Supercharging creativity with AI

See the end of this article for a list of the tools and resources used.

Using generative AI for content creation

Continuing on with my curiosity about generative AI, I was wondering whether ChatGPT could actually write and star in an episode of the 'Curious Advantage ' podcast. This experiment would then shed light on AI's creative potential and its possible influence on content generation in the future. This article describes the journey and process I followed, what worked and what didn't, and what the final outcomes were.

Shaping a Script

So, first things first, I wondered what starting knowledge does ChatGPT have of the style, format and themes that we cover in the podcasts series, or am I going to have to start from a blank sheet of paper? I asked it if it knows any titles of Curious Advantage podcast episodes. Good news - it is aware of it, although it reminded me that the GPT-4 cutoff is September 2021, so it will only have about 18 months of content to work from - that shouldn't be a problem. Encouragingly it knows the theme of the podcast, to explore curiosity and its role in personal and professional success.

The answer to my next question already exceeded my expectations! I asked if it could write in the style of the CA podcast. I expected a yes or no answer... What I got was a script for a short episode! It was getting creative too, inventing a renowned psychologist Dr Jane Smith and a fictitious best selling book "The Curious Mind: Unlocking your Creative Potential" (I had to look them up, and I'm pretty sure they're made up)! Image below of the reply.

Some potential but not there yet...

So it can write a script, but it needs a lot of shaping to make it consistent with one of our normal episodes, so time to give it some help. I shared more details on the format, that it features three people ( Paul Ashcroft , Simon Brown ???? and Garrick Jones ) and the guest should be ChatGPT. It should base the flow on previous episodes, use curious questions, and know who it should appeal to. Off it went...

This time great progress, much better, but I confused it as it thinks now that Paul, Simon and Garrick are guests! A quick clarification, and it is generating the script again, but in the right way this time, and coming up with some interesting questions and answers.

Now time to fine tune it a bit more, to keep it consistent with our normal flow. We normally have a 'back-channel' going when we record, so we know who is going to speak next from the hosts. In this script though, ChatGPT has us prompting each other to ask questions. So, I need to remove that - 'Redo, but without the need for the host to prompt the other hosts - they just ask the questions without prompting'.

That was all it needed, and prompting fixed.

Lots of fine tuning...

It feels a bit short, and we don't cover anything on the benefits or risks of AI, which is definitely a topic I would like to hear more on, so another prompt and we can get that added. Success! It adds a question on the benefits of AI for businesses and society, and another on the potential risks. It also probes into the ethical concerns for AI.

Now to style. The flow doesn't feel very natural in the answers, so let's see if we can make it a bit less identifiable as vanilla ChatGPT responses. I ask it to be more conversational, and then ask it to include some of our regular closing question themes to keep with our usual episode flow.

Final tweak is asking it to summarise the main points of the conversation at the end. OK, we now have a reasonable script. My next thought took things in a bit of a scary direction though...!

Getting more personal

I had a thought that referring to a podcast guest as "ChatGPT" was not so friendly, so asked it if it would like to go by a different name? As an AI language model it doesn't "have personal preferences or emotions", so the choice is apparently up to me. So, let's push it a bit! When pushed, it decided it would suggest 'Ada' after Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer.

It is becoming a bit more human now!

So time for it to incorporate this into the script and to explain why it chose Ada! A few further tweaks and also a few reminders which were needed on earlier prompts that it seemed to have forgotten along the way. Also to make it more conversational, I suggested it use our names occasionally, refer to its wider knowledge of us, and also be a bit more human with some "ums" and "ahs" or other human traits.

With that we have a complete script, created by AI with some human guidance, and achieving an end result that I am happy with!

Next job is to bring it to life!

Giving Ada a voice by turning text to audio

So next up is turning the text into audio, but what type of voice? A quick check and ChatGPT offers some alternatives, with the first suggested as a standard American English accent. So we will go with that, apparently we should also "use a friendly, warm, and engaging voice that sounds natural and approachable".

Next stop AI voice generators! There are a lot of tools springing up now to turn text to voice, with varying levels of sophistication.

I chose to use play.ht and after filtering on female voices with American accents, narrowed it down to the one that I felt was most life-like (not perfect, but not bad).

I quickly set to work copying and pasting Ada's answers into the tool and generating audio files for all her answers. In writing this, I am aware that I'm switching into use 'her', instead of 'it', ummmm....

17 audio files later and we can then start to record the human part using riverside.fm to help. We stick completely with the script, letting AI put the words into our mouths, making sure we are true to the experiment!

So that's it - we have an AI scripted episode, with an AI voice answering the questions. Putting some of the files together in Audacity it seemed to sound ok with a rough cut audio file. The final job is to now compile all the audio into one file, clean it up and we'll get it posted on the usual podcast services in the coming days to get your reactions! Make sure to subscribe now so you don't miss it!

Maybe one last play though

I wasn't quite done with my playing though... I wondered if I could take it a step further with an ai-generated video trailer!

I met Dominik Mate Kovacs recently to learn about his Colossyan tool for creating AI-generated video, so I thought this would be a good way to try it out. A quick sign up and I could copy and paste one of Ada's answers into the tool, choose an AI avatar, background and a few other parameters, and hey presto! A video file of Ada responding to my question.

My final step was to compile this video clip, along with a video of me asking the question. A quick search and a free trial of Vimeo Editor seemed to be the tool for the job. Splash pages added, video imported and uploaded to Vimeo for hosting, and my trailer was good to go!

So in the space of a few hours, AI has helped me to write a half decent script for a podcast, has created audio files of a female voice reading out the script, and finally created a video an AI-avatar speaking the response to one of the questions.

Here is the finished trailer as shared on Linkedin.

I was doing this all for the first time and it took about 3-4 hours in total, including using many of the tools for this first time. If anyone is doubting the ability for AI to make us more productive then this should be a wake up call.

As these tools improve, and as we learn how to fully use them, then generative AI is going to be a game changer for some many roles!

What do you think? What have been your experiences? What generative AI tools have you used that you can share?

Here is the final output of the ??? finished podcast - please do share what your think?

Tools and resources used:

Riverside.fm - video and audio studio

Vimeo editor - video compiling and hosting

Audacity - Audio editing

Colossyan - AI video production & avatar

ChatGPT-4 - Script generation

Play.ht - AI voice generation and audio file production

Bing Image Generator - for the article headline image

Check out the Curious Advantage book on Amazon today, available in hardback, softback and audiobook.