AI tools for YouTube: Making Faceless YouTube Videos in Minutes

Muhammad Ali
March 7, 2023

YouTube has become a substantial source of making money for content creators. Forbes predicts that people make between $3-5/1000 views, which can rack up quickly even for a small channel. So people have found a unique way to earn money through "faceless channels." These channels post videos that don't show a person's face and usually have a voiceover going through a script in the background.

Imagine you are a YouTuber, a microcelebrity with a channel about doing pranks in public spaces. Something like COVID-19 comes along, and you are disproportionately affected by the circumstances. What do you do when you are forced to stay home and can’t go out? This is where faceless channels shine.

Faceless channels help diversify your content portfolio. They are an exciting way to make money on YouTube because you can be created programmatically. In addition to your prank channel, you could set up a channel with tutorials about things you know. This kind of flexibility means you can hop on different trends. For instance, ChatGPT has recently stirred up quite a storm about AI, and different channels are springing up across YouTube dedicated to content about using different AI tools like MidJourney, DALL-E, ChatGPT, and more. These channels are quickly racking up hundreds of thousands of views. For instance, there’s a channel on YouTube called Prompt Engineering; it was created on January 15, 2023, and has already amassed over 1.1 million views in the five weeks it has been on YouTube, all without a single, real, human face.

There’s also the issue of social and performance anxiety. A lot of people struggle with stepping into the limelight. They’re uncomfortable using their face or voice for videos that millions of people worldwide could view. Faceless channels allow people to tap into the lucrative content creation business on YouTube.

But making a faceless channel isn’t as easy as it sounds. So how can AI help you make Faceless YouTube videos?

You can use AI tools like Fliki and ChatGPT to create Faceless YouTube videos. ChatGPT helps you automate the process of writing the scripts, while Fliki generates videos from the scripts, complete with animated visuals and AI voiceovers.

Let's walkthrough how to use each of these tools step-by-step.

Writing a script used to take a lot of time

In the past (and by that, I mean the era before ChatGPT), creators on faceless channels had to write scripts for the voiceover. This meant doing a lot of research, compiling a script, and then using a voiceover app to get the voiceover done.

To truly "automate" their channels, content creators often hire people to write these scripts, which costs money. However, with ChatGPT, you can get the script written in a single prompt, and that's what a YouTuber, Sebas Kampfmann, figured out.

Sebas is a 3D artist who also makes YouTube videos about technology.

He used a series of prompts to generate the YouTube video within minutes, a task usually taking hours.

Prompt 1: Please write an article on the evolution of Facebook

So, in the first prompt, Sebas got an "article" written on his desired topic by ChatGPT. That was his script.

He then copied the "article" and pasted it on Fliki, which converted it into a video and automatically gave it an AI voiceover. Typically, this would be a two-step process. First, you would get a voiceover for your script using a voiceover app and then use a video editor to give it the relevant screens.

However, Fliki, it's an all-in-one solution. You paste your script, and it automatically divides it into different sections, adds a voiceover, and converts it into a movie.

Flicki
What it's like to use Flicki.

Plus, the best part is that you don't need to look for visuals. All you need to do is describe the visuals, and it automatically generates them for you, including animated visuals!

Flicki
Automatically generated visuals

But that's not the end of creating a video. After generating the video, Sebas uploaded it on YouTube, where he had another brilliant idea: using ChatGPT for YouTube SEO.

Using ChatGPT to write your YouTube title and description using your keywords

Usually, when you want to rank your video highly in YouTube search, you first need to find relevant keywords, incorporate them in the title, description, and tags, and add relevant hashtags.

People usually do this through the "research" tab in the analytics section on YouTube or different tools like TubeBuddy, or they can use Google AdWords' keyword research tool. However, this can be pretty challenging - especially for someone whose native language isn't English. But Sebas got ChatGPT to do it for him.

Write me a video description of the evolution of Facebook

ChatGPT wrote the description, and Sebas then asked it for the keywords.

Write the keywords for the evolution of Facebook and separate them with a ,

And ChatGPT delivered again! So within a few minutes, Sebas got a script for a video, converted that script into a video complete with visuals and a voiceover, and got the title, description, and keywords for said video.

We don't know if YouTube SEO by ChatGPT works because Sebas has since removed the video from his channel (which used to be @techmac23 on YouTube). His channel has five subscribers and a few hundred views, so the SEO part likely isn't practical, especially given that the dataset ChatGPT has been trained on is limited to 2021, so the model doesn't know the current trends.

But if you do your keyword research, you can easily ask ChatGPT to incorporate them into the title and the description.

I actually tried that. I gave ChatGPT the following prompt:

Please write a description for my YouTube video using the following keywords: [keyword], [keyword], [keyword], [keyword], [keyword], [keyword], [keyword], and include the relevant hashtags

And I got a perfectly written description in a few seconds that naturally incorporated all my desired keywords.

So, ChatGPT and Fliki can take hours' worth of work off your hand and produce quality videos for you. But there are some things to watch out for when you use Fliki:

  • The images or videos it generates or the available stock visuals are usually short. They usually go up to 20 seconds, which isn’t great.

  • Moreover, the quality of the visuals isn’t always the best.

  • Obviously, Fliki doesn’t do a very good job of generating images, either. For instance, in the screenshot above, I asked it to generate an image of a haunted house with a ghost in the window. But it gave me a house with a ghost outside, and that ghost contrasted very sharply with the visuals of the house, so it’s not the best idea to get the visuals from Fliki when you want a very high-quality video

  • Moreover, there aren’t many video editing options as you would have in a traditional video editing powerhouse like iMovie.

  • But it has a very interesting feature that allows you to change the pronunciation of certain words for your particular voiceover.

Flicki
You can change the pronunciation of words in your voiceover.

So, while you can theoretically only use creation tools to create a YouTube video, it probably won't be a successful video without significant human input. You will need to take care of the video editing, the visuals (if you want high-quality ones), and the SEO part of the video creation.

And, if you want an in-depth script that explores a topic, you will need to do some of the research yourself. Regardless, it’s still great knowing that now tools like ChatGPT and Fliki can help take on some of the workload and do it for you.

They aren’t perfect, but they can speed up video creation.

You can watch the complete video where Sebas demonstrates the workflow here How to use AI to make youtube videos in just a few minutes.