I get it. There is something really alluring about having a robot make video clips.

Chiropractors will hate this.

But it's not worth it.

The amount of electricity and water consumed at a queued server somewhere is ridiculous. The way the programs run, they can glean your media files. And many of these programs are used for generating explicit sexual content (sometimes involving children). A lot of the content is also very racist and runs on the implicit bias of the internet.

I don't want to be associated with a tool like that.

The quality of what gets generated is also slop. You can see a feed in many of these programs of the videos users have recently generated.

The better ones are a result of very intentional descriptions, high quality starting assets, and sometimes even a background in video editing.

Understanding how a tool works can go very far. If you understand how video files, and video content are made. If you know what basic tools are offered on video editing software. If you understand compression, file formats, and how alterations are encoded in a file. You will go a long way.

The chance that what you will create, will generate positive impact in the world over the resources used, is very slim to none.

I am not anti- artificial intelligence. I study the trends. I look for ethical use cases and what the hidden costs are. I look at unintended consequences, such as how RAM sticks are getting scalped from old usable devices to power tools that do not benefit anyone. (I would rather refurbish laptops for people who need them).

If I had to say what the most ethical use case of AI was, it would be for coding tasks. That is the language that robots speak, code. If you have a working knowledge of code, and work with a coding assistant, you can do really amazing things.

For chatbots, if you have a dedicated space on your device, you can now run many of these models completely local on your computer. Where your questions don't take up bandwidth on a server somewhere burning through electricity and drinking water. Your data also stays private this way.

I like using chat tools for behavioral analysis. If somebody is acting in a way I don't understand, or is causing problems in my life, sometimes I seek the perspective of a chat tool. Sometimes the perspective is really good. Sometimes it isn't, but I can discern and work with that information.

I've been working on this personal blog and brainforest project for about five years. I kept notes to populate it for almost twenty years. I curate on a free note management tool called Obsidian. It is one of the only tools I will call by name and praise publicly. It's completely local and lets you link ideas and organize your notes in amazing ways. It also is a gateway to learn very basic coding, and writing in Markdown (think how Wikipedia is written).

If you believe in doing great things with technology, or with anything, it will involve discipline and restraint.

If you want to do magic with video content, I would recommend learning a tool called FFMpeg. Put simply, this is a way to examine, alter, and generate media files from the command line. It's an old internet wizardry language known by few. But almost every platform that runs video content relies on this to exist.

But that's more difficult than typing a prompt.