AI Made Me Sick

OK. I admit, I have to take responsibility for letting this happen. But it would never have happened if I hadn’t started using AI. Dizziness. Nausea. Balance problems. And an inability to sleep. I was getting two hours a night, max. I made an appointment with my physician and was subsequently medically evaluated by a specialist who said there was nothing wrong with me.

So here’s the skinny. I have a movie musical, SUPERSTAR Sarah Bernhardt for which I need to raise money for production. The music, script and lyrics are good to go. I have a pitch deck, song demos and all the other peripherals one needs to pound the pavement with the exception of a sizzle reel. And a number of industry professionals had suggested a sizzle reel could be helpful.

Creating a sizzle reel for a contemporary film is much easier and less expensive than a period piece. My screenplay takes place in 1912. That meant I not only needed actors but a period set and period costumes. This added up to a big budget. And it seemed like AI would be a good way to get around this.

I created a timeline with music (from my song demos), voiceovers, and dialogue in Final Cut Pro X. I even went into my sound studio, changed the key for the three songs for male vocalists, transformed/disguised my voice and created new vocals for them. Then I went to AI. I used eight different companies that offer AI to create the sizzle reel. It was a very frustrating endeavor. If you have a person sitting behind a desk and you want to change who they look like or their voice, piece of cake. If you have multiple characters interacting with one another and you need to direct them like you would direct real people, AI is not capable of this yet.

You provide directions and AI spews a visual that is way off the mark. You repeatedly provide directions and get back results that do not work. Each time you get charged. And for a long time you don’t get what you want. Reality check. You never get what you want but eventually you get something you can live with. Three minutes of video with roughly seventy scenes. You do the math. It took many weeks. Some days I worked fourteen hours. Finally I recognized that what I had was as good as it was going to get. Character consistency was disappointing. And only lip syncing was left to do.

That’s when I went to see my physician. Before I went for the medical evaluation I cold turkey terminated my relationship with AI. The next day all the symptoms disappeared. When I went for the medical evaluation, I no longer had symptoms and was given a clean bill of health. All I had to do was stop using AI and I had my health back!