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How to create with AI, including art, music, and writing, according to people who've written songs, stories, and letters

Jack Sommers   

How to create with AI, including art, music, and writing, according to people who've written songs, stories, and letters
  • Generative-AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 respond to prompts from users.
  • These five people used the tools to make content including a song and a commercial.

ChatGPT went live in November, prompting a surge of interest in it and other AI tools that can create songs, stories, and images in response to text prompts.

Insider profiled five instances of people using it and other tools to create content.

A song for Eurovision

Insider's Chloe Pantazi was underwhelmed by this year's Eurovision song contest. So she asked her husband to write a song that could hypothetically compete in the contest, from the lyrics to costume suggestions for a four-person band to a melody for vocals, lead guitar, bass, and drums.

Her prompts were simple, starting with "write a song for Eurovision please" to generate the lyrics, then asking for a "melody for a four-person band to perform the song."

"The result arguably has all the elements of a classic Eurovision song, and honestly, I prefer it to the winning entry from Sweden's Loreen," Pantazi writes, but adds, "Our test of ChatGPT shows that it can follow the formula for a Eurovision hit, but it won't test the bounds of creativity."

Read more: I asked ChatGPT to write a Eurovision song and it's better than the winner of this year's contest

A 'Star Wars' story for a 5-year-old

Insider's Spriha Srivastava and her husband have read to their son at bedtime since he was 3 months old. They love doing it, but the parents began to run out of ideas and so tried to write a story based on her son's favorite franchises like "Star Wars" and "Avengers."

With a prompt to write about Srivastava's 5-year-old son, Luke Skywalker, and Darth Vader, ChatGPT generated a full story in seconds, prompting the boy to say: "Wow, that's like magic."

Read more: I use ChatGPT to write stories for my 5-year-old. It's fun, innovative, and makes bedtime less stressful.

A letter of recommendation for a scholarship

An academic at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, used ChatGPT to help write a reference letter for a student who used it to apply for a scholarship at the University of Cambridge.

"The ChatGPT-generated letter was among some of the best letters I've read," Matt Huculak, the head of advanced research services at the university's libraries, told Insider. "It was concise, it used 'concrete' examples, it spoke to the candidate's ability to collaborate with others."

But instead of using it, he used it as a blueprint for what not to write when he wrote his own letter from scratch.

Writing a reference letter, Huculak said, "is a tremendously difficult task" that he finds "anxiety producing." But ChatGPT gave him the space to experiment with the writing in a way he didn't feel comfortable with before.

Read more: An academic used ChatGPT to write a letter of recommendation that helped a student win a prestigious scholarship from Cambridge

An attention-grabbing commercial

A creator who uses the pseudonym Pizza Later online used AI to generate a 30-second pizza commercial — complete with voice-over — in three hours. Pizza Hut and Elon Musk tweeted about it.

He got the idea to create a commercial for a fictional pizza joint called Pepperoni Hug Spot after tinkering with applications like Midjourney and Runway AI — a video generator — for almost a year.

"I know how long it takes to set up lights and microphones and all that entails. So even though this stuff is really rough right now, it blows my mind," Pizza Later told Insider.

Read more: Here's how to use AI to make a commercial in 3 hours, according to the guy whose creepy pizza ad grabbed the attention of Elon Musk

How to use make art using tools like DALL-E 2 and Craiyon

In addition to generative text, some AI tools can generate images from text prompts. DALL-E 2, which was made by the ChatGPT creator OpenAI, can create complex images in minutes.

Insider produced a step-by-step guide of how to use it and Craiyon, another free tool that uses AI to generate images.

Read more: The AI art tools that can generate images from any text prompt

How to turn selfies into digital art with Lensa

Lensa is a paid-for app that turns selfies into artwork, which Insider's Bethany Biron downloaded after seeing her friends fill her Instagram feed with their digital self-portraits.

She submitted a selection of selfies and received a set 50 selfies 15 minutes later. They were in five different categories and ranged from shots that seemed to recreate the image of the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, "black turtleneck and all," while others, such as one of Biron with two heads, were "the stuff of nightmares."

"For a robot creating art in 15 minutes, it did a decent job," Biron writes.

Read more: I used Lensa, the chart-topping app, to make myself a masterpiece digital work of art — here's how it works



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