The Kretinizer

A new video, here:

Whereas in other places these videos are posted without much comment, this site is where the details are disclosed and where we find “how the sausage is made.”

It’s not too difficult to guess that various AI were used to make this, and that each one was given the explicit task of mocking itself.

Text

The text was originated on ChatGPT, but heavily edited.  The AI would not, for example, write a commercial that endorsed any harmful activity, and it was smart enough to know that I was asking it about drilling holes into the brain.  I substituted the idea of taking care of a lawn, and how drilling holes in it would actually be beneficial.  The AI was happy to provide, and I merely did a find and replace with key terms.  I did make up that name, though, and added the ubiquitous and repulsive “Hi Guys,” opener.

Spokesperson

There are a number of available AI spokespeople out there, and most will give you a free trial of up to a minute or so.  Most of them will generate speech and performance from pure text, but there’s also an option to add your own sound file.  In future it would be more economical to generate the sound with a separate AI and then only render out the portions of speech in which the spokesperson appears on screen.

The low quality spokesperson often has a watermark on it, as well.  This definitely kills the joke, so I “removed” it buy uprezzing the video (using more AI software) and then cropping it out.  It would normally appear just below her midline, just out of frame.

Images

The “slides” are, of course, generated by an AI program, which must be coaxed into providing the proper visuals.  To be honest, though this particular AI’s algorithm produces great results, it’s getting a bit fussier about providing certain content.  You have to be a bit tricky about what you ask for.  Certain images, like smiling people in front of burning buildings, seem easy enough, but getting holes in the head were actually a bit difficult to wrest from it.

Music

The music is, of course, AI generated, and comes from yet another site that provides music “beds” consisting of loops that are kind of mashed together to make generic background tunes. You can choose from several kinds of “moods” and “instrumentation.”  TBH, there’s not a ton of variety here, and creating two or three pieces that essentially sound exactly the same was fairly easy to do on a couple clicks.  I am sure it will get better.

So…

Why not include their URLs?  Well, mostly because they are easily found on their own, and secondarily because this is not meant to be a commercial for these particular companies.

The ease with which this content was generated is not to be misunderstood, however.  The technologists would have you believe that you can pay your rates, push some buttons, and off you go, selling into the void.  Even this little thing took some time to assemble and “direct,” and it’s not likely to reach that many people simply dumped on this site and my sad little YouTube channel.

They’re predicting more and more of this will be done via the machine, and the improvements are increasing every day.  But that just means more bots shouting and screaming their noise over the already crowded landscape.  Hard enough for a weirdo to get his stuff seen, now we’re going to compete with weaponized, aggressive mediocrity.

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