How two AI tools turned still pictures into moving art, and why this is just the beginning
This week I tried a small experiment that turned into something surprisingly delightful. I took six still images created in Midjourney and asked it to turn each one into a five-second video. Nothing fancy, no complicated prompting, just a simple “animate this” test to see what it could do.
Continue reading “When Six Images Became a Mini-Film: Testing Midjourney + ElevenLabs “
When I was at school, (a long time ago!), “art” meant pencils, paint, and the faint smell of turpentine. We learned about perspective and shading, drew still-life bowls of fruit, and hoped the teacher wouldn’t notice when the apple looked more like a potato.
If you’d told me that one day people would create portraits, landscapes, and dreamlike scenes simply by typing a few words into a computer, I’d have laughed, or worried for humanity. Yet here we are.
I’ve been experimenting with Midjourney, an AI tool that transforms text prompts into visual art. The results can be astonishing, eerie, funny, sometimes breathtaking. But what fascinates me most isn’t the images themselves. It’s the thought that my grandchildren will grow up seeing this kind of creativity not as extraordinary, but as ordinary. For them, it won’t be a revolution, it’ll just be Tuesday afternoon.
Continue reading “Painting the Future: What AI Art Means for the Next Generation”
I’ve started to realise that the most interesting moments with AI aren’t the ones that go exactly to plan. They’re the ones that don’t.
You type in what you think is a precise prompt, expecting a predictable outcome and the machine goes completely off script. Sometimes it misses the point spectacularly. Other times, it creates something that feels oddly beautiful.
That’s partly because Large Language Models (LLM’s) like ChatGPT don’t actually understand what they write, they predict the next most likely word or image based on patterns they’ve learned from billions of examples. Every so often, those predictions take a creative detour, and that’s when things get interesting.
Continue reading “When AI Surprises You: The Joy of Unexpected Results”
For this experiment, I decided to hand the steering wheel to chance. I gave ChatGPT two random, unrelated images (both created by Midjourney) and five random words, words with no connection, rhyme or reason (words created by ChatGPT). Then I asked it to write a 200-word story that somehow pulled everything together. No hints. No context. Just chaos.
It’s the kind of challenge I’d struggle with myself. A jumble of words and pictures that don’t belong together, and yet, that’s what makes it irresistible. Could an AI find a thread of meaning where there shouldn’t be one?
The five random, unrelated words were: Velvet, Splinter, Compass, Jigsaw, Marshmallow
Continue reading “When Chaos Tells a Story: An AI Creativity Experiment”
I never meant to fall down the AI rabbit hole.
My curiosity about artificial intelligence really began when I stumbled across Midjourney and ChatGPT. Midjourney appeared in 2022 like a digital paintbrush, allowing anyone to turn words into images, surreal, beautiful, and sometimes downright strange. After trying it out, I was hooked and still use it widely today. In fact, the image that accompanies this post was created by Midjourney. I’ll talk more about AI and image creation in a future post.
Continue reading “Falling Down the AI Rabbit Hole: How Curiosity Led Me to Midjourney and ChatGPT”
The AI Grandad 