138 | Scaling Visual Stories: Secrets of Consistent Character AI with Diana Zdybel

0:00Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I've had that episode for you that I'm personally really excited about. So I'm going to take you back in time before we get started, and we're going to talk a little bit about storytelling. So storytelling has been a part of human communication since there's been human communication. It's the way people connect with one another in the best way. It's the way you generate emotions in other people to have deeper connections.

0:36Now, that thing has evolved through the years and it started from face to face. And then we had books and then radio, which was just voice and then TV and then social media. Then really all the content that we are creating is storytelling. We're trying to influence people's emotions in order to drive them into some kind of action. Now, what does that have to do with business is pretty obvious, right? You want to connect with people in your organization. You want to connect with your internal team. You want to do team building, employee engagement, but it also impacts your external side of your company like sales and marketing, et cetera.

1:15So all of this has to do with telling better stories. But what does that have to do with AI? Well, AI now enables us to create images of videos in a much more effective way than we could have ever done before. We all know that video is the most impactful kind of content, other than obviously meeting people face-to-face, but to create video content used to take weeks, sometimes months. And now we can do it with AI very quickly and very efficiently. There's only one problem, and it's a very big problem, and that is consistency, or to be more specific, the lack of consistency. If you want your story, the person in your story that is supposed to tell the message that you're trying to convey to look the same in every frame, in every shot, it is very hard to do.

2:07If you try this, even if you try to write a very long prompt and now you change it and run it again, you're going to get a slightly different look of the person that is supposed to represent you and your company and your brand with the right colors, with the right pose, with the right background and so on. So what's the solution? So lucky for us, we have the co-founder of Consister Character AI with us today. Diana Zdibel has been at this problem for about a year now, every single day, working in the trenches with her partner, initially trying to hack it through different GPTs and other solutions and better prompting.

2:47and in the past few months developing an app that will be able to do this for us even easier. But today she's going to share with us how you can do this with existing tools. What are the techniques? What are the tools? What are the prompting? What are the tricks that you need to use in order to create consistent characters that will look as the same person or as the same character, if it's like an animation kind of character, between the different scenes so you can tell a better, more compelling story and hence connect better with both internal and external people for your business. I am personally really, really excited about this and I hope you are too.

3:27And so it's time to welcome Diana. Diana, welcome to Leveraging AI.

3:35In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

4:15Hi, Isar. Hi, everybody who is listening. Thank you so much for having me. It's a great pleasure. We spoke before. I spoke to your partner several times. I've been following you guys on LinkedIn and trolling you since you guys started posting this kind of stuff. What you guys are doing is magical, right? Because it's really the holy grail of content creation is creating video that used to take, again, a very long time. And now the things you're doing and that the people that are using your tools and your processes are doing is nothing short of magic. Like in a matter of hours, you can create a 10 minute video that tells an entire story about something and it looks amazing.

4:55And it's all because of this technique. So I really leave the stage to you to lead us through the process. How does this thing work? What are the tools? What are the process? So people can learn how to do this as well. Cool. Great. So my presentation is quite short, but I think that designers and non-designers and business owners can benefit from this in various ways. You don't have to be a musician to enjoy listening to the music. Same way I'm thinking about creating stories. You can create stories and tell your story with the characters. So I think that will be a great session and looking forward to sharing my best tips and tricks with everyone.

5:39Let me start by sharing the famous quote that I personally really love and connect with. This is the quote from famous Seth Godin, the god of marketing, someone might say, that AI is the biggest change in our world since the invention of electricity, a bigger change than the internet. And I couldn't agree more. On this slide, if you are watching this, you may see how AI illustration is evolving from 2022 to 2024. This is just amazing. We can create super photorealistic images, mood boards, and now we can create AI illustrations. All of those images that you see right now on the screen are created with a tool called Me Journey.

6:25This is the AI image generator, which is one of the most popular right now. This is the leader of the market. And you can create amazing characters, human, animals, whatever you can imagine. I want to pause you just for just one second. For those of you just listening and not watching this, you're missing like the cutest board you've ever seen because it has 10 different characters that are like a bunny and a little girl and a little girl dressed like an Indian and two little twins and a furry cat. And they all look like something that Pixar would generate, right? It's just these cute, big-eyed, furry, fluffy, cute people or animals, and they just look amazing.

7:06And you just want to hug each and every one of them. Yeah, that's true. That's true. One of my favorites. Those ones I have created over the last year with MeJourney and just wanted to share what is possible right now. So while you can create all of those amazing illustrations, the high detail, the just the texture the quality it's really challenging to create the same character in different poses or different expressions to tell the whole story so consistency with ai is challenging and what we were listening that people are going through the early adopters who started using ai that this is like the biggest challenge.

