I Tried Turning My Blog Post into a Video with Pictory — Here’s What Happened

 

 Yesterday, I had an interesting idea.

I had written a blog post on AI123.ca called “I Let AI Talk About My Own Blog — And I Was Blown Away.”

After writing about AI reading and talking about my own blog, I thought:

Why not let AI turn the same article into a video?

So I decided to try it.

This time, I used Pictory.

I wasn't trying to make a professional YouTube production. I simply wanted to see what would happen if I gave Pictory my blog post and asked it to turn the article into a video.

And the experiment turned out to be quite interesting.

I Started with My Blog URL

I opened Pictory and entered the URL of my article.

At first, I wasn't even sure whether it would work.

It did.

Pictory read the article and generated a video script from it.

I could see the script on the screen, along with several AI editing options such as Optimize, Rephrase, Shorten, Length, and Change Tone.

For the moment, I left the script alone.

I wanted to see what Pictory would do with my original article.

Then I clicked “Next: Video Preferences.”

Let AI Do the Work

Pictory gave me several choices.

For the visuals, I selected Auto Select.

For narration, I selected AI Voice.

Then I clicked Generate Video.

And I waited.

A few minutes later, the video was ready.

I was curious.

What would my little blog article look like as a video?

Then Came the Interesting Part

I previewed the video.

The AI voice was there.

The video had images and video clips.

Everything looked like a real video.

But as I watched, I noticed something.

The story didn't feel quite like my original article.

The individual shots were interesting enough, but they sometimes felt loosely connected. One scene would be followed by another, but the connection between them wasn't always obvious.

In other words, Pictory had made a video about the general subject, but I wasn't sure it had really captured the story I had written.

And that distinction caught my attention.

My original article was personal. It was about my experience of letting AI talk about my own blog and being surprised by what happened.

The video was more like a collection of visual scenes accompanying the subject.

That made me think.

But I Don't Want to Judge Too Quickly

I'm not writing this post to tell you that Pictory is good or bad.

That would be too easy.

I only tried one article.

I used the automatic visual selection.

I used the AI voice.

I didn't spend time adjusting individual scenes or rewriting the script.

Someone else might use the same tool differently and get a much better result.

Maybe the automatic version is only the starting point.

Maybe with some editing, the story could become much stronger.

Or perhaps another type of article would work much better with this kind of automatic video creation.

I don't know.

And that's exactly why I found the experiment interesting.

What I Really Wanted to Find Out

My question wasn't:

“Can Pictory make a video?”

Obviously, it can.

My question was:

“Can AI take something I wrote and turn it into a video that still feels like my story?”

That's a much more interesting question to me.

Because as someone who enjoys writing, I don't simply want words converted into moving pictures.

I want the idea, feeling, and story to survive the journey from writing to video.

Maybe that requires more human involvement.

Maybe AI will get better at it.

Maybe both.

So What Do You Think?

I'm sharing my experiment because I think many of us are going to face this question more often.

AI can now write.

AI can read.

AI can speak.

AI can create pictures.

And AI can turn an article into a video.

But how much of the original human story survives when AI does most of the work?

I have my own thoughts after watching my video.

But this time, I won't give you my conclusion.

I'd rather let you try it yourself.

Take one of your own articles, put it into an AI video tool, watch the result, and see what you think.

Maybe you'll be impressed.

Maybe you'll be disappointed.

Or maybe, like me, you'll find the experiment itself more interesting than the final video.

And that, I think, is one of the most enjoyable things about experimenting with AI.

We don't always know what we're going to discover until we try.

What Google Search Is Telling Me About My Blog

 

 This is one of Grandpa's earlier stories, revisited while Grandpa takes a short break.

 

This morning, I went back and reviewed a conversation I had with my AI companion a few days ago.

It was about something I have been watching quite closely lately: the traffic to my blog, AI123 (ai123.ca).

At first glance, the numbers didn't look particularly exciting.

For the week of August 3–9, 2026, Google Analytics showed:

• Organic Search: 27 sessions

• Average session duration: 12 minutes 35 seconds

• Blogger: 19 sessions

• Average session duration: 6 minutes 14 seconds

Twenty-seven sessions?

