When AI Videos Go Wrong

Girls Love Guitars by Soulsigma

When making AI videos these days, it’s usually wise to focus on vertical 9:16 format for two reasons. First, most people watch videos on their phones now. Second, the smaller resolution and screen real estate means less room for AI mistakes to visually screw things up in a way that the viewer can’t help but notice.

However, the new Director system I’ve been using to construct the skeletons of my music videos exhibited a pretty serious bug, which was producing 16:9 clips when I’d specified 9:16 clips, and developed 9:16 images from which to produce them. Even worse, it didn’t automatically return the 20k or so credits spent on producing them because the refund system is based upon delivery or non-delivery, not the correctness of the delivery.

Fortunately, OpenArt tech support was good enough to return the credits, plus a few more for my trouble, so instead of starting from scratch, I made use of the horizontally-formatted clips to complete a 16:9 video for the Soulsigma song GIRLS LOVE GUITARS. This was challenging, because it’s all a real-world setting, so there isn’t much in the way of techno-dazzle to distract the eye, and there is a lot of human face time that creates plenty of opportunity for character inconsistencies to be exposed. The larger field of the format is more difficult to fill, and, of course, the larger screens make visual shortcomings more noticeable.

So, an amount of editing chicanery was required that mostly worked. All things considered, it turned out rather better than I expected. And the song is itself AI-generated, so I think it’s fair to say this is reasonably close to the current state of the AI art in the hands of an very amateur video editor.

In related news, I’m currently working with an actual film director on a new music video, which will be in the vertical format, and so I anticipate that will actually push the state of the publicly available art. And the remix of the Byronic we’re working on is, well, there’s no other word for it, but epic.

Tools:

• Suno 5.5, music

• Reaper, studio editing

• BandLab, mastering

• OpenArt Director, video layout

• Seadream 5.0 and 4.5, still images

• Seedance 2.0 (mostly), video clips

• Capcut, video editing

This is an unreleased video mix of Girls Love Guitars, which is currently available only at UATV and on the Soulsigma CD, THE ONLY SKULL, of which limited supplies remain. But we’ll get a single out for Spotify and Apple Music soon.