7:53So one year ago, after many calls with our students, with our clients, we have already tested everything what is possible within the existing workflows. And we realized that there should be a better solution. And this is how we come up with the idea to use the workflow, which we are usually using for creating characters and create a consistent character GPT. It was created by my co-founder, Sachin Kamas. In case anyone is not following him yet, I highly recommend doing so on LinkedIn. He's sharing amazing... And I will second that. Definitely follow Diana and Sachin on LinkedIn if you're interested in anything that has to do with graphic design with AI.

8:36I think so much, Isar. So he had developed this consistent character, GPT. And until now, half a million users have tried using and creating their characters with this solution, telling their stories. And it was just an amazing journey learning from their experience, what they are looking for, how they want to convey the story. And I would like to tell that what are the capabilities right now? First of all, you can access ChatGPT, Consistent Character GPT for free. You will have limited credits in case you are not a ChatGPT plus subscriber. Nonetheless, you can test it out even tomorrow. Just go navigate and look for consistent character GPT and you'll find it.

9:23You will be able to create the same character with different expressions, with different action. It can be human or non-human character and with different poses. I do have an amazing example of AI animation created by one of my AI creative Accelerator student, Tali. She is a psychologist. She is very passionate about helping kids overcome different kinds of challenges, and she wants to create educational content. Right now, AI enables her to do so. She had used a consistent character, GPT, to create many images of the same character, and later she had animated those to create that story. In case you are watching this, please enjoy.

10:10Sparkling waves in an ocean full of wonder lives a unique mermaid with a shimmering tail named Mia. In this enchanted ocean, every creature is unique. But sometimes, even in the most beautiful places, we can feel unsure of ourselves. Mia feels sad and frustrated about her tail. She really believes it's too shiny. Why does my tail have to be so shiny? Everyone scares at me. Mia decided to isolate herself from the others. Hey girls, did everyone see Mia today? No, I didn't see her around. Wait, is that Mia behind the coral? Why does she look so sad? I will go check to see if she is okay. Chloe, that is a great idea.

10:46Hey, Mia, are you okay? You seem to be a bit distant today. It's my tail. It's just too shiny. Mia believes that she needs to resemble others to be considered beautiful. I just want to be like everyone else. Oh, Mia, but your tail is what makes you special. It sparkles because it's unique, just like you. I don't know. Sometimes I just don't feel like I belong. Mia, if you look around, you'll see that no two mermaids are the same. This is awesome, again, to tell a little bit of what we're watching. You can listen to the cool voices if you're just listening to this. But what we're seeing is, again, it's a Pixar level kind of animation of mermaids underwater with the shimmering lights through the waves and the fish swimming around and the coral all around them.

11:26and they're speaking and their lips are moving properly as far as syncing to what they're saying. It looks like a real video. And again, the beauty of the work by Thule is that she is a psychiatrist. She's doing this with some very serious logic behind this on exactly what they're saying and why they're saying it. And it's just, again, a way for her to help her connect with children. And so this is a part of her line of work that allows her now, together with the technique that we're going to learn now, how to create these kind of videos, That is absolutely amazing to me. By the way, we're going to have Thule as a guest of the show early next year.

12:01So you will be able to see more of that aspect of it later on. Yes, this is an amazing project that she has done. And I just wanted to mention that she doesn't have a design background. So this is super empowering how you can tell your stories and create those kind of characters to deliver it in a more impactful way. I do have a little short demo of how you can create the characters with Consistent Character GPT, and I'm happy to walk you through the process in case you are listening to this podcast. When you will navigate to Consistent Character GPT, you can click the button and the chat will ask you if you want to create a male or female character.

12:42So you will just answer in the chat male or female. In my case, I have chosen to pick up the male character. So the next question would be, what would be the name of this character? And I have chosen the name Tom. And then the consistent character GPT, just with this information, will ask me to provide more details. What is the age, country, hair, outfit, or any other details that I would like to have in my image of my character? So I'm giving a little bit more information. my character is Tom he is a boy he's 10 years old and he has very messy brown hair he has blue eyes and I'm describing the outfit that he is wearing in just one minute or less the consistent character GPT will create an image for me according to this description which is super cool because I didn't have to go through any difficult process and I am able to already have my first image of the character.

13:44The next chat GPT will ask me do I want to have more expressions or poses for this character and in my case I'm choosing that I would like to create more expressions so I'm creating a happy expression of the tom and next I'm creating the sad expression and next I will create very excited expression and so much so forward whatever my story has to convey I can create it next. The last image that I'm creating here is Tom being sleepy just to showcase the capabilities of this tool. So I highly recommend and encourage everyone who wants to create a content for their social media educational content or just to have a really fun project one evening with their kids.

