Episode 1 – Avi Avocado

 

Short Stories for Kids Blog – Episode 1 – Avi Avocado

The first post is very long and goes over how I came up with the idea for the channel, all the tools I tried as I created the first video, and the setup of the channel itself.

How I came up with the ideas and content for this YouTube channel.

On Friday 2/10/2023, I used ChatGPT for the first time to show a co-worker what sort of quality info it could provide when asked whether 75Mbps is fast enough to work from home. The answer was more or less exactly what I would want to know as a consumer trying to figure out what internet speed I needed.

I spent the rest of the evening coming up with silly prompts for stories and realized that using Chat GPT in combination with image generating systems, music systems, and maybe even AI-generated voices to read the content would be an interesting thing to document.

I also thought that this technology is only going to get better in the coming years, so why not document its progress (and my own skill growth) by creating simple YouTube content. I created a YouTube channel called ‘Short Stories for Kids’ and intend to try using AI systems as much as possible to create the content. I’ll point out what I come up with for prompts and what the AI systems deliver as output. I will edit as needed, but want to try to keep my edits ‘light’ in order to demonstrate how these generative systems improve over time.

A list of names for a YouTube channel containing short stories

Here are some names for a YouTube channel that features short stories:

1. Story Time
2. Tales from the Tube
3. Short and Sweet Stories
4. The Short Story Hub
5. Mini-Tales
6. Quick Fictions
7. Little Legends
8. Brief Bits of Magic
9. Short Story Society
10. The Storyteller's Studio
11. Whispers from the Web
12. Webbed Tales
13. The Internet's Short Stories
14. The Digital Tale Weaver
15. The Short Storyteller's Corner

I hope this helps! Let me know if you would like me to come up with more names or if you need help with anything else.

 

You can see I didn’t actually use the results of this prompt to create “Short Stories for Kids.” I can change the channel name later if I believe it deserves a different name or my content strays from the title.

I also want to make this available to as wide an audience as possible to begin, so thought I would create only Kid-friendly content to start. Ideally in the 4-7yo age range as that’s when parents begin letting YouTube babysit their children (not saying that’s healthy, just an unverified statement according to my personal observations.)

So I started by asking ChatGPT https://chat.openai.com/chat/ -

List of fruit for every letter of the alphabet

Here's a list of fruits for every letter of the alphabet:

A - Avocado B - Blueberries C - Cantaloupe D - Date E - Elderberry F - Fig G - Grapefruit H - Honeydew I - Ivyleaf Gooseberry J - Jackfruit K - Kiwi L - Lemon M - Mango N - Nectarine O - Orange P - Pineapple Q - Quince R - Raspberry S - Strawberry T - Tangerine U - Ugli fruit V - Vanilla Bean (Technically a fruit, derived from the seed pods of the orchid) W - Watermelon X - Xigua (Water Chestnut, a type of aquatic vegetable often used in fruit salads) Y - Yellow Plum Z - Zucchini (Sometimes referred to as a "summer squash," but technically a fruit)

 

For each letter I’ll need a story, pictures, and music. I’ll look for a text to voice system after I’ve got the first three.

A very short story for small children about an Avocado that is angry because it is tired, and doesn't want to go to bed.

Once upon a time, there was an avocado named Avi. Avi was a very happy and playful avocado, but today was different. Avi was very angry and grumpy because it was so tired.

Every time someone suggested that Avi should go to bed, Avi would shout, "No way! I don't want to go to sleep!"

But Avi's friends knew that sleep was important, so they tried to convince Avi to take a nap. They told Avi that when it wakes up, it would feel refreshed and ready to play again.

Finally, Avi agreed to try and went to bed. After just a few moments, Avi started to feel better and soon fell asleep.

When Avi woke up, it was amazed at how much better it felt. Avi thanked its friends for their help and promised to never be too stubborn to listen to good advice again.

From that day on, Avi was back to its happy and playful self and always made sure to get enough rest. The end.

 

OK, that’s a decent story. A few of the words would be difficult for ‘small children’ to understand, but not bad. And it’s a lot shorter than many of the results I’ve seen from prompts that didn’t specify the story should be ‘very short,’ so I’ll probably keep including that in my prompts.

