(an old fashion radio-drama styled story, with the help of AI)

Have you ever listened to the old-time radio dramas? I went on a kick one year where I listened to a whole bunch of them. They were pretty fun in a retro sort of way. Everything had to be done without visual aids, so that a radio audience could understand the story. This led to a little extra dialog that conveyed the story, something you might avoid in a movie, but I decided to try writing and producing one myself. And since I’ve been pushing the limits of AI, to see if it can help creatives or just replace them, I used several AI tools to see how far they could take me.

Who Is This For?

This was written for kids and families. The 38-minute story follows several kids as they discover a portal to Dimension X inside one of the lockers at school. It’s full of teasing and fun. Perfect if you’re on a drive and need something to distract your kids with for a little while. Some adults might enjoy it too, but it was mostly made for early teens and pre-teens.

How I Used AI To Make This?

This was actually one of my simpler projects. I spent about an hour writing it for a couple of weeks, then did two edits, one on my own, then one using Sudowrite to see if it could offer any helpful suggestions. Sudowrite is an AI writing tool, one that I’ve been experimenting with a little. I don’t use AI to write any of my stories. I’ve tried to see what kind of stories it can write, and they are all terrible. Instead, I use AI to help edit and suggest fixes. Even then, it’s not something I can just feed it, and expect it to hand back a polished draft.

The role of AI when I’m editing, is more to help me come up with ideas on how to improve a draft, either by adding more description in areas, or finding areas that I can elaborate on. Usually what happens when I do an AI edit, is that it reproduces my work, with slight changes, always shortening and destroying my work too much to make sense with the overall story. So I have to go through its version, and cherry pick the items that strengthen it. It’s very laborious, but it is helpful. If you’re a writer though, I wouldn’t worry about AI taking your love of writing away just yet. It’s not really anything close to reliable in crafting a quality story yet, especially in longer form content.

As I made this, I used one other AI tool. Since this project had a $0 budget, I couldn’t hire actors to voice all the characters. However, I do have a subscription to Elevenlabs. This was instrumental in helping me bring the story to life. But AI voices, like AI writing tools, are still not there yet.

I first tried text-to-speech. The problem with that, was that it couldn’t get the inflections and acting right. And true, you could spend a lot of time encoding pauses, and whispers and things into it, but then you end up spending so much more time on it. So rather than waste my scarce hours on that I recorded every line of dialog myself, acting out all the parts.

I’d go through the script and do a file with all of one character’s voices on that, then go through the script and do all the next characters dialog. Then I took that over to Elevenlab’s voice changing tab. This provided a much more reliable sounding script, that matched fairly close to my acting job, but in all the different voices. That however was not void of its own issues either. There were some areas that I had to re-record and send through the AI generator again to get right.

I think that stems from it converting my voice, into text, then using a different voice to follow that text, but with the rhythm cues from my recording. This was mostly effective, but it did change some of the words in the process, and it muted some of the reactions. Also, not all voices on Elevenlabs are created equal. You’ll notice when you listen to this show, that the jocks’ voices came out a lot dirtier than some of the other characters, and some of the characters sound more boxy or muted than others. You have to really work on finding the best quality of voices to get the best quality of voice changes.

It was all a fun exercise to learn more of what AI can and can’t do. To be honest, getting real actors is still the best way to approach a project where quality counts. But without AI, I wouldn’t have been able to do something like this without help.

Do I Like AI?

For the last several months, as I’ve been experimenting with AI, I’ve come to see where AI really is, versus where the hype is. Not long ago, I was terrified that AI was going to come for my new career and kill it before I even got it started. But AI isn’t really there yet.

It has its uses, but it has major limitations still. There is a lot of AI hype in the market right now. I’ve got dozens of subscriptions to all the latest AI tools, just to put them through the ringer, and since I’m not paid to promote any of them, I’m happy to say that most of them are not worth the trouble.

But there are some that do make life easier from a budget producer’s standpoint. I’ll do an entire article on all my pros and cons of AI later, and what I’d actually recommend, but for now, I hope you enjoy this radio drama. It’s been fun to make, and I’m releasing it right in time for Halloween.