14:31It's super fun. They should just go and try this tool for free. It's available in ChatGPT store. And as I mentioned, many creatives have found this ChatGPT really useful. You can navigate to YouTube and just type Consisting Character GPT, and you will find a ton of guides, tutorials, and step-by-step process described with the details, how professional creatives are doing this, or just beginners. This is awesome. I want to ask you, oh, you're going to, what you're about to do is exactly my next question. So I will let you continue. But you know what? I'll ask the question just for the audience because we started with, okay, I can create these images with Me Journey or I can create them with whatever other tool.

15:15A lot of people now switch to other tools as well. But if you have an external tool that you're using, or it's a real image, it's an actual person that you have an image of, how can I do the same thing and then bring it into the AI universe, make changes to it and create videos or even just the images themselves in various moods and character positions? That's a great question. And the next possibility that I wanted to talk about to use your own images or even AI-generated images and create more character variations is by using MeJourney. MeJourney is one of the leaders at the market right now and it does have a learning curve but it impresses everyone with the results that you can get.

15:59To create consistent character in mid-journey what you can do is to generate the image and use this image as a reference which means you will upload this image as a part of your prompt and before you will do so you will use a command dash strep which means the character reference. And this is working amazingly with photorealistic results. You can create an experiment with the backgrounds, with the outfit, with different situations and different poses. And many creatives find it specifically useful for creating storyboards for pre-production. It had saved a lot of time. So this is a really helpful tool to use.

16:46And in case you have not experimented with this yet, I highly recommend going and using your own photo or AI generated photo and trying out this command, there's sort of image journey. So just to add to that, for those of you who don't know me journey, first of all, as, as Diana said, it's probably the best tool out there right now together with flux, but the mid journey has been around for longer. And as of about a few months ago, they have a proper user interface on their app. And so even doing this became a lot easier because after you create an image or upload an image on the right side menu, you have a button that says, use this.

17:20And you have different options of what you can use. And one of them is to use the image. And then if you literally click that button, it will do that process for you. So you don't even actually need to know the command. You can click on use the image, and then you will put it in the command line for the next generation. And then you can add whatever you want to add, and it will use it as a reference. The other thing that you can add is you can add how strong you want that reference to be. So do you want it to be to relay on that image a lot or less? And with that, with those two parameters, you can control how much it's going to look just like the original image and how much variation is going to be in that image.

17:54But it's a very powerful capability. Yes, you're right. Although I must tell you that it works amazingly for photorealistic results and a little bit less amazing for illustrations. You can create a character and use this character as a reference. And right now on the screen, you can see the images that I have generated within Midjourney and use the same character as a reference to create a side view or the shot from the behind to generate the same character in different angles. Nonetheless, in case you want to have more control over the pose, it becomes really challenging. while midjourney is creating amazing illustrations detailed high quality with the background and it can convey the story the part with the consistency is still really tough to figure out so it will take you a lot of prompting a lot of time to generate many variations and then to pick from those which ones look the most similar you don't have so much control as you would really want to have and for beginners it might be a really difficult path to go through.

19:08Right now on the screen I'm sharing step by step how you can do this in MeChurney. As a step one you are creating the character, as a step two you are adding this as a character reference and you're modifying your prompt a little bit to create a different angle view and also you can use the same image as a style reference to ensure that the style is the same. Although this is possible, but it's really challenging. Another way to create the same character in different poses from different angles, and many game studios is using this one, is prompting character sheet in your prompt while creating your character.

19:49And if you're watching this right now on your left side, you can see the results generated with me journey by using character sheet in the prompt and you can see that you really need a lot of generations to have a good result. You have the same character from different angles but something is missing there or the pose is just repetitive and you don't have so much control. When you will generate 20 different variations you will pick the one where you have the same character from different angles but you will not be able to control the details of the outfit that much or of the character itself. And especially later with the poses, you will not be able to generate something new.

20:33So just to summarize quickly and to give people who are listening what we see is when you use the concept of character sheet, it gives you several different variations of the same character. So side view, front view, 45 degree view, but you have no control on what that's going to be. So yes, it gives you multiple variations, but if you want to have them in specific poses of variations. You just have to generate the same thing 25 times. And then out of those, grab the three. And in each and every one of them, you're going to have a few of the characters, right? So in the different setups. So if you run it 25 times, you're going to have between 75 to 100 options of this character.

