AI Biography Video Generator

Pencil Sketch, the default here, draws every scene in graphite on paper, which gives a life the feel of a portrait study: a face, a pair of hands, a letter, a notebook. It suits lives of the mind, a mathematician, a writer, an inventor. Nobody mistakes a graphite study for a photograph, so the person can be on screen in every scene without the video claiming to show what they really looked like. About 37 credits a minute.

Vintage Archive renders each scene as an old black-and-white photograph, which places a life between roughly 1850 and 1960, the decades we picture through such photographs: the Civil War, the first flights, the laboratories and newsrooms of the early twentieth century. Earlier than that, a photograph is an anachronism. Its realism is also its catch: an AI 'photograph' of a real person can pass for the real thing, so caption it as an illustration and see the labels below. About 37 credits a minute.

Classical Painting turns every line into an old-master oil painting, the way the famous faces from before photography have come down to us. It suits older lives, a court astronomer, a scholar or a navigator of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and a painting reads as an interpretation, never a record. About 37 credits a minute.

For a lighter tone, make it a cartoon biography. Cartoon Explainer draws bold, expressive YouTube-style cartoons, for a life with a punchline in it, like Tycho Brahe's nose: he lost part of it in a duel in 1566, and the replacement he wore, long said to be silver and gold, was probably brass, according to the team led from Aarhus University that exhumed him in 2010. Comic Book draws inked panels with halftone shading, for a life with an adventure in it: an escape, a race, a rivalry. A lighter look doesn't make the facts optional. Both about 37 credits a minute.

Documentary stock footage is the cheapest look, at about 24 credits a minute: licensed clips of the places a person lived and worked, a harbour, a university town, a coastline, as they look today, with nothing to attribute. It rarely shows the person, and when no clip fits a line the pipeline uses an AI image instead, so check every scene. Mixed, about 27 credits a minute, adds AI images for the moments no camera filmed.

A cinematic biography, with the person in photoreal film stills, is the Cinematic look in the app or AI Images in the box, at about 37 credits a minute. It's the look most likely to need YouTube's disclosure, because a photoreal image of a real person doing something is exactly what the rule describes: see the labels below.

Pencil Sketch, Vintage Archive, Classical Painting, Cartoon Explainer, Comic Book and Cinematic can also turn each image into a short AI video clip, and documentary footage, Mixed and AI Images become AI Video Clips when you ask for animation. That raises a minute of video to about 440 credits, on videos under 1 minute or 1 to 2 minutes long, so keep it for a flagship life rather than every episode.

"Srinivasa Ramanujan's letter. January 1913: a clerk at the Madras Port Trust, who wrote that he had had no university education, sent G. H. Hardy at Cambridge a long list of his theorems, without proofs. Hardy brought him to Trinity College in 1914, and in 1918 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died in India in 1920, aged 32. Pencil Sketch, quiet narrator, open on the letter."

"Robert Smalls, May 13, 1862: before dawn, the enslaved crew of the Confederate steamer Planter took it out of Charleston with their families aboard. Smalls wore the captain's coat and straw hat and gave the signal that got them past Fort Sumter, then handed the ship to the U.S. Navy. After the war he bought the Beaufort house of the man who had enslaved him. Vintage Archive, steady narrator."

"Mary Anning, the fossil hunter the experts doubted. In December 1823 she found the first complete skeleton of a Plesiosaurus, so strange that Georges Cuvier, from sketches, thought it might be a fake. The Geological Society of London met about it without inviting her; it admitted no women as Fellows until 1908. Cartoon Explainer, wry tone, end on her fossils at London's Natural History Museum."

Each fits the 400-character limit of the box above, and every fact in them comes from MacTutor at the University of St Andrews, the U.S. House of Representatives' history pages, the National Park Service or the Natural History Museum in London. Pick the look each one names: Pencil Sketch is in the box, the others are in the app. Each is an idea, not a script, so the AI writes the narration and can still round a date or drop a qualifier: to fix every word, paste the narration instead, as the next section explains.

The box takes an idea or a finished script, and treats them differently. A prompt with names and dates gives the writer facts to work from, which beats a bare name, but the AI still writes its own sentences and can slip on a year, a number or a name. A pasted script is read word for word: nothing is added, cut or reworded.

You can't read or edit the AI's script before the video is made; editing it first is coming soon, as the AI script writer page says. So for a life that turns on exact dates, quotes or numbers, write the narration yourself and paste it. The box above takes 400 characters, room for a prompt or a few lines, so paste a full narration in the app, where it's read the same way. A pasted script is never cut: if it's too long for the length you picked, it can't be sent until you pick a longer length or shorten it, and you're warned when it would run longer than that length read aloud. With an idea prompt, watch the finished video against your sources and generate again if a fact drifted.

Exact words need a pasted script. At South Carolina's 1895 constitutional convention, Robert Smalls spoke against changes designed to remove Black South Carolinians from the voter rolls, and the House of Representatives' history page quotes him: 'All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.' Describe that as an idea and the AI may reword or shorten the line; paste it inside your narration and it's read as written. Quote from a page that cites the record, as the House's page cites the convention's printed journal, and name it in the description.

