Watch the AI-generated video and voiceover here.

For this assignment, I worked with a partner to identify a problem within journalism and brainstorm a solution, while working with generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to create a script and 3-5-minute video summarizing our findings.

We aimed to use AI as the backbone and foundation of this project, so we asked ChatGPT to identify a problem within journalism in this conversation. The response tackled real-time misinformation, and suggested creating an AI-driven platform called VeriCheck as a solution to this problem. With this, we gave it the command to generate a script for a VeriCheck advertisement.

Then, we used Synthesys’ AI voice generator to pick a “Lifelike voice” for our characters and create a voiceover to our VeriCheck advertisement. Although the AI voices conducted the work of speaking, and the audio quality was better than if we had recorded our own voices on our phones, many voices sounded robotic and clearly fake, so it took time to scroll through voices and accents to find appropriate ones for our script.

To generate the video and put everything together, we used Pictory, which provided this video of artificially generated scenes that supposedly match the script, and subtitles with supposed important words highlighted in different colors. It was obvious to both me and my partner that the video flowed awkwardly and the highlighted words or phrases in the captions were effective in aesthetic only.

Regarding the ethics of this assignment, we tried to credit everything to AI, from the start to finish, but we still had to participate in the work of providing commands to the AI programs we used, deciding on the genre of “advertising” after reading the script ChatGPT provided, choosing lifelike voices for the voiceover and polishing the video. At the beginning, we expected to do little work on this project, but by the end, both my partner and I agreed we could have completed the project more effectively than the AI and generated a less awkward product.