Now for images. Craiyon is free, but contains watermarks. At least the watermark is small. https://www.craiyon.com/

Cartoon Avocado playing on a swing

The first 2 and last one are the only options that really look like a swing. We’ll go with the top left one.
But seriously, look at that middle one, it’s more like a peanut stuck inside an avocado shell.

Cartoon Avocado throwing a tantrum

This one doesn’t have any images that get the ‘angry/grumpy’ theme across, so let’s try another prompt:

Cartoon Avocado angry turning red

Ok, not a whole lot better. I was hoping the ‘turning red’ would come through as maybe a red face, but no. If I have to choose one of these, probably the last one most looks like an angry avocado.

Let’s try one more time

Alright, I can see the anger coming across in most of these. Once again, we’ll go with the top row, far left.

We need some of Avi Avocado’s friends trying to tell him to go to sleep, so let’s use s simple phrase:

cartoon avocado friends

Ok, so three of the pictures have more than one avocado, so that’s ok. The top row, middle picture is decent so I’m saving that one.

Yikes! This is supposed to be a kid-friendly channel. Top middle is the closest, but still a big no. Try again. This is why I’m not starting with a paid image generator, which I’m told have far superior quality. Maybe I’ll go with a paid image generator if the channel ever makes enough to pay for the subscription.

3 Happy Cartoon Avocados

Hmm. Someone can’t count. Only two of the images have three avocados. I really like the bottom right image if it weren’t cropped and the third avocado has three eyes.

happy cartoon avocado and sad cartoon avocado and darker cartoon avocado

I thought if I gave instructions for each avocado, I’d get three, but no. One more try, then we’ll just have to go with the one I saved earlier.

Ah, yes, I think we can work with this. Perhaps the ‘in the style of a cartoon’ helped. We’ll have to try that again. The middle row, right image looks like some friendly avocados. (Still not 3, but at least it picked up that the avocados are PLURAL).

Now to put Avi to bed…

Ah, yes. These aren’t too bad. Top row middle image and middle row, right images are both getting saved.

Well it picked up on the alarm clock, but now most of the avocados don’t look very avocado-y. Let’s try again.

I think there’s a bit too much cannibalism in this one. I save the bottom right image in case we can’t find anything better.

The middle left may qualify as a ‘fresh’ avocado more than refreshed, but let’s save it. Bottom left could be ok too.

Let’s give it one more go to see if we can get a bit more ‘morning’ in the image.

I’m afraid not. The only one that looks like it has a bed is the top middle and it’s more of a hospital bed. We don’t want children thinking avocados will make them go to the hospital, so let’s be done on this one.

Last stop, playful avocado. I’m going to try the keyword ‘clipart’ to see if that works any better than cartoon. I don’t expect it to, and for consistency sake I should probably stick with ‘cartoon,’ but this is a learning experience.

As I suspected, it’s not great. The last two in the set at least look happy, but aren’t personified as much as the ‘cartoon’ ones.

Oh, I see a joyous avocado in the top right and something that looks close enough to an avocado on a slide in the bottom left. Not sure what happened in the top right – it’s like the avocado and the slide merged into one. One thing is for sure among all these images so far is that the pit is the most important part of the avocado. It’s never missing.

The middle left and bottom left  images both look like happy avocados on a playground. We’ll go with middle left since it seems a little less abstract.

Now for the music.

I first looked at the OpenAI MuseNet, but didn’t see a way to create a new song, so went over to Boomy, which generates short soundtracks based on genres.

First I tried ‘Global Groove’ but it was like a bunch of piano and cowbell with tuning issues.

Next, I tried Relaxing Meditation, pulses. Seemed like a space-aged clavichord that enjoys an ABABAB AC A’B’AB format. Too much repetition.

Next, I tried Relaxing Meditation, ambient. Definitely better than pulses. A pretty good space vibe if you wanted a deep and slow narration on top, but not right for Avi Avocado.

Next Electronic Dance: Vapor (Chillwave). Does not follow any sort of progression that I can follow.

Hmm, might need to play around with the free-form settings to find something between elevator and cartoon.

Boomy Bap could be promising…

Lo-Fi: Morning Sun… maybe

The Boomy’s could be ok

Well, after about 30 minutes of playing around with a handful of the options I’m not convinced this will result in anything but the most annoying tracks.

 

Let’s check out another AI-generated music site- Soundraw.io.

