In this lesson, we will delve into the fascinating world of creating content with AI, exploring how generative AI technologies can bring your creative visions to life. By leveraging tools like deep-learning face animation and text-to-image generation, you can produce professional-quality digital media that stands out.
Get ready to turn your creativity into reality with the power of AI.
What You’ll Learn:
Ready to dive in?
Turning Your Creativity Into Reality
Hi, I’m Stefan! I think it is fair to say I was one of the original AI-empowered people at ALX.
I joined the ALX team in 2023 just as ChatGPT hit the world. From day one, I saw this tool’s value and have kept my eye on AI tools ever since. At the time, I was creating projects for Data Science and Data Analytics courses, and I wanted to use AI to build these projects. This is how the world of Maji Ndogo and the city of Bahari came to be—all AI-powered!
I dreamed of telling a story that many of you know all too well. Many of us face infrastructure collapse across Africa because of corruption, greed, mismanagement, and often limited resources. I wanted a leader to rise up and change things for her people by being brave, compassionate, and passionate. More importantly, I wanted AI, data, and data science to guide her in making the right choices for the people of Maji Ndogo. We told this through a story about a country struggling to provide water infrastructure.
Everything – from the story idea, the country, the towns, street names, people’s names, and mountains of data – was created by collaborating with ChatGPT. I remember calculating that I exchanged one million words with ChatGPT in just six months. That’s the equivalent of the entire Harry Potter series or the Game of Thrones books! With ChatGPT, I created the story, thousands of lines of code, video scripts, and even an entire virtual world for this course, but nothing worked without my guidance, rewriting, using my own creativity, and collaborating with my team. AI tools often produce results that require extensive work, and using them without humans in the loop creates soulless content. So, when you use these tools, empower yourself and your creativity rather than relying on them to do all the work.
We wanted to create a video to tell this story, but making a video with many scenes and characters is insanely time-consuming. When Midjourney launched, I spent a weekend creating a storyboard for the team, telling the story of Maji Ndogo.
Only when I pitched the idea to the rest of the team did I understand what I had created. I tried to take the place of an animator and gave their job to AI. People were a little shocked – some were angry, some disappointed, and some excited at what I had created, but I regretted it. This will be true for anyone using AI tools at work. AI brings irreversible change to our lives, and there is no going back now. So, learn from my experience and consider how you use AI tools and how this might impact others.
After reflecting, the team saw the opportunity this brought. We could use AI image generation tools to tell stories and create an impact in Africa with fewer resources. Our entire production team worked on that video for almost a month. They poured their souls into that project, and it is their skillful manipulation of the AI tools, unleashed creativity, and collaboration with each other that improved my first terrible version to what you see here:
So what are the lessons here?
- Unleash Your Creativity: AI tools like ChatGPT helped me create characters, tell a story, and develop a world-class learning experience. Midjourney brought my ideas and story to life.
- Empower People: Introducing AI results wasn’t easy for everyone to accept. It’s important to empower people with AI over time and be open to feedback.
- Collaborate and Refine: While AI got us 70% of the way, the final 30% required significant human effort. Creating a polished product took more than 800 hours! AI can simplify initial creation. However, refinement still relies on our creativity and collaboration, not to mention the thousands of images we generated that didn’t work. Sometimes, I still have nightmares…
In this lesson, we’ll take the steps I took and tell a story using AI. We’ll use a large language model to help us think creatively, generate prompts for image, video, and audio generators, and then use free creative AI tools to bring our story to life. Along the way, we’ll learn valuable lessons about creativity, collaboration, and the power of AI.
