AI and the New Age of Artistic Creation

31:47It's just, I find that it's so stylized, what it does is it kind of adds like a little bit of an artistic element to your images. So obviously if you don't want to, if you want, if you're looking for something a little bit more like everyday picture. I don't know if I would add as much. It really depends on what your use case is and what you're trying to accomplish. But here I do really like stylized 300. It's just a preference. Everybody has a preference, whatever you want to do. What's the scale on the stylized from, is it zero to some number of a thousand or something? Yeah, zero to a thousand.

32:21So, and even with chaos, chaos is zero to 100 so that's another thing that you kind of need to study is to understand like what these parameter values are and what you know the minimum and the maximum are it's it's because it's different for everything so yeah this gets back to like there's no there's no perfect problems i think what's great here is you're detailing a structure to approach it with and even the order within the structure I didn't realize was as important, but then start playing around with it. I think that's where you start to fine tune with your own personal preferences in a sense, right?

32:59Yeah. I think you have, I mean, you have to play. That's the only way that you're going to learn in this tool. I think, you know, for me, like my, my little slogan is, you know, AI should be fun. It shouldn't be so serious. You really can't take yourself too seriously. I think Like you need to be in here and figuring out what works best for you because there is no right or wrong, honestly. And, you know, and I don't think there's any expert per se because you are the expert for your own exploration. Yeah. So I think that's really important to kind of highlight here. And obviously things are evolving every day, like mid-jury changes every week or every month.

33:39So it's just relearning and repracticing and practice, practice, practice. I think too, like a lot of people that I've talked to feel like they're already too far behind. But if you look in the step back, the grand scheme of things, like you've never been closer to a starting line of a major disruption than you are right now. So that's, I think that's a big mindset shift to like you even mentioned it, like you said, I wish I would have started earlier. And there's people now that probably feel even more so that way. But it's, we're still so early, I think, in this journey to where don't let that be the thing that holds you back for the audience and the people listening.

34:18If this is new to you and you're like, oh my God, she's so good at this. There's no way I'm going to catch up. Don't let that stop you. Get into the tools, start playing around with them. And that's not just mid-journey. I mean, that's any generative AI tool that seems like there's, you know, a hundred coming out every single day. Yeah. I still feel like I haven't scratched the surface, to be honest. I love MidJourney for so many reasons, but I think if your headspace is in it to learn and develop and come up with processes that you never thought you could ever do and finding solutions to things by utilizing AI, that's the goal.

34:57It doesn't matter when you start or where you started a year ago, you started two years ago, whatever it may be. like things are like you said always evolving and I think that you know any any good time is a good time yeah and you don't have to be creative either I don't think you necessarily have to be creative I think you just have to be really good like a really good communicator that's you know and I think you can and I think even uh through you know developing you know my prompts through AI it's actually made me a better communicator honestly because I'm really starting to really dive in and think about, you know, what I want and why, you know, what my end use case is, where before it was kind of just, you know, pulling things together and trying to get things done.

35:42But now AI gives me more time to really be creative and pull those concepts together. And so it's, it's like almost cut that creative time in half where you're not pressured as much to get so much output because you're, you're basically like you're leveling the playing field a little bit. Oh yeah. Okay. Back to the fun part. Yeah. So basically let's keep it going. So, okay. So now I, so there are, so if you go in, there's actually like a little slider bar. So people who are new to mid journey could definitely like take advantage of the slider bar. I didn't go through that at first because I wanted to show you the actual prompt structure, but here, if I click on the little slider bar, it gives me an image size option.

36:28It gives me a model option. It gives me a version option, aesthetics. So aesthetics being stylization, weirdness, variety. I did not touch on weirdness yet, but weirdness is a thing in mid journey. So if you want something, it is fun. Um, but I can go back to that, but basically, and then you go into, you know, more options, which is, you know, your speed and your, your mode that you're in, whether it's stealth or you're on a different plan. But basically, so currently I'm just kind of showing you this. I prefer just because I know the tool so well that I'm able to just put in what my favorite parameters are.

37:09But this kind of brings up like a little bit more of a parameter guideline for you. And you can kind of use some sliders to get you there a little bit faster. Like low code versus actually doing the coding, I guess, for engineers on the listening today. Exactly. Yep. Yep. Great, great parallel. So, all right. So what I'm going to do is I, so now we have our prompt, I'm going to hit enter and now we are going to process this generation. So luckily I'm in fast mode and this won't go too slow. Basically. So now it's completing the process. So right now we're at. You mentioned the fast mode. So there's different, is this based on your plan, how much you're paying, or is it how often you use the tool?

