Let’s Talk about AI: Sora, Effective Tools, and What Comes Next…

At Diagonal Media we discuss AI almost daily and our conversations fall into two different categories: Looking towards the future: what’s coming? And what is useful right now? 

As one of my professors said ‘I’m not a beta tester. I prefer to stay on the tail end of the cutting edge.’ We aim to strike the balance of pioneering workflows and implementing tools that simply work!

What AI Tools We’re Using Right Now

We use various AI tools that are currently effective. For instance, this article was transcribed from a long verbal note into pages of text via a Zoom Cloud Recording automatic transcription and simplified in Notion.so with the ‘ask AI’ feature. Finally, it was rewritten for clarity. 

Here’s a topline overview of the AI tools we’re finding extremely supportive to a streamlined and efficient workflow.

Zoom AI Companion – for productive meetings with automated detailed summaries. 

Notion AI for easily creating a knowledge base. 

Lalal.ai for quickly separating dialogue and music.

ChatGPT Plus enhances your ability to direct AI with more control and precision. Especially with it’s contextual understanding, internet search capacity, document analysis, and ability to collaborate with tools like Dall-E 3. It’s akin to working with a creative partner. Although generating imagery and storyboarding currently takes as long as manual methods, improvements are expected. 

Midjourney for ideas on compositing scenes, lighting, and background generation.

Where AI Falls Short

There’s no question that AI is causing, and will continue to cause, a seismic shift in video creation and our world at large. There’s a trend of AI content experimentation, but much of it feels gimmicky and lacks long-term value, created in isolation without real purpose. 

I’ve spoken to many people about Sora’s text-to-video creations, and the general consensus is “That’s cool. But I don’t like it.” Why do we all feel that way? Personally I think it’s the lack of humanity in the visuals we’re seeing. There’s an uncanny valley. We recognize what we’re seeing doesn’t have heart.

While we have a healthy sense of trepidation about what’s to come next we are constantly making use of new tools and platforms. 

What Comes Next?

Taking inspiration from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father’s life advice: ‘be useful’ – we, as humans, need to identify where we can provide the most value.

Our view at Diagonal Media is that we’re most useful when we…

• Identify and recognize humanity in the world. 
• Continue to tell stories that matter, and change the world for the better. 
• Create the most compelling content possible using all the tools at our disposal. 

We’re excited to stay ahead of the curve. AI, including tools like Sora, is poised to drive change faster than we’ve ever seen. AI will democratize content creation and accelerate creative innovation.

Everyone will soon have the ability to easily produce content, but we believe the best content (with the most heart) will still rise to the top. 

– Garrett Kafchinski
Partner & COO, Diagonal Media