I just clicked on Hopeful and listened to the first track 001 and honestly, it was 100x better than anything on Boomy, so I think we’ll play around with this one for a while.

Soundraw creates fantastic background music, but cost $16.99/mo to download 50 songs/day. If I knew I could get all the songs I ever wanted created in a month, that would be fine, but this is more than my Netflix plan, so I might need to look for another option.

YouTube Studio https://studio.youtube.com/ has some free music for videos that doesn’t require attribution (which I’d be fine with, but this first one is really to get my feet wet, so trying to do whatever requires the least effort).

I filtered for bright/happy, dance/electronic/ambient and came up with around 100 options. Among them were a few decent ones. These aren’t AI generated, so goes a little bit against my goals, but all the truly free AI generated music I could find was not good enough.

Indecision by Dyalla is what we’ll be using for the video.

 

For AI voices I was really liking Natural Reader – it had a few really good-sounding voices, but I quickly hit the 5-minutes daily limit of the free version and the actually free readers sound like the original TomTom voices on GPS (I think I’m dating myself there).

After some searching, I found TTS Free https://ttsfree.com/ which had voices that sound good enough. Definitely not as good as Natural Reader premium voices, but a tad better than the Google Assistant as it stands today.

TTS Free does have limitations – only 2000 characters – which is about 2 minutes of talking at normal speed. And the page is pretty loaded with ads, but these are good enough for my current needs. You can go to 10k characters (10min) and 200 voice options, add background music, etc. for $50/year, so not bad, especially if some of those additional voices sound more natural.

 

As for putting the video all together, I started with ClipChamp but ran into problems adding the audio. I’m sure there’s a way and it’s probably simple, but since I’m literally on my first video, I kept looking and found VideoPad by NCH software. https://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/screenshots.html I’m not paying anything yet – it says for home use only – non-commercial license. I’ll need to look through their EULA to see if I’ll need to take action if I ever try to ‘monetize’ these videos, but I think it’s safe for now. Looks like the licensed version is $39.95 (if I buy now, which I’m not), or $69.95 for something that can handle more than 2 audio tracks – hard to know if I would ever need that. As these are one-time prices, I’m much more likely to pay than subscription services.

When I export the video, it asks for a description and keywords. I figured I would use something similar to the ChatGPT prompt that generated the story.

For keywords, I plan to include Short Story, Kids, Chat GPT, AI, and Art every time, as well as the name of the fruit or vegetable.

 

Seems this uploaded to my personal Gmail account, not the channel I created for this project, so I needed to save as MP4 and upload to the YouTube channel manually.

 

 

 

Below the “Show Less” are the ‘advanced’ settings. The only thing I did there was add ‘English’ as the language. Everything else seemed fine.

 

I used the “Add Captions” feature and was able to paste in the text directly. YouTube was able to synch it to the video very well.

The option for ‘end screens’ or ‘cards’ (promoted content) doesn’t run on videos made for kids (note to self). This may be worth looking into some day, but today is not that day.

 

The system Checks for copywrite violations before publishing. This one says I’m good to go – fwew! Of course it has a disclaimer to say that the check results aren’t final as issues could arise in the future, but that’s no surprise.

 

I’m making this public, but not scheduling a time to release it. Although that would be a good idea if I can create so much content that I want to release it on a schedule.

Instant premier means it runs ‘live’ for the first time – probably good if you have an audience that is engaged and wants to ask questions in real-time as it shows.

 

I’ll link this video to my Facebook page, which is almost never used. Maybe this will give me a reason to be on Facebook again.

Here’s proof that the video has been uploaded!! But nobody has watched even though it’s been up a whole 12 minutes?!! ß That is a joke. This is a new channel with the first video I’ve ever uploaded, so I have very low expectations in terms of viewers.

 

 

My channel doesn’t have a profile picture yet, so here are some more pictures from Craiyon.

Bottom right looks OK, so we’ll save it.

The middle row, middle picture looks great (relative to everything else it’s made). The bottom middle isn’t too bad either.

Well, these look like fruit, but not like a book. Good try though.

These ones turned out pretty well, especially the bottom left and bottom middle. While there’s some weird stuff with her hands, it’s not as noticeable as many others, and I really like the pigtails. Ai is doing well with hair.

I’ve uploaded that one as the channel mascot and watermark.

 

That’s all for my first video! I suspect the next one will be a lot faster to make!