9 May 2023

It's the cool new thing of 2023 and has got people from all walks of life fascinated, intrigued and full of fear all at the same time. Has the day finally come where robots can do our jobs rendering us obsolete?

We’ve all been aware of the automation of jobs for many years now but what’s making some of us panic is that it’s coming after the creatives too?!

Personally I have my doubts about this tool that is only in its infancy but, despite this, I’m prepared to explore its scope. And, so, here, at the house of Fat Rat, we thought we’d put the artificial intelligence tools to the test. The experiment explores how AI is going to change social media videos and how it can be a helpful tool for all our lovely non-profit clients.

The AI experiment: The controls we’ve set ourselves are simple; our in-house editor Charlie will feed a singular script (written by us) and images/videos into the chosen AI program of the week. Depending on how good the video output is, we will spend a maximum of 2 hours tweaking it. The only variable will be the AI software used each week.

N.B We will be only using AI software that is free to use or has a free trial available.

Week 4: Murf.ai

The main takeaway is that this is a great program to get a quick V.O sorted but would recommend another software to edit your visuals with.

• The text-to-v.o function works really well! The range of voices is great, giving us many more options on tone of voice, style of voice, accents, gender, age, etc - overall I’m impressed with this function. The two real voices we chose for the final output are much more emotional and much less robotic than the other programs have allowed. The effect is as though Fred and I were narrating the video ourselves giving it a personal feel.
• The visuals are very static, it only allows a drag and drop which doesn’t allow for a lot of dynamism which is much needed for an output like this.
• There are too few images being used by the program so it feels slow and clunky.
• The images used are not illustrative of what’s being said.
• Tonally the music doesn’t suit the story being told.

Whether you’re a filmmaker or a client, how do you think AI-generated videos might impact the creative industry?