Wishing & Coping

 Hi!

Another A.I. video. This one isn't a story; it's more along the lines of several fantasy TG transformation videos that are out there, a collection of transformative vignettes. So, I'm not exactly breaking any new ground here, I know, but I did try to do a quality job with these, and not just dump whatever faulty video generations Grok A.I. spit out. I made sure voices matched, all the dialogue was spoken correctly by the right characters, that nobody had extra limbs or moved in a weird way, etc. 

Some of the clips in these turned out well rather quickly and easily, others were maddeningly difficult and required dozens of attempts before finally nailing everything. It's really like trying to use a slot machine crossed with a 'whack-a-mole' game crossed with 'The Magic 8-Ball' toy as a creative tool. As slick as some of the results out there generally look, the tech has a long way to go before it will effectively replace traditional film-making, unless you just want to make slop or fictional Tik-Tok/Instagram models.

One new wrinkle, for me, is getting my fantasy 'alter ego', Lassitude, on the screen and hosting the video. Again, nothing new, generally speaking, but a fun experience for me. I took an old photo of the real-life me, uploaded it into Grok Imagine, told it to make a new image of that as a pretty, idealized version of a young lady with traits I enjoy, then had its video-making function bring her to life. She's so different from me in most major ways, yet I can see traces of the real me in her face and expressions. And now she talks to you and bookends this video. What a strange, amazing time we're living in.

Anyway, I hope you like this latest little video concoction of mine.

 

 

 

 

Three Wishes for the Mrs.

 Hi there! It's been a long time, I know. I realize some love it and some really hate it, but A.I. has finally allowed me to bring some material like this to life, so I couldn't resist. Here's a new story for you, a short film I devised, using Grok Imagine A.I. (plus some editing software). If the look of it seems a bit unusual, it's because I deliberately intended it to look like vintage 1950s paperback novel cover artwork brought to life.

I hope this comes across as a work of some quality; I don't want to generate "A.I. slop", if I can help it, so I've tried my best to see to it that this isn't that, but that determination ultimately rests with you. There are still a lot of limitations to the technology, so there are some details that "drift" across the narrative (the brunette woman's brown eyes suddenly become a striking blue at a key moment, early in the tale, for instance), and some background details become inconsistent. I tried to mitigate a lot of it, but some things like this still happen or slip through.

While I obviously didn't film, animate or visually design any of this (the data-scraping A.I. program did all of that, of course), I did devise the story, all of the dialogue, most of the camera direction and some of the acting, without aid of the A.I.. though Grok Chat did help refine some of the prompts, so that the video clips would, more or less, turn out the way I had envisioned them. It was harder and more time-consuming than you might think; there are lots of built-in visual biases in the A.I. that can make what seem to be simple actions or details go ridiculously wrong over seemingly endless video generations of a clip, plus super-strict (and often arbitrary) Content Moderation for even something as PG-rated as this is.

Anyway, I sincerely hope you enjoy this first formal foray of mine into A.I.-assisted storytelling...