Made a one-shot video (I don't think I'm making shorts any more... the point of those was to use stuff off my cutting room floor but I make MORE cutting room floor while making shorts the way I do).

Anyhow: Hot Pursuit. Ellen and Kayla are enjoying a quiet morning at the beach - beautiful white sand and perfect rolling surf. However, there's more going on than they imagined under the surface.

Google's Flow

Flow is great - Nano Banana 2/Pro overcome the two fatal flaws of the original (being overly censorial & making everyone look like a rough 45). On the free tier you get a decent number of images per day - Pro seems to give a couple dozen, 2 I could run steadily for an hour or so until it hits the limit, and Lite I've never actually hit the limit (but Lite is also noticeably lower quality than the other two modes). As I alluded to, it's gotten much better in terms of allowing PG-13 sexuality, although it'll get weirdly hung-up sometimes with reference images, I think when it mistakes the character for being nude because they're wearing an outfit a little too close to flesh tone, or something like that.

I've never actually used Google or Seedance for video, but they look quite impressive. Normally my go-to for video is Grok, because Grok has been by far the cheapest & horniest AI on the market for some time now. Actually, on both those points it has gone back & forth - currently, the default paid membership gets you a weekly usage quote, which translates to basically unlimited text, probably thousands of images, or several minutes of 720p video. The video & image generation get updated fairly often - currently the image generator offers a lot of neat fine tuning options. Quality wise they're a little more 'stylized' than Flow, which may be a pro or a con depending on what you're looking for. In terms of video censorship - in the past it was at times basically anything goes, and then they'd go a week or two where they'd over-correct by making it really strict, until too many people started complaining. Now it seems they have a fairly happy medium where videos made from external reference images are a bit more moderated (to discourage deepfakes), and things generated purely from AI are more free. That being said, I still find it can get pretty kinky even when using reference images. It's the one AI you can really tell they put porn & other 'sexy' material into the training data.

For texting I'm not sure what the current best option is! I do somewhat miss the days of things like AI Dungeon (which I guess is still around, but feels dated), where it was more of an interactive experience. It's just not the same prompting and LLM and having it churn out an entire story all at once (although that can do in a pinch). I know there are some adult chat bots out there but I haven't explored it in great depth, because most of them cost money...

I find Google's Flow, AI Studio, and Gemini at the Pro tier (approx $20 per month with the option to buy more tokens a 1 cent each) adequate for my storytelling.

However, I'm a primitive - I don't engage with many of the automation tools available because I feel like crafting prompts and then shaping the output into a coherent whole IS the joy.

Google's Omni model is way behind (at least) Seedance when it comes to doing anything dynamic... but it has improved since launch so I suspect all of the free tokens and generations they're throwing at subscribers are allowing them to improve the model using real-world inputs. Maybe, eventually, it'll be at parity. Maybe.

Where I believe it wins right now is economy. 10 second clips for 15 cents in tokens... 50 bonus tokens a day... gemini (if you don't mind the watermark and SD resolution) generations 4x every 6-8 hours depending on volume... that's a lot of outputs for relatively little money.

I figured it would be good to have a thread specifically dedicated to discussing the nitty gritty of generating AI content (video, text, and images), rather than just sharing output. Do you have specific websites & tools you find particularly useful? Has your favourite service recently updated, for the better or for the worse? Just seen an exciting news story about some coming development? Have you found a prompt that gets particularly good results? Do you have a strategy for keeping more complex projects coherent (eg editing together long multi-scene videos)? Which services are friendly to hypno-content, and which require creative prompting? Which services are best at teritary stuff, like replicating the look & feel of media from some other era? And so on and so forth. I'm hoping to eventually update this OP into a more formal list of the best tools, but for now I just figured I'd get the ball rolling.

"Hypdon'tnosis" by Downing Street. and  "Nice Guy" by Downing Street.
i will get into these a bit more later when i have time!

Don't worry, right now I don't have much time either 
So it might take a while.