North American Unitarian Association

There is much uncertainty and uneasiness about what Artificial Intelligence will mean for our future but, for now, it’s already being employed by millions of people to save time researching, writing, creating art, and producing media. Not wishing to be left behind, I recently started dabbling with AI myself and have been overwhelmed by its creative possibilities.

My exploration began by taking a children’s story I’d written several years ago about a mama bear and her hungry cubs. I pasted its transcript into ElevenLabs AI, a text-to-speech program, chose a voice, and within seconds had a flawless voice-track telling the story. Then I asked ChatGPT to create a storyboard. The story was immediately broken down into scenes, complete with descriptions that I could then use as image prompts in Leonardo AI, a text-to-image program. After I had all the original AI generated royalty free pictures needed for the story, I animated and made them 3D in LeiaPix AI. Finally, I asked Tracksy AI to compose an original piece of music, lullaby-like, to play in the background (also royalty free). Then I edited it all together the old-fashioned way, using Adobe’s Premiere Pro.

The most time-consuming part of the process was the extra time it took to learn these various (mostly free) programs and how best to prompt them for my desired outcomes. (It’s a whole lot easier than learning the symbolic language necessary to code!) This only amounted to minutes, not hours or days. That’s it! Check out the accompanying link to see the outcome for yourself.

By NAUA President, Rev. Dr. Todd Eklof

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