cybermacs_huge_title_text_VOICE_four_cute_and_retro_robots_are__0788eb40-f0de-40b9-9310-af0b084dca2c flickr photo by CyberMacs shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
It’s the eighth day of the 12 Days of AI project, and today, the prompt has us looking at the affordances, limitations and possibilities of AI-generated video content. The site we are exploring is Synthesia, which is apparently geared towards the business world, and not education, and as I explored the site with a prompt to create a learning video, I had to navigate elements of the business world lexicon. I also realized, mid-way through, that the site works best on Chrome or Edge, and not Firefox, but I was already knee-deep in it, so I kept going.
I decided to ask Synthesia to work on a video for me about a topic I am teaching today, in fact, as part of our vocabulary lesson. The non-fiction text for today’s lesson is all about silk works and the making of silk. So I uploaded the student text as PDF and asked it create a video about silk worms for elementary students.
Here is the AI video it created:
I recently tried Google’s AI Video platform (now embedded inside my Google Drive) and it was terrible on this very same topic. The information was not quite correct, and the flow of the interface and wording was so disjointed I abandoned my efforts to make it work. Synthesia, on the other hand, is smooth and seemed to do a pretty decent job of integrating the information I uploaded (about silk worms) into the video presentation.
I only used the free version, so I could not do much tinkering with the template (can you tell this is a site aimed at businesses?) and I was put off a bit at the end, as the AI woman presenter wraps things up with a sultry voice out of place with the rest of the presentation. I cringed, a bit. At times throughout the video, you can hear the voice being stitched together and some of her expressions seem odd. But still, this is a big improvement from where things were just a year ago in AI video production, I would say.
I also realize that I have been seeing more of these same kinds of AI talking head videos in the online world, and I imagine some businesses are going be all-in on this, creating AI training videos and AI marketing videos and more, without need for human editors or media employees, and how sad is that? (I have to sons who are in the film-making field and another in public relations and I worry mightily for their futures).
So, will I share this with my sixth graders? Maybe. We’ve been doing work around digital technology in their lives and we just did some work the other day exploring the role of Generative AI in the world. They might be intrigued by this, and perhaps bring a critical lens to the production value here.
Peace (in the vid),
Kevin