ver on Discord. So I kept going there and coming back, thinking, okay, this is obviously just some kind of mistake, because I'm trying to sign up for Midjourney but it keeps making me sign up for a whole different account on a different platform. And then finally I figured out that that's how you use Midjourney. You send it a message as if you were messaging a person, but you're messaging the AI. And you message the AI with a weird little hashtag command, which again is ridiculous and stupid. And then you wait a long time while other people's answers are going by, so you're not sure if you've missed yours. And then the picture will come back and they have three fingers. And so mostly I would say Midjourney is not really much of anything. So Midjourney is more like a toy. And I made it create some images, and I used my thumbnails here. So if you wanted to give some free, copyright-free art for some minor uses, it might have some value, but it's not going to change the world, right? Definitely not going to change the world.

So then I looked at Runway. Runway looked real impressive in the commercials. It looked to me like you could type in like a movie script and it would actually create an actual moving movie with characters and stuff to do your movie. It turns out it sort of does that but not really what you really could do. If you're a human actor, you could have your background removed and you could be put in a different scene, and there's a whole bunch of tools that it has to clean up and fix an existing video. What it can't do is the thing that I thought was the only purpose for it. What it can't do is make a movie out of your text or even close. Now, if you thought it could do that — and by the way, it advertises that that's one of the features — it just can't do it. It's not even close to being able to make a movie, right? Not even close. And it would be an immense amount of human effort to make it do anything right. So it's a tool that would require huge amounts of human time, well-trained in a lot of different skills to use it. So that was not going to replace movies anytime soon. So if you thought movies were going to go away because of that, it's not even close. But who knows how quickly things move.

So then I tried... well, I spent a few hundred dollars yesterday just trying out AI. Probably a thousand dollars I spent yesterday just testing, because a lot of them have expensive signups. And so the first thing you need to know is that most people will not be able to test a lot of AI, because unless your company is paying for it or you're rich, you're not going to spend a thousand dollars just to see what it can do. You're just not. So there's a huge barrier of price. So you'll probably only maybe use one of them or two of them, something like that.

The one that I thought had the most promise was Synthesia, I think that's what it's called. So what they do is they'll put a deepfake-looking human who can say whatever you want it to say and does a really good job. Really good job of making the voice sound natural, not like a computer voice. Really good job. Can't tell the difference really. And you can also create an avatar of yourself, but that takes a little work. So I've got to set up a room and get a wall and go through some steps to make an avatar of myself. That will cost me a thousand dollars. So to make the avatar that I would use, one of myself, it's a thousand dollars. So I'm going to spend it because I can afford it and because it's important for me for business to make sure I understand this field. So I'm going to make an avatar of myself. I'm going to see if it works, and I'm going to see if I can make a me reading an audiobook.

What I wanted to do was turn my book into an audiobook automatically but also into a movie or a play automatically, because all the scenes are described in the book. So I thought, well, I'll just feed the book in. But it turns out that to even read my own books, because they've been converted into QuarkXPress by my publisher, I needed this InDesign software. So I had to go through this whole process of loading InDesign and opening it up,