AI is already too good, how to create studio-perfect photographs with Midjourney, and no more cold calls?

Thought of the week: Is AI already too good?

When I began this newsletter almost a year ago, I still had hope that human creativity would always trump AI. I, like many, mocked the unreal videos of Will Smith eating pasta and the clunky ChatGPT texts that were littered with 'delves' and cheery summaries. Yet I fear that AI that will have the last laugh.

What prompted this watershed moment was an email from Visual Electric, an AI image gen app, highlighting some of the best image generations. As you can see from the examples below, these are indistinguishable and I'd say even 'better' than a studio shoot. All based on a single-paragraph prompt (see below to learn how to use this).

Now let's break this down. No need to hire a model, a photographer, a makeup artist, lights, a studio or a creative director. All you need is a geek with a laptop, and soon you won’t even need the geek! In the space of a year, the AI has got so good that anyone can do in 30 secs, and for peanuts, what used to take an expensive team of at least five people at least a few days.

I know that my mantra “the implications are profound” is becoming a cliché… but this is deeeeeeeeply affecting stuff if you create any content for a living and you operate at any level below the person who pays the bills. This is only the beginning, as AI developers are aggressively hunting use cases for their solutions, and the number one use case is? Cutting the cost of human employment. This means that it's only a matter of time before almost any service job can be AI’d.

So what can you do about it? Lean in, folks! You definitely can’t beat em’ so my advice is to either quickly embrace a future when you will always be ‘post-editing’ AI output, or carve out a niche in a sector that is by definition anti-AI – creating offline experiences or tangible products.

In the coming weeks, my focus will be on helping you survive and thrive with Option 1, but you may also want to consider developing a new backup side hustle in Option 2 ;-)

More robot butlers set to drop in 2025

Weave's Isaac, a California-made personal robot, finally promises to give us what we’ve all been asking for – doing household chores. Hyped for a 2025 delivery (i.e. if they don’t run out of money/aren’t beaten to it by a cheaper Chinese model), Isaac can autonomously tidy, fold laundry and organize spaces, responding to voice or text commands via an app.

That’s all great until you see the almost £40k price tag. Why in the hell would anyone pay even a third of that when you can get your weekly domestic chores done in most modern cities for around £3,500 a year? Another example of a solution looking for a problem.

How to create studio perfect photographs with MidJourney

I really should get commission for hyping the Midjourney (MJ) app, but for £20 a month I think it’s a really good value subscription, if only to be able to marvel at the jaw-dropping creativity of state-of-the-art AI image generation.

I’ve put together a step-by step guide to creating images:

1. Find your style. In the oh-so geeky days of 12 months ago, you would have to be a photography expert to create photorealistic images. Effective prompting required intimate knowledge of lens types, exposure, aperture and lighting moods.

2. Steal the prompt. Click the image you would like to replicate and copy the prompt by clicking the 'Use' icon, which pastes the same prompt into the 'Create image' box.

3. Adjust the text to your needs, e.g. you might want to change the text on a poster (or the background or colours of clothes).

4. Iterate on the output. MJ allows you almost unlimited edits and test runs to get the right final image.

There you have it. How to create studio-quality photographs in seconds. A more comprehensive tutorial is linked below.

What we’re reading this week

• This fascinating article on a group of scientists using AI to reverse-engineer expensive, life-saving drugs and empower people with the tools to create them themselves.

• AI generates ideas better than humans. Researchers found that AI ideas are judged as more novel, though slightly less feasible, than those from human experts in a study comparing AI-generated research ideas in natural language processing (NLP).

Tools we’re playing with this week

• Android call screening: Finally, more useful AI. The one bit of AI that actually makes my life has been the built-in call-screening function. Now if anyone calls, you can press the 'Call Screen' button and Google Assistant will take the call on your behalf and transcribe in real time what the (typically cold) caller wants.

That's all for this week. Subscribe for the latest innovations and developments with AI.

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