Are you ready? AI: Actionable Insights #5

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our AI: Actionable Insights newsletter.

This week we’re taking a look at Audio, Video and Image creation - and what the speed of change in those fields means for you in your business.

Our promise to you remains: Any items in this newsletter will include an action you can take to help you get more from AI in your business.?

Less hype, more action.

Audio and Video - it's better than you think!

I’ve given a couple of talks recently where I’ve shown AI generated videos created from text prompts, and asked the audience to say if they think they’re real or generated:

Each time, barely anyone spots they are AI generated – and this is at an AI talk, where you’d hope people would have their guard up.

Go see the examples from Sora if you haven’t already.

Why does this matter to you as a business?

The rapid evolution of AI Audio and Video production is an indicator of wider changes coming soon from AI in many areas.

AI generated content is already much better than most people realise, easier to create and improving rapidly. While we’re talking specifically about audio and video right now, this should be a call to action for all of us to review the services we offer which could be radically changed soon by new AI tools.

A friend of mine shared the Figure with openAI integrated robot video on Facebook. I was taken by the number of people who did not think it was real, because of the audio.

Quick test - take a listen to this, is this audio from one of my radio voice-over friends in the US or generated by an AI?

I hope if you’re a subscriber you’ll know, or guess, it’s ChatGPT – notice the breath noises, pauses and “uhh” natural language though.

A prompt to make it sound like this took me 2 minutes.. and it blew people’s mind when I added this as a reply.

To be clear, they thought the video was fake because the voice from the robot was "too real" to be from an AI - and I could generate a similar voice in almost no time, really easily.

Yes, AI is going to negatively impact some businesses, and open doors to new ones for other people.

For example, in the audio world, you can now generate 2 minutes of audio from a text prompt. Rather than pay for stock music, you could custom make your own and use that – here’s two examples from suno.ai I created really quickly:

“Acoustic backing track for an advert or presentation video”

“Create melodic atmospheric film score music, building to a crescendo”

I don't claim these as musical master pieces or creative works of art, but honestly are these good enough for a promotional video or presentation?

Absolutely, yes.

Are they unique and mean you could avoid using the same stock music as others?

Also, yes.

To give you an understanding of how fast this has evolved:

• Suno launched in December 2023.
• V2 in January made interesting, but not really useful, 1 minute pieces of music.
• V3 released last week now makes 2 mins and longer useable tracks.

Yes, sometimes you need to regenerate/remix the result to get what you want but it’s exponentially better than v2 in January.

Note: I don’t say that lightly as someone who in a previous life ran a small record label, and worked full time in music for about 7 years.

That’s what you need to be thinking about – these tools are developing in many areas of business really rapidly.

AI: Actionable Insights

1)??Get together with people in your business and ask yourselves a few questions to inform your future strategy in a rapidly evolving world of AI tools:

• What do we do now that is valuable, which is potentially no longer valuable?
• What things can you now do, you could not do before?
• What are the impacts on the services/products we offer in an AI enabled world?
• What new opportunities does this provide?

These are my starting points when working with an organisation, by no means exhaustive but it will get you started.

2) Just for fun, go and try suno.ai to create music based on text prompts you give it - make sure you’re using the paid version for any commercial use.

Generative fill and image editing, now available on Dall-E3!

If you’ve used ChatGPT to create images using their DALL-E3 tool, you’ll know it sometimes is close… but not quite what you want, and re-prompting can often change the output quite considerably.

Well now that’s no longer the case.

For any images you create, open it up and you’ll find an edit button in the top right of the image: [edit / download / information / close]

You can then set the size of the brush; highlight the selection you’d like to change – in this case I wanted to correct the word “small”:

I prompted it to “replace with the word: small” and…

I guess it’s still not great with text! How about if we want to change the border elements:

Ok, that worked perfectly:

Let's try and add some elements into the image - start by selecting the border area I want to fill:

A bit disjointed but other examples I've seen shared are better - as always, you may need time to go back and forth to get exactly what you had in mind.

All in all, a very welcome, work-in-progress editing addition to Dall-E3. I look forward to seeing it develop over time.

AI Actionable Insights

1. Read more about editing with Dall-E3 at openAI.
2. A reminder of the Microsoft guide to Art Prompting - re-sharing it because it really is good!

Struggling with chatGPT prompting to get good, relevant marketing content for your business?

In-case you missed it, there is a recording of the Maisy AI marketing assistant demo we ran last week.

Learn how to generate market specific, tailored content quickly and easily, using an AI tool that understands your business and target market.

Free 7-day trial link here for you to try it yourself.

Want to learn more: there’s still a chance to join me for one of the Solent Growth Partnership Simplify AI Workshops.

(Various dates, locations across the South Coast and online - FREE)

Thanks for reading, if you have any feedback or topics that you’d like us to cover please do let me know.

If you’d like more tailored help with anything we’ve covered, please do get in touch.

Luke