To One And All A Merry Christmas

 

And A Merry Christmas To One And All!

 

  

Notes on AI Used In This Christmas Message

Oh, yes, there was some...

First, I took a photo of Beryl, flat out and fast asleep after Christmas Lunch. I cropped and edited it in Paint.net, after which it looked like this:

Then I uploaded it to NightCafe, where I used it as a starting image for Flux Schnell. I gave it the prompt "A sleeping black and white dog wearing a santa hat, surrounded by piles of opened presents under a tastefully decorated Christmas Tree", set the run time to "Long" and asked for four images. The only usable one was this: 

No Santa hat. No tree. One measly present. And that was the best of about a dozen images.

I used several models, trying for something better but they were uniformly terrible. Honestly, it was like the last three years of AI development never happened. I haven't tried generating from an image for a while. I was expecting a lot more. I even used some of my freebies to access the Pro models but they were even worse than the free ones, which ties in with Suno's supposedly best model actually being much worse than its predecessor. 

I think some of these companies are just trying too hard now. Either they're getting desperate or they're so far into the forest they can't see the trees any more.

Anyway, I did manage to get one I was fairly happy with so I uploaded it to ClipChamp. Then I went to Suno and generated some "music" to go with it. That was a low-effort move on my part for which I'd apologize if I didn't also think it fits pretty well with the cheesy effect I was after. 

All I did to get started was type in a half-assed prompt: "Vaporwave Christmas melody, ethereal, glitchy, otherworldy, tuneful, soothing, seasonal, bells, jingling, faint caroling". That gave me something all but unlistenable so I tried to fuzz it up by covering it under the prompt "As heard through the faulty speaker of a  malfunctioning radio, broadcast by a station that fades in and out, quite faint, hard to hear". No luck. The cover sounded pretty much identical to the original. Apparently Suno can't do effects like that.

MeloBytes can, though, so I exported it as a .wav file and uploaded it over there, where I used a filter to make it sound like an old-time radio broadcast. I downloaded the result and uploaded that to ClipChamp. I put the image and the sound file into a timeline, added a couple of effects (Vaporwave and VHS) to get the scratchy, glitchy effect, then I exported the final version to my PC.

I was going to get Blogger to just embed the video directly but the file was too big so I uploaded it to my YouTube channel instead. Once it had processed, I embedded it from there and that was that.

It took me longer to write up this account of what I did than it took me to do it. I probably should have got an AI to do the summary. 

How much of all of that was really AI, though? If I'd been a bit less lazy and made up my own tune and uploaded that, instead of letting Suno do it for me, most of what the "AI" did would have been nothing more than post-processing. Calling it AI just makes it sound more impressive, or so the AI companies would like to believe.

It passed a Christmas afternoon while Mrs Bhagpuss and Bery sleep off their lunch, anyway! Happy Christmas everyone!