Grace Ashiru
Do you want to see King Charles and Queen Camilla do some cool dance moves at the party after they were crowned king and queen? Pope “P. Diddy” Francis wore a puffy jacket.? It’s all in a day’s work for today’s smart image-generation bots, which give some people a fun way to express their creativity while others think about how moral it is to make deep-fake pictures from scratch.
Welcome to the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence, which can be a danger but can also be a garden full of ways to be more productive, especially at work. The trick is to teach the bots how to help you, not take your place.
Much has been said about ChatGPT and its changing marketing and communication. Still, there’s much more to today’s constantly changing generative technology environment than content chatbots.
For example, mid-journey is an image-making tool that runs on the Discord platform and is fun for amateur and expert designers. As with ChatGPT, the devil is in the details. It all depends on how well you tell the bot what to do.
For instance, we asked Midjourney to make a picture of a small loggerhead turtle moving in the ocean that looked very real. Here’s what it came up with (notice the turtle with two heads that has two heads of its own):
Then, we changed the question by using ChatGPT to make a better text description of what we wanted, right down to the (imaginary) camera and aperture, and added Table Mountain for good measure:
Not bad for totally fake digital images, but there are some obvious mistakes, like the mountain not being Table Mountain, and the funny two-headed turtle is still there.
But if you keep tweaking your prompts and playing around with the tool, you might get something close to what you want, though finding a free stock photo might be easier and faster.
AI-generated picture tools like Midjourney might work better for artistic renderings in a certain style, like anime, than for photorealistic images (see examples below). Still, making rules for using this kind of tech in your business is a good idea.
It’s great for mock-ups of mood and picture boards and for playing around and making your digital artwork. However, unless they agree, it might not be the best tool for making original client content
As technology moves faster than our ability to control it, we still don’t know if it’s moral to use these tools for commercial gain or if and how they should be used for artistic purposes without telling anyone. It’s fun to play with, though.
AI transcripts and ‘smart’ summaries
At Flow Communications, we’ve been trying out meeting recording bots like Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai as a cool AI hack. They act as “virtual assistants” by crashing your meetings, recording the audio, and sending you transcriptions and recaps afterward.
From what we’ve seen so far, they aren’t 100% accurate yet because they don’t always pick up on subtleties in accents, speech patterns, etc., but they’re a good place to start, and you can go in and change the transcription while the recording is played back.
Last year, a team of Flow writers had to quickly type Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s speech at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture as she was giving it. Then, half an hour after the speech, they had to edit and send the text to the national media quickly. This tool would have been like manna from heaven.
Can’t go to an important Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet meeting because you already have something else scheduled? Send your virtual assistant to the meeting on your account, and this “fly-on-the-wall” bot will take notes for you to review later. Be careful, though, because people may not know if it’s you in the meeting or just your bot…
We have so much technology that it’s hard to believe. We can’t and shouldn’t ignore AI. Instead, we should look into how it can help us be more productive and make “grudge” jobs like taking notes in meetings easier, giving us more time to do the things we love.
More companies should look into and use AI generative technology and machine learning to responsibly improve their design, content, web development, ideation, and brainstorming to be ready for the future. Don’t be afraid of the beast.
