Recently, I’ve taken some heat from a few, irritated souls who despise everything AI. It all started with the video trailer I created for Boltguns and Duct Tape using AI technology. Now please understand, semi-anonymous platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow people to write things in a way they’d never say to your face. The topic of flaming off on Facebook because there are few to no repurcussions is an interesting conversation by itself, but not really that interesting to this topic. The question I’ve wrestled with is when is it okay to use AI to generate content? Why is a video trailer different than a novel or even cover artwork? Likely the answer is, that it’s a question everyone has to wrestle with for themselves. For me, using AI to generate a novel, the cover artwork for my books, or even the narration for audiobooks is not acceptable. Creating video trailers? For me, that’s fully on the table. Why? I imagine that’s somewhere between the goal posts of; I love learning the skill of creating those videos and I can’t afford the production costs of creating fifty seconds of video.

So just what’s involved in producing the embedded video? It’s a lot more than I’d originally expected. First, AI video generation is both impressive, frustratingly inaccurate and extraordinarily limited. The art of figuring out how to piece together a comprehensive video which is comprised of dozens of elements into something that’s intriguing and digestible is maddening. I’ve given up on the process several times, but I keep coming back, because I want to see my ideas in these videos. And contrary to popular belief, it’s not free, although also not prohibitively expensive. In the creation of the Boltguns and Duct Tape video trailer, I generated 10 different videos and stitched them together. But before I could generate those videos, I used a combination of stock artwork, painted artwork from my illustrator Elias Stern, and an image generating AI. With the still images, I entered prompts talking about how I wanted the images to relate to each other in the video. I then used another AI to generate the voice tracks for the narration of the tiny story. Finally, I stitched it all together using Adobe’s Premiere Elements video tool. The fifty second video took me roughly fifteen hours to produce and when I was done, I wanted to spend even more time fine tuning.

What I ended up with makes me happy artistically. Oddly, my favorite part of the video is where Kel expresses her frustration that everyone on Earth knew that Rix’s advertisement that said he could fix spaceships was just a joke. In the end, that I’m having a good time working with the AI tools and that I’m creating something interesting is all the justification I need. Does that mean I’d entertain writing novels with AI? Not even for a minute. Writing is creative joy for me. I get caught up in the character’s lives and am transported to new worlds while I write. Why would I ever give that up?

Check out the video here:

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