AI tools are fun (they can generate pictures of unicorns riding bicycles while eating an ice cream cone), but can they help missionaries do their job better?

Spoiler alert: they can.

While many AI tools are still working to become relevant, tools like DALL-E and Viggle have begun streamlining the graphic design and video production process.

For missionaries who want to engage with people online, this is huge. These tasks used to be restricted to highly skilled design teams. Now everyday missionaries have tools to produce higher quality engaging content.

What are DALL-E & Viggle.ai?

DALL-E is becoming well known for its ability to turn word prompts like "give me a picture of a unicorn riding a bicycle through a New Jersey boardwalk while eating an ice-cream cone" into photos (see photo at the start of the article). That's text-to-image generation.

At One Village Group, we typically use DALL-E for more useful things like generating photos for our newsletters and creating concept art for design projects.

Viggle on the other hand is tackling image-to-video generation as seen below:

Our experiment with DALL-E & Viggle.ai

After seeing what Viggle could do I decided I wanted our company mascot to do something cool.

The first problem: we don't actually have a mascot...

That's okay. We'll use AI!

Step 1: I took a sketch from our graphic design team and asked DALL-E to create a mascot.

On the left is the original sketch, and on the right is what DALL-E gave us:

Step 2: I used DALL-E to get our new mascot's hands out of his pockets so Viggle could more easily manipulate him in the next step. This was as simple as asking DALL-E, "Please have both of his hands visible at his sides."

Step 3: I uploaded our new mascot into Viggle and picked a template of a trending K-pop video from their library...

On the left is our mascot. On the right is the dance video template:

Step 4: A couple of minutes later Viggle gave us this masterpiece...

Let's try one more!

After watching this video WAY too many times with my kids, I asked our design team to try it with another trending video. This time we would clean it up and add some of our own special effects.

Here's the before and after side by side:

These are fun, but why does this matter for missionaries?

Missionaries today have a unique opportunity to engage with people around the world and use these tools for things like:

  • Quickly creating social media posts that drive new visitors to websites with Christian resources
  • Creating animations for teaching aids (ex. vacation bible schools)
  • Protecting the identity of missionaries in closed countries who want to create content (ex. replacing them in videos with animations)

While it may be hard to keep up with all of the AI applications coming out every day, doing so can maximize our ability to share more Jesus with more people in more creative ways.

Some extra videos

Here's one more video with our mascot that I've watched WAY too many times:

And for those of you who are really into AI, here are a couple more AI-enhanced videos...

Watch on TikTok
Watch on TikTok