About Tiny Desk AI

Tiny Desk AI is a small, single-purpose tool. Give it photos of up to 5 people, one per seat, and it hands back Charlie Wilson's "Outstanding" Tiny Desk performance with your crew playing in the band: a 10- or 15-second vertical MP4 in 480p or 720p, sized for TikTok, Reels and Shorts.

How this started

In October 2026 a parody that dropped five college football coaches into that performance spread across TikTok, and the comments filled up with people asking how to make one with their own friends. The honest answer was: swap five faces by hand, frame after frame. We built the shortcut, where a handful of photos is all it takes.

What happens after you press the button

Your photos go to an AI video model that places each face in its seat while the room, the instruments and the camera work stay exactly as they were. You never write a prompt. Depending on the quality and length you pick, a video costs between 110 and 330 credits, and if the model fails, those credits return to your balance by themselves.

What you get back

Every video is a vertical 9:16 MP4 at 24 frames per second, without a watermark, made to be posted straight from a phone. The shorter 10-second version keeps the moment everyone knows; the 15-second version runs a little longer before the clip ends. When it is ready, the video plays right on the page and can be downloaded as often as you like from your account.

Each of the 5 seats is its own slot: lead vocals, sax, keys, left backing vocals and right backing vocals. Any seat you leave empty keeps the original performer, so a single photo is enough to put yourself on lead vocals while the rest of the band plays on as it did in 2023.

Who uses it

Most videos are made for a small audience that knows the faces. Friend groups put the loudest person in the chat on lead vocals. Sports teams and coaching staffs make their own version of the parody that started it all. Offices make one for a farewell or the end of a long quarter, and plenty of people simply hand the microphone to the family dog. What these have in common is that everyone in the video is in on the joke.

Getting a good result

The model works from the photos alone, so the photos decide how convincing the faces look. Use one person per photo, facing the camera, in good light, with the head and shoulders in frame. Sunglasses, heavy filters, masks and faces turned to the side make the result less accurate. Pets work best with a sharp, front-facing shot. Photos can be JPG, PNG or WebP files of up to 10 MB each.

What AI can and cannot do here

The model is good at keeping the room, the lighting and the camera moves of the original, and at fitting a new face to each performer's movements. It is not perfect. A face can come out slightly different from the photo, especially from a side angle or in a busy group photo, and fast movements can blur the details. That is why the shorter, cheaper version is a good first try before spending more credits on the longer or sharper one.

How paying works

There is no subscription and there are no free credits. You buy a credit pack once, the credits never expire, and each video uses between 110 and 330 of them depending on the quality and length. Sharper 720p video opens up as you buy bigger packs, and once an option is open it stays open. The pricing page lists every pack and what it unlocks.

Why it is not free

Every video is rendered by a commercial AI video model, and each render costs us real money whether or not the clip comes out well. Credits are how that cost is passed on fairly: longer and sharper videos take more rendering time, so they take more credits, and a video that fails is never charged. We would rather keep the price per video honest than fill the site with ads or sell anyone's data to cover it.

The technology behind it

The video itself is made by the Kling model, and every photo and finished clip is checked by the Qwen vision model, both running on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. The site, your uploads and your finished videos are hosted on Cloudflare, and sign-in runs on Supabase. The privacy policy explains what each of these services receives and where it is located.

What you can do with your video

The videos you make are yours to keep and share, including on accounts that earn money. The one condition is honesty: label the clip as AI-generated where the platform asks, for example with TikTok's AI-generated content label or the synthetic content disclosure on YouTube Shorts, and never present it as real footage of the people in it or of the original performers.

Consent first, and two checks on every video

Real people can appear only if they are you or have agreed to it, and you confirm that before each video. A photo is checked automatically before any credits are charged, and the finished video is checked again before it reaches you. Sexual, violent or hateful material is refused, and so are characters or logos that belong to someone else. The acceptable use policy has the complete list.

Your data, briefly

Photos and videos are kept in private storage, photos are erased 30 days after upload, and none of it is used to train AI models. The privacy policy names every service involved, and the terms of service cover credits and refunds.

An independent project

Tiny Desk AI is run independently. NPR, Tiny Desk, Charlie Wilson, The Gap Band, the people behind the viral parody, ByteDance and TikTok have no affiliation with it and do not endorse it.

Contact

There is a single inbox for everything: support@tiny-desk-ai.pro. Please write from the address you signed up with so we can find your account. Replies come from that same address, and we will never ask for your password.

• Missing credits or videos: the account page shows every credit change, order and finished video, and credits for a failed video are returned automatically, so look there first.
• Refunds: tell us when you bought the pack. The refund policy covers the 7-day window and what qualifies.
• A broken or odd-looking video: mention what you uploaded, the quality and length you chose, and about when you made it.
• Reporting a video: send the link where it was posted and the reason it should come down, for example your rights, someone appearing without consent, or a breach of the acceptable use policy.
• Your data: say whether you want a copy of it or want it erased. The privacy policy lists what we keep.
• Closing your account: you can do this yourself on the account page; if you are locked out, write from the account's email address.
• Security problems: send the steps to reproduce the issue. The same details are in /.well-known/security.txt.

Put your crew in the band with the Outstanding Tiny Desk AI generator