AI Mythology Video Generator

Classical Painting, the default here, turns every line into an old-master oil painting, the look most viewers already picture for Greek and Roman myths: Prometheus carrying fire in a fennel stalk, Persephone and the pomegranate, the gods' war with the Titans. Nobody takes a painting for a photograph, so a god on a mountaintop reads as myth. Old-master paintings of myths often show nudes, though, so ask for clothed or draped figures; the ad rules below explain why. A video in it typically costs about 25 credits.

Marble Statues renders each scene as Greek sculpture in a stoic mood. ShortFast lists it for Stoicism and discipline, and it also suits the portrait of a single Greek god: who Hermes was, what Athena carried and why. Its stillness suits a portrait better than a chase. Greek sculpture is often nude too, so ask for draped figures. About 25 credits.

Ukiyo-e draws each scene as a Japanese woodblock print, with bold outlines and flat colour, and ShortFast lists it for Japan, legends and history. It's the natural look for the gods of the Kojiki and for Japanese legends, such as Susanoo and the eight-headed serpent in the third prompt below. About 25 credits.

Comic Book inks every scene as a panel with halftone shading, made for heists, legends and action stories, and myths have all three: a stolen hammer won back at a wedding feast, a hero's labours, a monster's last fight. It's also the look where a borrowed design slips in most easily. Thor and Loki are in the Poetic Edda, but a comic or film studio's costumes and faces for them belong to the studio, so describe your own. About 25 credits.

Anime gives cel-shaded characters under painted skies, for a myth told through one character: Persephone's year, Susanoo's exile, Loki's next trick. If a series is made for children, set its audience in YouTube Studio: ShortFast doesn't set one on the videos it posts, so the channel's setting applies. Design your own gods rather than borrowing a recent anime's or game's. About 25 credits.

Vintage Archive draws each scene as an old black-and-white photograph, which suits the modern half of a myth: the people who went looking for it. At Knossos, Arthur Evans uncovered the building he called 'the Palace of Minos' between 1900 and 1904, and frescoes of people leaping over bulls helped convince him it was the Labyrinth of the Minotaur myth, as the Ashmolean Museum tells it. It's the one look on this page that can pass for a real photograph: never present a scene as a real archive photo, and when one shows a real person or a real dig, answer Yes to YouTube's AI question. About 25 credits.

Every look on this page can also turn each image into a short AI video clip. That raises a typical video to about 464 credits, so keep it for a series' strongest episodes rather than the daily post.

"Prometheus, from Hesiod's Theogony: at Mecone he hides an ox's meat under its stomach and dresses the bones in shining fat. Zeus takes the fat, so men burn bones for the gods. Zeus withholds fire; Prometheus steals it in a hollow fennel stalk. Zeus chains him, and an eagle eats his liver, which grows back each night, until Heracles kills it. Classical Painting look, grave narrator, no gore."

"Thor's stolen hammer, from the Poetic Edda's Lay of Thrym: the giant Thrym hides it eight miles under the earth and will return it only if the goddess Freyja marries him. She refuses, so Thor goes as the bride, in a veil, with Loki as his maid. At the feast he eats an ox and eight salmon; when the hammer is laid on the bride's knees, he takes it back. Comic Book look, deadpan narrator."

"Susanoo, from the Kojiki: he sees chopsticks floating down the River Hi and finds an old couple weeping upstream. A serpent with eight heads and eight tails has devoured seven of their eight daughters. He turns the last into a comb for his hair, has them set out eight vats of strong sake and cuts up the serpent as it sleeps. In its tail: a great sword. Ukiyo-e look, calm narrator."

Each fits the 400-character limit of the box above. Write the events of your chosen version into the prompt yourself, as here, rather than asking for 'the myth of Prometheus': then you know which version the narrator will tell, and you can name the source in the post text. Myths are violent, so add 'no gore' whenever a story has a wound in it.

