Regardless of your personal views on creative AI, it's an incredibly fascinating advancement in technology as far as I'm concerned.
Leaving a bad taste
There is obviously controversy around large private companies training these generative neural networks using copyrighted materials. Which simply wasn't something the lawmakers could have ever conceived several years ago. Sometimes it's clear cut all out illegal, such as Meta (parent company of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and more) being caught torrenting '82TB' of pirated books for AI training.
Or the less criminal potential 'misunderstanding' around some unfortunate phrasing in Adobe's Terms of Service which many believed to mean that Adobe was within their rights to 'use, reproduce' and 'create derivative works based on' the user's content, through 'automated and manual methods'. Leaving to a huge movement across social media calling people to abandon the giant for alternate products.
I have personally stopped using Adobe products, because it's incredibly expensive for personal use as a hobbyist / enthusiast. But mainly because Adobe Premiere Pro crashes and incredibly frequent amount, and Adobe Photoshop UI is infuriatingly slow to the point of absurdity - lots of people online are suffering with the same thing. So I've switched to DaVinci Resolve and Affinity Photo 2.
On with the show...
As the saying goes "a picture paints a thousand words", and even on the most text heavy topics, an image can go along way to improve the experience, convey additional context, or just straight up look nice for no other reason.
And it's the latter that pushed me to think about how I can make my blog posts look more glamorous.
Having used Midjourney and DALL-E before, with some partial success, I wanted something 'free' and a bit more consistent. With my recent trip to Seattle to present a session to a room packed with Microsoft employees, I needed to get them on my side. So I tried Microsoft Designer that's built into PowerPoint to give them some low-effort eye-candy and the ability to provide follow up prompts to tweak the results.
And ended up with stuff like this...
I think it went down well, I'm sure it was my compelling enthusiasm and not the images that got the applause at the end.
Microsoft Designer
Currently free with 15 credits per month, a credit being used each time you interact with it to generate something, good news is that you automatically get 4 variations to choose from each time. Check it out below...,
It has various options for generating different things such as Images, Icons, Wallpapers, Invitations, Banners, Posters, Social Posts, Greetings Cards, Stickers, Monograms, Colouring Book Pages, Backgrounds, Avatars, Collages, Emojis, and Clip Art.
Here's my prompt
I'm after a 'featured image' to use on my blog, this post is specifically about using generative AI to create bespoke images relevant to the topic of the post. So can this one be some futuristic computer having a spark of inspiration to create something truly mind blowing and yet at the same time effortless.
There is also an 'enhance prompt' button that takes my mere mortal pathetic attempt to convey a concept, and turns it into this...
A futuristic computer with sleek, metallic design and glowing neon accents, surrounded by a digital aura. The computer is emitting a bright spark of inspiration, symbolizing the creation of something truly mind-blowing. The background features a blend of abstract, high-tech elements and a sense of effortless creativity, with soft, ethereal lighting and a harmonious color scheme of blues, purples, and silvers.
I don't see the difference if I'm being honest ¯\(ツ)/¯
And here's what I got...
But they didn't float my boat. So I went in a different direction...
An ethereal being composed mostly of light, at one with nature in a dark forest, caught in the act of "creation". Bringing something unique to life that has never been seen before.
Yeah, I think I'll go with one of those.