That's not a huge number.

But then I looked at the other number.

12 minutes and 35 seconds.

That caught my attention.

Maybe the number of visitors isn't the whole story

I have been watching my blog traffic for quite a while now. Sometimes the numbers can be surprisingly large, and sometimes they fall back down again.

It is easy for a blogger to become excited when seeing thousands of pageviews.

I certainly have done that myself.

But my conversation with ChatGPT made me think about something different.

Perhaps I shouldn't only ask:

"How many people came to my blog?"

I should also ask:

"What did they do after they arrived?"

That is a different way of looking at blogging.

Someone who arrives through Google Search may have been looking for something specific. They type a question or a topic into Google, see a result, and decide to visit my blog.

If that person stays for several minutes, perhaps they are actually reading.

That is much more interesting to me than simply knowing that someone clicked on my site.

Organic Search versus Blogger

The comparison was particularly interesting.

Visitors coming through Blogger averaged 6 minutes and 14 seconds.

Visitors coming through Organic Search averaged 12 minutes and 35 seconds.

In other words, the average Organic Search session was roughly twice as long.

Of course, I have to be careful.

There were only 27 Organic Search sessions in this particular period. That is a small sample, so I don't want to make a big conclusion from one week's data.

But I think it is a signal worth watching.

Maybe Google is slowly finding people who are genuinely interested in some of the things I write about.

And that makes me curious.

What are people searching for?

This is where blogging becomes interesting for me.

I am not a professional SEO expert sitting in an office studying keywords all day.

I'm a grandfather who likes to write.

I write about AI. I write about blogging. I write about my experiments with technology. I write about things that happen in my everyday life.

Sometimes I don't know which story will attract readers.

I simply write about something that catches my attention.

Recently, I have also noticed people searching for subjects such as blogging, Blogger, AI learning, and AI versus AGI.

That tells me something.

People are not necessarily coming to my site only because somebody sent them a link.

Some are actually searching for these subjects.

That is encouraging.

My AI companion gave me something to think about

When I shared the Google Analytics information with ChatGPT, it told me that the Organic Search result might be more meaningful than simply looking at a large pageview number.

I liked that observation.

Not because ChatGPT told me something I wanted to hear, but because it gave me another way to interpret the data.

I used to think of analytics mainly as a scoreboard.

More visitors = good.

Fewer visitors = bad.

Now I'm beginning to see it more like a conversation.

The numbers are telling me something about the people who visit.

Where did they come from?

What did they read?

How long did they stay?

Did they come back?

Did they find me through Google, Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, or somewhere else?

These questions are becoming more interesting to me than simply watching the visitor counter.

I don't want to change everything

There is another piece of advice from my AI companion that I found useful.

It suggested that I shouldn't immediately start changing everything just because I saw one encouraging result.

I agree.

That's probably one of the hardest lessons for a blogger.

You see one number go up and you want to change the whole website.

You see another number go down and you wonder whether something is wrong.

But perhaps the better approach is simply to watch and learn.

For now, I want to see what happens to Organic Search over the next few weeks.

Will those 27 sessions become 40?

Then 60?

Maybe 100?

And will visitors continue to spend several minutes reading?

I don't know.

That's the fun part.

I'm learning alongside my readers

At 80, I didn't expect that I would become so interested in website analytics.

But here I am.

I'm learning about Google Analytics, Blogger, AI, search traffic, engagement, and all kinds of things that were certainly not part of my daily life years ago.

And I have discovered that I don't need to understand everything at once.

I can ask questions.

I can experiment.

I can make mistakes.

I can look at the data.

Then I can ask my AI companion, "What do you think this means?"

And we talk about it.

That's actually one of the things I enjoy most about blogging now.

I'm not simply writing stories.

I'm learning from the people who read them.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of this whole blogging journey.

The 27 Organic Search sessions from August 3–9 may not look impressive to a big website.

But to me, they represent something much more personal.

They may be 27 small signs that someone, somewhere, searched for something, found a little corner of my website, and decided to stay for a while.

For an old grandfather who simply enjoys writing and sharing what he learns, that's worth paying attention to.

And I'll be watching what happens next.