My Home - An AI Experiment - Soapbox Jr.

But when you’re wearing as many hats as I am these days, a little help with time-consuming tasks is welcomed, so I’m embracing it with limitations and with caution.

Then I see the extent that it is being used – and abused – on social media and that gets my blood boiling. 

A few months ago I wrote about the abuses of AI and the countless AI generated stories and images that flood the information superhighway (to exhume a phrase from the early days of the internet) with sloppy unresearched “rest of the story” posts that may – or most likely not – be true. The really annoying ones are the celebrities – living or deceased – holding up birthday cakes that all seemingly come from the same bakery while lying on their deathbeds in the hospital.

Then all the “One More Ride” tours that were allegedly announced with AI generated photos in 2025 for 2026, and for some reason, have yet to materialize. I also wrote about this a while ago, expressing with sarcasm my looking forward to a Traveling Wilburys reunion tour, considering out of all the original members, only Bob Dylan and ELO’s Jeff Lynne are still with us, however the tour announcement had George Harrison and Tom Petty posing with Bob and Jeff seemingly enthusiastic about the tour.

So as I mentioned, I’ve got a love/hate relationship with AI.

That being said, I wanted to do something special to promote the “lost” CDB song “My Home” that we recently released through our label, Blue Hat Records.

I figured the easiest and most cost-effective way to do this is a slideshow video that I would combine with existing photos of Dad and see what AI generated imagery could do to complete the slideshow.

I came across an online service called LyricEdits.ai and decided to give it a shot. It was easy enough to get started, just upload the track and then give the system some prompts to guide what you want to create and it then tries to put together a concept based on your input.

I ended up picking a 4^th of July celebration themed concept, with lots of cookouts and scenes across our great country.

But there were some issues that persisted throughout the entire process.

First of all, the process began with stock characters in the system which did not make any sense, so I tried to generate a character that looked like Dad, giving the prompts to try to create one, but it was not comprehending what I was wanting, so I uploaded my own character based on an existing photo, and the results were better, not perfect but better.

It created a nice mixture of scenes, some a little overboard with backyard cookouts, but also scenery like Route 66 and imagery from around the country. I tweaked and tweaked each slide until I was generally happy with the direction.

I thought that it would be a decent slideshow based lyric video, and was about to go ahead and save it as it was, then I saw the option to animate the scenes, and that changed everything.

It went from simple to simply spectacular.

The slides came alive in a way I wasn’t expecting, so I went through each one and most of the time it was a seamless process, however…

There were issues.

A lot of issues.

The most glaring one was that if the Dad-inspired character lifted his head up too much, it became obvious it was not him. So, I had to rewrite many of the scenes to attempt to keep its head down.

It also tried to put the character in each scene, even though I explicitly instructed it not to.

Then there was the problem of the fiddle. The platform does not allow you to sync the music to the instrument being played. It will allow you to sync the vocals to appear as a character is singing, but that wouldn’t work since we couldn’t show too much of its face.

I tried and tried to rewrite the prompts to get the best results possible, but there’s only so much I could do.

So, it’s FAR from perfect, but considering it was created by an inept amateur with a microscopic budget, it looks like it cost tens of thousands of dollars or more.

There’s so much I would have liked to have done differently, but this was the best I could do in the time I had with the lack of skills.

I’m still happy with the overall video.

It’s a celebration of our great nation on its 250^th birthday and it ties in to the first of hopefully many CDB vault tracks to be hopefully released in the coming years.

Happy 250^th Birthday, America!

What do you think?

Let’s all make the day count!

Pray for our troops, our police, the Peace of Jerusalem and our nation.

God Bless America!

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