21:08And it's just a lot of work to get the... And then you'll have to pick the one that probably is not exactly what you wanted, but is the closest to what you wanted. And out of 100 options, you'll have three or four that will be roughly what you need. But it's just time consuming. That's right. It is time consuming and agencies are picking the closest version. Yes. What my journey is great with is that you can work with really different styles, but it's really challenging to get control. And later when you want to generate the character with specific posts, it will not be possible. What you are looking for, you can see right now on the screen on your right side, where you have the character, you have the same exactly outfit all the time from different angles, from different views.

21:50And later you will be able to generate more poses or expressions for this character. Not similar one, not after 300 times that you try, but very efficiently and very fast. So I am calling me journey lottery because of amount of times you generate and depending on the character and the outfit that you want to create, It can be really easy or really tough. I was creating one project for my client and it was so challenging. I have spent the whole day for another project I was generating the character. It was possible within one hour. So it's a lottery, a lot. You have to be lucky and you have to be lucky specifically in this particular project.

22:39I'll pause it just for one second. And my son really likes manga. And we were trying to create a manga for him that he, him together with me and Claude has written the storyline, but he had the general idea. And then we did exactly this, right? We were trying to create the images, like the manga images for the story. And it was ridiculous because it's a little ninja with a stick. And then sometimes instead of a stick, it has a sword. Sometimes his ribbon on his head is red. Sometimes he doesn't have the ribbon as a whole. Sometimes he has a hat. I'm like, what the hell? I'm using the character reference.

23:08Like you're supposed to show me the same character. And it's just, like you're saying, it works, but at X percentage of the time, but then it's not exactly the angle. And the other guy doesn't look the same. And the tower behind him doesn't look the same. And so really getting to a situation where you can consistently create what you want without spending hours of recreating stuff and picking is the holy grail. Yes, that's true. And also it's true for beginners because it's really challenging for them to create consistent character as much as for creative professionals who value their time and they need to do this at specific deadlines.

23:44So they have heavily to rely on Photoshop in those results to have more consistency or something like that. So let's talk how it is possible to get consistency. After we have seen the success of consistent character GPT, and at the same time we gathered a lot of feedback, what can be improved, we have decided to partner with the SegMind. This is the platform where we can deploy the workflow that we have developed. And with this workflow, it will be possible to generate a character sheet in less than one minute. Super easy, super fast. and right now on your screen you can see the character sheet which has the same character in full body pose as well as just the avatar and that gives a lot of possibilities to already tell the story or use those characters for some book or illustration or for presentation as it is without specific modification.

24:43So how to use this? I will probably share all the important links with the ISAR. But just to give you the roadmap, you can use the QR code, which you can see right now on the screen. You can scan it and that will open a guide. In this guide, you will have just two links. First link you will log in with and that way you will get free credits. And second link is specifically this kind of workflow where you can type the prompt and get your character created. I have a specific prompt structure that I would highly recommend in case you are creating characters and you want to create consistent characters in your future generations.

25:26It starts with image style, because this is important. Everyone works with a different one. Character type, where you describe your character in more details. Then you have age, hairstyle, outfit, emotions. And usually I do recommend using a clean background. because you can very easily create the background later and overlap them in free tools as well. So the example prompt would be Pixar style, French girl, 10 years old, curly brown hair, simple red dress, happy smile, clear background. And I would highly recommend everyone who wants to create consistent characters to use very simple kind of outfits because AI can hallucinate and you will have more challenges along the way if you pick something super specific, very detailed and overcomplicated.

26:16I do have a short demo video how you can create this. Here I'm showing the SACMind and you can just upload your prompt following the prompt structure which we just discussed. And in less than one minute, the model will generate the character for you. Are there any questions, Cesar? Well, it's - Yeah, so first of all, it's a tool that you guys created, right? That is now in beta and it's going to be released sometime soon to the world? This is the workflow which we have deployed in partnership with the SegMind. It's already available. It's not the app yet. The app has some extra capabilities. Got it.

26:56Okay, so this is available. Anybody can use it. We'll put the link in the show notes. So if you guys want to try it out, just open your phone right now or wherever it is that you're listening to the podcast. If it's on your screen and then just click the link to this and you'll be able to create these consistent characters very, very quickly. And by the way, as we're looking at this now, we already have the girl with her address and the curly hair showing up. And to tell you what it creates, four images of the girl from front, side, diagonal and back. And then it creates a similar thing just of her kind of like headshot, like just the avatar of the same girl.

27:28And she looks exactly the same and the dress looks the same. And she has the same kind of pose in all images and she has the same shoes in all images, even if we didn't prompt that. And so it's amazing how good this is compared to, if I'll use Diana's words, the lottery that you have to play X number of times. Again, because it's the lottery, it might be 20 times, it might be 200 until you get what you need. Yes, and you definitely cannot just do it in less than one minute in my journey with this kind of results. Quick question about the costs. You said there are going to be a few free credits or tokens.