Keep the source's qualifiers. The Natural History Museum is careful to say that the ichthyosaur Mary Anning dug out, after her brother Joseph found its skull in 1811, wasn't the first one found, only the first to be scientifically studied and described; a retelling that calls it the first ichthyosaur has dropped the qualifier that made it true. And when two good sources disagree, keep only what both support: the House's page puts Smalls's wife and one child aboard the Planter, the National Park Service names three children, so the prompt above says 'their families'.

Then put the sources in the description: the institution and the page for each fact, such as 'MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews'. The same video and post text go to every platform you post to, so one list serves YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

YouTube requires creators to disclose AI content that seems realistic, starting with content that 'makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't do' or 'generates a realistic scene that didn't actually occur'. In a biography, the photographic looks can do exactly that: a Cinematic or AI Images still of Robert Smalls on the Planter's deck, or a Vintage Archive 'photograph' of him, shows a real person in a scene no camera recorded. When a photographic look shows a real person or event, answer Yes under 'AI use' when you upload; for videos ShortFast posts for you, the setting is in YouTube Studio.

Pencil Sketch, Classical Painting, Comic Book and Cartoon Explainer are plainly drawings and paintings, and YouTube's examples of content that needs no disclosure include clearly unrealistic content, animation, and AI help with the script or captions. YouTube says: 'Disclosing AI content alone won't limit a video's audience or impact its eligibility to earn money.'

Two of YouTube's examples of content to disclose read like biography scenes: 'Making it look like a real person has been arrested or imprisoned' and 'Making it appear as if someone gave advice that they did not actually give'. A realistic arrest or prison cell is content to disclose, and so is a lifelike figure delivering the lesson of their life in your words: in a photographic look, keep the person off screen while the narrator draws the lesson.

TikTok requires a label on AI-generated content that shows realistic-looking scenes or people, while artistic styles and generic text-to-speech narration don't need one; it encourages labeling AI-generated content and says the setting won't affect distribution, so turning it on costs nothing. Even with a label, TikTok doesn't allow AI content that falsely shows public figures being bullied, making an endorsement or being endorsed, or that uses the likeness of an adult private figure without their permission.

Living people need the most care: report only what's documented, and never show them saying, doing or endorsing what they didn't. The prompts on this page use people who died long ago for that reason. And write the narration in your own words rather than reading out an encyclopedia: among YouTube's examples of reused content that can't be monetised is 'Content that exclusively features readings of other materials you did not originally create, like text from websites or news feeds' (checked 5 November 2026).

It can't open links, so a Wikipedia or encyclopedia address in the box gives it nothing to read. In the app's own words: 'ShortFast can't open links yet. Describe what the page says, or paste its text.' Type the facts you checked, or paste your narration.

It doesn't find real photos of the person. Every scene is drawn in the look you chose or comes from stock footage, which rarely shows a particular historical figure. In the editor, you can replace any scene's picture with an image or a video clip you upload to your media library: use one you have the right to use, such as a public-domain photograph from a national archive or a museum, and credit it in the description. Building a whole video from your own footage is coming soon.

Its pictures are interpretations, not portraits. The face in a scene is the AI's, even when you describe the person, so never present an AI image as a real photograph of them, least of all in Vintage Archive, which is made to look like one.

Small details can slip between scenes. The AI plans recurring characters, a shared setting and a palette before any image is drawn, so describe the person once near the start of the script, a beard, a uniform, an age, and check every scene.

It doesn't check facts or quotes, and you can't read or edit the AI's script before the video is made; that's coming soon. The narration is fixed once rendered: you can swap scenes, edit captions, change the music, title and post text, and re-render, but changing what the narrator says means generating the video again.

A series has no approval step. In a biography series the AI picks each life and writes its narration, so a date can come out wrong. Episodes post on the schedule you set or arrive by email: choose email and check each one against your sources before you post it. The next two episodes are queued ahead; you can edit their scenes and captions, re-time or delete one, but not change their script.

None of these channels use ShortFast; they show what a life story can look like at different lengths. Biographics, which describes its videos as 'biographic profiles of the men and women who -- for better or for worse -- helped write the pages of human history', gives most videos to one person and titles them with the name and an angle, as in 'Winfield Scott Hancock: The Union Army's Most Superb General?' and 'King George V: Founder of the Modern British Monarchy'. American Experience on PBS ('Bringing to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America's past and present') posts full documentaries and Shorts that each take one moment of a life: four days apart in October 2026 came the Short 'Could her aim have prevented WWI?!' and the full documentary 'The True Story of Annie Oakley'. American Masters, which Unladylike2020's director Charlotte Mangin calls PBS's 'flagship biography series', released her 26 short films on 'little-known' American women from the turn of the 20th century, such as the nine-minute 'Bessie Coleman: First African American Aviator'. They set archive photographs and film beside new artwork and animations for the scenes 'for which we have no archival imagery'.

What they share is a reason to watch this life now, stated in the title, and, in the PBS films, real archive material wherever it exists. That is the part to copy; the scenes, the voice and the captions are the part ShortFast handles.