We’re about to dive into the world of generative AI and create some amazing content. As you may have heard, AI has made significant advancements in generating high-quality images and artwork. In fact, a recent example of AI-generated art even won a prestigious prize – you can read more about it in The New York Times article titled “AI-Generated Art Won a Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.” (nytimes.com).
While this technology is undeniably fascinating, it does raise some concerns about the potential for AI to create content that appears to be real but is actually fake. As AI becomes more advanced, it may become increasingly difficult to distinguish between what’s genuine and what’s not. This poses a significant responsibility for media outlets and content creators alike.
AI Powered Image Generators
We are going to use Midjourney. But there are quite some alterantives available that you may want to checkout:
There is no particular reason for us to use Midjourney besides that we knew it and payed for a monthly subscription. 🙂 I have tried the Bing Image Creator briefly and it is also very simple to use. It uses DALL-E under the hoods. I don’t really know too much about the individual pors and cons, but what I really like about Midjourney is the ability to pass some parameters like the aspect ratio. This comes in very handy if we want to generate images that are a good fit for a printed A4 paper.
Here is how this looks in the Bing tool:
Midjourney
As previously mentioned we are going to use Midjourney, the award winning AI for image generation. I have to admit that we had some trouble understanding how to use the service at first. They basically offer a Discord channel that lets you interact with the service; and you have to carefully follow the instructions.
After registering you can join their Discord channel and start generating images. I was not able to generate a lot of images on the free plan, the service often told me it was heavily under load.
We decided to go for a paid plan for this reason and a very important additional one: commercial use of the content.
I’m not an expert on all the details. I would still not try to use copyrighted characters, for example from the Pokemon franchise. But, to my understanding you are allowed to use the generated images commercially, but you don’t have the copyright. For our purpose this is fine.
Show me how to use it!
The real fun is to write some prompts for the AI. We are still new to the service, but we found some keywords and parameters that work quite well for us.
You basically start by typing /imagine which will change the view, allowing you to describe the image you want to generate.
And now we can just type whatever image we want. Let’s say we want a toy car driving on the highway in the midst of real cars. We could type something like: a real size toy car driving on the highway in the midst of real cars.
I recommend watching the chat channel to learn what other users are doing. It is really interesting and we learned most of the commands by just seeing them in action. The documentation is helpful as well: Midjourney Documentation.
Here is the result generated by the AI:
You will have to find out how to talk to the AI to generate what you want. I would argue knowing how to use such tools will be a valuable (if not essential) skill for the future.
Coloring Images
We found the AI is very good understanding the art style. So we just describe what we want and appended: coloring picture for kids, black and white, bold lines –v 5 –aspect 100:141
The aspect ratio is important to get an A4 format. By default you just get a square image, which is not very printer friendly.
With the tool and the knowlege equipped, we have generated a few dozen images in no time and added them to our portfolio. 🙂 Sometimes the results are good, sometimes they are … suboptimal. But it was great fun to generate the images. We will for sure try to create more interesting images over time. But for now we are good! Let’s see if we can add some ads and optimize the page to generate some actual traffic!
Check out the current result under https://www.usmalbilder.ch.