Myths come in versions, so say which one you're telling. Greek myths reach us through writers such as Hesiod, whose Theogony tells how the gods were born, and the Roman poet Ovid, whose Metamorphoses retells them as stories of transformation; Norse myths through the poems of the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda; Japanese myths through the Kojiki. The same story changes between them. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hades gives Persephone a pomegranate seed and she must spend a third of every year below; in Ovid she eats seven seeds, and Jupiter divides the year so that she spends six months with her mother and six with her husband. Some stories have only one source: the Lay of Thrym in the second prompt survives in a single manuscript of the Poetic Edda, and, as its 1923 translator Henry Adams Bellows notes, it isn't in the Prose Edda at all. Name your source in the script or the post text, and don't blend two versions in one video.

Retell from the old text, or paste an old translation. The myths are thousands of years old, but every translation is a new work: the US Copyright Office lists translations among derivative works, whose copyright 'covers only the additions, changes, or other new material' they bring, and says all works published in the United States before January 1, 1931 are in the public domain because their protection has expired. The sites that host old translations name the translator. Theoi.com has Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 Hesiod and Brookes More's 1922 Ovid; Project Gutenberg has Evelyn-White's Hesiod and Bellows's 1923 Poetic Edda; Basil Hall Chamberlain's English Kojiki was first published in 1882. Project Gutenberg says its books can be used at no cost in the United States and most other parts of the world, and asks readers outside the US to check their own country's laws first. A modern translation, and Theoi.com's own summaries and notes, are someone's recent work: retell them in your own words instead of copying them.

Modern retellings belong to their makers. The Copyright Office counts 'motion picture versions of literary material or plays' as derivative works too, and its rule cuts both ways: a film's or a game's copyright covers what it added, while using public-domain material in it 'will not prevent anyone else from using the same public domain work'. Thor, Loki and the stolen hammer are yours to retell from the Edda; a studio's costume, face or new plot for them, or a novel's invented demigods, are not. Describe your gods from the ancient text and your own imagination, never 'like in the film'.

Some of these gods are worshipped today. Hinduism and Shinto are practised now, and so are many Indigenous traditions. Naiku, the shrine at Ise Jingu dedicated to Amaterasu, Susanoo's sister in the Kojiki, is in the shrine's own words 'the most venerable sanctuary in Japan'. Tell stories from a living tradition with the care you'd give any faith's sacred texts: name the text ('the Kojiki tells', 'in the Ramayana'), and check details against the tradition's own sources rather than a viral retelling.

YouTube asks you to disclose AI content that looks realistic and shows a real person doing or saying something they didn't, alters footage of a real event or place, or generates a realistic scene that didn't happen. You answer Yes under 'AI use' when you upload; for videos ShortFast posts for you, the setting is in YouTube Studio. Its examples of content that needs no disclosure include clearly unrealistic content, such as 'someone riding a unicorn through a fantastical world', animation, and using AI for the script or the captions, and it says disclosing alone won't limit a video's audience or its eligibility to earn money. Painted, carved, woodblock, inked and anime scenes of gods and monsters are plainly not footage. Vintage Archive's old photographs are the exception: when one shows a real person or a real place, such as Evans's dig at Knossos, answer Yes.

TikTok requires a label on AI-generated content containing realistic images, audio or video, while artistic styles like anime and generic text-to-speech narration don't need one. These videos are made with AI from script to voice, and TikTok encourages labeling AI-generated content and says the setting won't affect distribution, so turning it on costs nothing.

YouTube's hate speech policy lists religion as a protected attribute: it doesn't allow content that promotes violence or hatred against people because of their religion, including religious slurs and stereotypes that promote hatred. A careful retelling of a Hindu epic or a Shinto myth is nowhere near that line; a video that uses a living faith's gods to mock the people who worship them is a different video from the ones on this page.

