced in around 30 minutes. If you divide out the monthly cost of these things and pay me $100 an hour, it still would have cost less than $100 entirely to make.

AI video is not ready for prime time. This would definitely raise an eyebrow to viewers. Any rocket scientist or engineer who works for NASA would cringe at the technical inaccuracy of the astronauts or the ships. To the normal person though this is passable if not even a little inspiring.

Here’s the final shocker…I didn’t even write the text! I queried ChatGPT, “You are creating a video about traveling to space for a NASA Commercial. Be inspiring but sound like quotes from a book or story of adventure.” I placed some of the text that generated into the AI voiceover.

The only human part of this was my direction. I chose what to generate and use. I placed the videos, cutting them and lining them up to the script. I added some fading effects manually. That’s it.

What does this mean for the future of video and entertainment? Not a lot yet. This is not going to make a movie. It’s actually a very slow process. The real time this took was about 3 hours, almost all of it just sitting and waiting 2 to 5 minutes for a 4 second video to generate. However, imagine if it took half as long and looked twice as good. That’s when Hollywood should start to get a little concerned.

I finally watched Avatar: The Way of the Water. I was blown away by what they accomplished. AI video is still years if not decades away from replicating anything even close to that level. In fact, given the amount of instructions you might need to give to get that kind of detail, you might be better off just making the movie the right way. At the current speed of AI video generation, a 3 hour movie would take me about 30,000 hours or 3 working years if I knew exactly what I was making and the AI gave me the video I needed.

But for smaller projects, social posts, website video backgrounds, and other small chunks of content, this is a game changer. The amount of money being dumped into AI video alone is stupendous. Runway alone has raised $141 million and a newer competitor Pika has raised $55 million. Big tech companies sitting on huge amounts of video like Facebook have launched free versions of AI video generation as well. Yes, the videos you uploaded to social media helped train an AI. Really any content on the internet that is publicly visible is up for grabs until / if legislation catches up.

So what should you do? Learn how to use it! At the very minimum, it’s fun to make a small movie and feel like a director. The skills of AI are about human direction. It still requires creativity and making mistakes. The worst mistake you can make is saying, “I’ll try it when it gets better.” By then, others are way better at the tools than you.

As the AI said of space travel, “This journey is our legacy- a beacon for future generations to follow.” Space travel or AI might feel intimidating, but normal humans just like you and I have made the journey.