Join us for a journey into AI Tools
We want you to join us in celebrating an amazing year of growth for MNT-EC. For NSF reporting purposes, our “year” ends on March 31, 2026. We keep track of the entire 365 days of each year, of course, but in order to complete all of our reports that’s just how it works. We don’t make the rules. 🙂 but we might be bending them with AI…
Introducing your Center Director and PI — as Sci Fi warriors and superheroes in a movie you might recognize. 🙂
To be quite fair, Jared agreed to let these funny video takes be published as a way to share the journey. He always has the willingness to put himself out there, even when quite funny, to help his team and his students!
Each of us has heard the unrelenting cry of AI taking over, replacing us, and changing just about everything about our workday. Well, we asked AI to help us create a video explaining the past five years. What you will see here are attempts at videos based only on still images taken by Peter Kazarinoff of Jared Ashcroft. In the stills, Peter took photos of Jared in plain clothes. These depictions of him as a superhero or “head coach” were iterations from AI tool prompts. The audio is AI-generated as well. The scripts, minus the mispronunciations, were made by the AI struggling with timing or words due to timing (meaning it was hurrying itself in one area to fit it all in). Many other glitches or word choices, were not in our scripts…
This is the start of our AI Video Pilot to see if we could create something useful and fun for our members and visitors. Something that helped to explain the previous five years of success and help us point the way into the next five years. [ The written post is linked at end of this post. ] With the exception of the images we used to establish Jared’s “AI Character” all of this was generated by AI tools — mostly Kling 3.0 and Nano Banana Pro (for still images that also influence the videos). There are five short videos here, roughly 5-15 seconds each, and they will autoplay if you start this first video by clicking.
Here is a quick gallery of various attempts at still images:
Read the full post that inspired some of our AI Video Pilot work. Click the “Five Years” link below.
Five Years of Building Together post from Jared and Billie
Again, hats off to Jared and Billie for allowing these crazy and funny takes to be shared and used to show the process (and its limitations) as well as its amazing potential. We’re not done, but our first attempts have generated ideas and more ideas for how to use AI tools. Most of all, we are grateful to these two for being true superheroes as they lead out in this national work that is MNT-EC. Brava and bravo to you both, Jared and Billie. Thank you. Your leadership and example keep us moving in the right directions.