It’s happened again. You’d think that after many years of writing this column I would stop being astonished. Not so.
A free artificial intelligence tool for creating animation absolutely delighted me. My prompt was this: “This video should be in the style of a cartoon. An automobile races down a country road toward the viewer. When it arrives and the dust settles, lettering appears on the side of the car. Please show this lettering: the numerals 1495 and the word Wednesday.”
The result was perfect—even better than I imagined.
I then foisted it off on my captive audience: a Facebook group related to the Wordle game. Each day we post the puzzle number and the day of the week, and then the dozen or so members post their Wordle result in a comment.
The danger of a captive audience, of course, is that you’ll annoy them. But I’m forging ahead. I was nervous because the previous day, for the first time, someone complained. She said she found the animation I posted to be “creepy” and asked if anyone else felt the same way. No one responded. Whew.
Not sure what was offensive. It was simply a young woman holding a sheet of paper showing the day’s puzzle number and day of the week. Then the video shows her turning the paper to reveal “good luck” written on the backside.
Several years ago, we began this convention of posting puzzle number and day by simply typing that information and using one of Facebook’s stock backgrounds to make it more colorful. But eventually we’d used most of them, and it got boring.
Then ChatGPT’s great image-creation capability became available, and I began using that to create charming images that showed puzzle number and day. Idyllic rural scenes. Children at play. Pets and animals. Gradually the others in the group ceded the task of starting the day’s post to me.
Then animation came along. The capabilities have been getting more amazing, and tools are proliferating, including free ones. I couldn’t resist.
I first tried Google’s Whisk, which gives you 10 free animations a month. (For more animations and greater capabilities, pricing starts at $21.39/month for access to Google AI Pro.) Whisk has you start with an image that you describe or a photo that you give it. Then you describe how you want it animated.
I asked it to create a kitten asleep on a couch. The result was charming. Then I asked it to animate the kitten waking up. It was wonderfully cute.
So for the first time, I started our Wordle day with an animation. And one person wrote, “Cute video.” Yes! Just the encouragement I needed.
Then more animations in the coming days, such as a blue jay on a patio.
But then I wanted more. Whisk will only animate a starter image. But I wanted to introduce elements in the video not contained in that image.
So I used ChatGPT to recommend free video animation tools and selected HailuoAI. It gives you 500 free credits and three days to use them, with each video deducting 25 credits. (Any more costs $9.99/month.)
My first attempt was the aforementioned woman with the puzzle number and day on one side of the sheet of paper and “good luck” on the backside. I was pleased with the result and don’t know why one participant found it creepy. The next day I created the car racing down a country road and stopping. And someone commented that she liked my AI images!
Next came a video of monarch butterflies alighting on a roadside wooden sign that shows the relevant information. Facebook’s algorithm liked it and asked to make it public so general users could see it.
One can wait hours for HailuoAI to create a video, but if you pay, then it promises to do it in three minutes.
Of course, AI can do much more than these 6- or 8-second animations. The videos that expensive tools such as Google’s Veo 3 can create are indistinguishable from real life, including voice. The New York Times posted a quiz that included a mix of 10 AI and real-life videos showing a person talking in a variety of settings (http://bit.ly/454RW7E). The object was to see whether one could tell which was which. I scored 5 out of 10.
You may not have a use for animation, but it might be fun for you to give it a try. It’s amazing how AI can readily create anything you can imagine.
And as far as the Wordle Facebook group goes, I’m going to be judicious. I don’t want to annoy anyone. After all, they’re there to post their score, not be entertained.