Want to learn how to create videos like this? Read on!

Generative artificial intelligence models are set to supercharge the creativity and efficiency of just about every field on the planet. And this is especially the case for creative professionals. AI will not replace writers and artists, it will empower them. All creative professionals need to do is to learn how to get the most out of it.

The economic downturn, coupled with breakthroughs in AI, will leave more and more people in a state of unemployment. And when a population gets bored, they’ll need entertainment. Entertainment in the form of movies, TV shows, and video games.

AI has the power to bolster entertainment industries. Given the choice between downsizing teams to fulfil the current workload or training existing staff to be more productive and thus able to create even more content, the choice, to me, seems logical. Make more games. Make more movies and TV shows. The people will be begging for it. And your profits and market dominance will skyrocket!

Today’s AI creative processes are akin to those that were used by games developers back when 8-bit home computers, like the Commodore 64, first hit the market. Games were often created by just a single person who would code everything – the game’s logic, graphics, sprites, music, storyline, and even its tape loader. And like in that era, today’s AI tools are set to enable a single individual to be a one-person director, crafting detailed lore, narratives, images, illustrations, and even videos.

This democratization of creation will break down barriers to entry that many aspiring creators face. No longer are large teams or significant financial investments necessary to bring complex visions to life. With contemporary AI, a solo creator is empowered to generate captivating worlds, intricate characters, and immersive soundscapes with nothing more than a desktop and an idea. This is not to say that AI is a magic wand—successful utilization still requires a foundational understanding of traditional storytelling principles, prompting techniques, and aesthetic judgment. However, the heavy lifting of content generation can be greatly aided by AI, allowing artists and writers to focus on the nuanced aspects of their craft in ways they’ve never imagined.

We’re all familiar with the notion that generative AI models are known to “hallucinate” or make things up. For a search engine or chatbot, hallucination is a bad thing. When you ask AI a question you either want it to spit out the correct answer, or tell you it doesn’t know. But when it comes to creative uses, hallucination can often be a good thing. In fact, when we use AI to create lore and fictional worlds, we’d prefer it to wander off the beaten path and provide us with ideas that aren’t common, formulaic, or cliched. Oddly, that’s often easier said than done.

Real novelists won’t use AI to write their next book. They write because they enjoy it. And because they love crafting imaginary worlds and interesting plot-filled tales. Besides, current AI models are rather bad at writing interesting plot lines – they are designed to predict the next word in a sentence and so they will almost always write stories similar to the ones they’ve seen in their training data. However, where I’ve found AI to shine is in the creation of lore, characters, and backstories. And for those of us who can’t paint or sculpt, AI art models provide us with a way to richly visualize the worlds and scenes we’ve written about.

In this guide that I’ll be posting chapter-by-chapter on this site, I’ll demonstrate how to use AI to create richly detailed fictional worlds. I’ll provide numerous prompts intended for use in both large language models, such as ChatGPT, and AI art models such as Midjourney. By following this guide, you, the reader, will learn how to build your own intricate fictional universe from scratch – one that you can use in your next video game, novel, TV show, or movie. And, as you’ll learn as you read through this guide, creating a world in this way can take very little time.

So, sit back and enjoy as we build this universe together, piece-by-piece, layer-by-layer.

In the next post, I’ll show you how to set the scene, craft your initial prompts, and bootstrap your fictional universe into life. Stay tuned!