Classical myths raise two ad questions. YouTube's advertiser-friendly guidelines let illustrated nudity in art, 'such as characters in classic art', earn ad revenue, but give limited ads to classical art featuring discernible genitals and to titles or thumbnails featuring adult content in classical art, so ask for clothed or draped figures. Myths are violent too: dramatised violence can earn ad revenue, but 'dramatized violence that results in serious injury where the aftermath or impact is visible and present' gets limited ads. Prometheus's liver and the serpent's blood belong in the narration, not the picture.

The rule a daily mythology channel is most likely to meet is about sameness. YouTube's monetisation policies say generic or repetitive content 'includes content that looks like it's made with a template', and list among their examples 'videos where characters are put in the same situation over and over again with the same outcome'. A series is fine when each video has 'a distinct storyline, focus, or concept': what YouTube asks is that 'the substance of each video should be materially varied'. Its spam policy allows 'posting a few variations of a video', but not 'using automated tools or AI to churn out high volumes of similar content with minimal changes', and its example is a channel using 'the exact same background music and repetitive AI generated imagery across many videos, with each video reading out an AI-generated script'. A new myth, a named source and a new angle in every episode are what make each video different, and that difference is what both rules ask for.

It doesn't check sources. The script it drafts reads smoothly whether or not it matches Hesiod, and it can blend two versions of a myth or borrow a detail from a film. Check the script against your source before you render.

It doesn't know what a god 'really' looks like. There's no canonical face for Zeus or Amaterasu, and the image model draws a god from your description in the style you chose. Give it the details your source gives: fifty heads for Hesiod's Cerberus or three for Apollodorus's, eight heads and eight tails for the Kojiki's serpent, a bridal veil for Thor. There's no style modelled on Egyptian tomb painting or Norse carving either, so Egyptian and Norse myths are told in a borrowed look, such as Classical Painting or Comic Book.

Small details can slip between scenes. The AI that splits your script plans the recurring characters before any image is drawn, but a single image can still drop one of the serpent's heads or give Odin back the eye he gave up. Describe each figure once near the start of the script, check every scene, and swap any that's wrong for another image or one you upload. Don't rely on writing inside a scene, either: runes or hieroglyphs in an AI image are decoration, not an inscription anyone can read. Put names and words in the narration, which the captions show word for word.

It won't make an hour-long retelling. Videos run up to 3 minutes on every plan, or 8 to 15 minutes on Advanced, so a whole Odyssey becomes a series of episodes, one adventure each.

The narration is fixed once rendered. You can swap scenes, edit captions, change music, title and post text, and re-render, but correcting a name or a version in what the narrator says means generating again.

An automation has no approval step. In a mythology series the AI picks each new myth and writes its script, and every episode posts automatically or arrives by email, so choose email and check each episode's version and scenes before you post it. The next two episodes are queued: you can edit their captions, scenes and post text, re-time, pin or delete them, but not change their script. The series brief, up to 500 characters, is where your rules go: one myth per episode, its ancient source named in the first line, clothed figures, no gore.

None of these channels use ShortFast; they show what mythology audiences come back for. Extra History says its team makes 'animated video essays about world history, mythology, and other subjects', and its Extra Mythology series names the culture in every title, as in 'Thor and Loki - The Lay of Thrym - Norse' and 'The Rakshasa - Ravana & Vibhishana - Hindu'. Crash Course World Mythology, a series on the CrashCourse channel, compares myths across cultures by theme, from 'What Is Myth?' to 'Creation from the Void' and 'Rama and the Ramayana'. Mythology & Fiction Explained tells whole works and traditions in long videos, some close to an hour or longer, such as 'The Odyssey: Ancient Greece's Wildest Adventure' and 'Is Tiamat the Queen of Monsters? The Mesopotamian Creation Story'. Jon Solo's channel breaks down the 'Messed Up Origins' of familiar myths and fairy tales, the older versions behind the ones viewers grew up with, in titles such as 'Why You're Wrong about Hades: God of the Dead'.

What they share is one story or one question per video, a culture or a source named up front, and a narrator with a point of view. That is the part to copy; the scenes, the voice and the captions are the part ShortFast handles.