AI media generation, explained: one account for image, video, voice and music

"AI media generation" is the umbrella term for turning a written description into a finished piece of media — an image, a video clip, a spoken voiceover, or a piece of music. You write a prompt, a model interprets it, and a few seconds later you have something you can use. The last two years turned this from a novelty into a genuinely useful production tool, and the models now specialize: the one that draws a great product photo is not the one that animates it or narrates it.

The four kinds of generation

Most work falls into four buckets, each with its own leading models:

• Images — text-to-image and image editing. Models like Flux, Nano Banana, Seedream and GPT Image handle everything from photorealistic product shots to illustration. This is the fastest and cheapest kind, and the usual starting point. Try it on the image studio.
• Video — text-to-video and image-to-video. You can describe a scene, or hand a still image to a model and let it animate. See video generation and our deeper post on how AI video works.
• Voice — text-to-speech that reads a script in a chosen voice, for narration, characters or dialogue. More in the voiceover guide, or jump to voice generation.
• Music — full tracks from a prompt, with or without lyrics. Useful for backing tracks and soundbeds. See music generation.

Why the model matters more than the prompt

People new to this spend a lot of energy perfecting prompts and not enough choosing the right model. A model is trained for a job: some are tuned for photorealism, some for text-in-image, some for fast drafts, some for cinematic motion. The single biggest quality jump usually comes from switching models, not rewording the prompt. That is why access to many models beats being locked into one — a point that also keeps you working when any single provider has an outage.

A simple workflow that uses all four

The kinds combine well. A common pipeline looks like this:

• Generate a strong still image of your subject.
• Clean it up with a utility — remove the background or upscale it.
• Animate the still into a short video clip.
• Add a voiceover and a music bed.

Doing that across four separate tools means four logins, four bills and four export steps. Doing it in one place means the output of one step is the input to the next.

What it costs, and what to watch for

Pricing is usually per output (per image, per second of video, per block of characters for voice). Video is by far the most expensive, because it is the most compute-heavy — a few seconds of video can cost more than dozens of images. Two things worth checking before you commit to a platform: whether you are charged for failed generations (you shouldn't be — ours refund automatically), and whether credits expire (ours don't). Our full breakdown lives on the pricing page.

Getting started

The fastest way to understand AI media generation is to make something. Start with an image — it's instant and cheap — then animate it into a video. The entry plan is enough to try every kind at least once. If you work inside an AI assistant, you can also generate without a web app at all — see MCP media tools.