37:58How do they define that? Yeah. So they define it by your plan. So basically you get a certain amount of hours in what's called fast mode to utilize. So depending on your plan, it could be like, you know, 15, it can 15 hours, it could be 30 hours. It depends on like what your choice in how much you use the tool is sort of like what you want to pick. Relax mode actually, so relax mode is the other option, which is pretty fast. To be honest, sometimes I have blown through my fast hours just because, you know, I was totally down some crazy rabbit hole. And, you know, my fast hours were just generating, generating, generating, and then I go back and do another project.

38:39And you just, the way that I prompt, I think I probably burned through so many so fast and I can show you why that is in a second. So, but, but relax mode is pretty fast and you know, it's, it's, it's obviously another option. It just doesn't get you the final result as quick as fast as. So that's the difference. Okay. So we have our four generation outputs. So you can kind of see here, you know, you have, so I can click on each one, And like here, you know, this is pretty true to what we asked for. The detail is crazy. That's obviously due to the camera and obviously the lens that I chose. So you're really getting like these glossy, you know, smooth effects, like a lot of like, I didn't even put lighting in here because I was kind of, you know, leaning towards more of like the lens and the camera doing that for me, essentially, which lighting is a whole other piece of this that I think a lot of people sort of overlook in mid-journey.

39:37lighting is like a really good really important feature in terms of getting you know the look that you want in certain images like if you want a backlight or you want you know some light painting or you want to do a colored light like there's just so many things you can do with lighting to give you like this mood of your image but again like even this one for example I didn't put in any sort of lighting but it's giving me this crazy neon glow throughout the body which is amazing i mean that's not something i asked for but through the stylized tool that's probably where that's coming from that's what i've noticed parameter i'm sorry parameter yeah yeah when when i'm playing around with mid-journey the output may be something i hadn't initially intended but that'll trigger other ideas which it just gets back to the i think it's the speed of being able to play around with the tool is critical.

40:30Like if you try to do this without these tools, I mean, especially the photorealistic, it's a whole different process in terms of the creativity element, but it like triggers other ideas. That's the neat thing I've noticed playing around with it, which will then to your point, send you down these rabbit holes. You like, you wonder how you got to where you started. I mean, the tool is being trained on so many different images that are being generated. right so i think a lot of the times if people are generating something really common i see this actually a lot on instagram i post on instagram a lot and i do see that sometimes trends start forming and you're like how did that happen like why why are eyeballs so important today like why is that such a theme but i think what's happening is that mid-journey is then taking the style the stylization and kind of like just sneaking it in there because it's just a part of the algorithm right and when people are generating the same thing or similar things it starts to just sort of transform across the whole entire platform so those are little sneaky things that I see happen a lot um where I was like wait I did that last week probably for an hour and now somebody's got it up on their Instagram you know so it's not that anything's original per se I mean everybody's you know you know looking at each other's stuff and whether it's intuitive or not intuitive people are taking you know ideas from everywhere I mean but that's just the way that the creative world works we're always you know either are copying or whether it's intentionally or unintentionally so I think that that's kind of a weird thing about the tool is that it's doing it but it's not always something that you're expecting so okay so we have our four robots So what I can even do here is I can, so if you, so I really love this one with this neon glow.

42:25It's really cool. It has like something about it is really nice. So, you know, you can even go in here, you can vary it. So I can click on this little tab. I'll hover over the image. I'll click on this tab that says like very strong or very subtle. So I can kind of click in here and do either or, or I can even, oh, sorry. I can, let me go back. I can right click on this image. And basically now I can even go in and like change it just by right clicking. So I can even use I can use the image as my source for another image, which is basically taking the, you know, the style of the image. So then we get into these crazy other features that were just released in the past month.

43:08So there's style reference, there's character reference. Basically, what those are, are taking basically a base image and using that for other images that you're generating. So in this case, I actually did want to show you something that I kind of stumbled upon, which is basically utilizing character reference, which is essentially taking, you know, your face or someone's face and putting it, you know, within several images that you're able to basically transpose the same human across multiple images, which is incredible. that's an important piece too because that was a problem maybe not a problem but just made things like make journey tough because you if you want to keep a character consistent think of um you know a movie a show or just like some type of campaign or whatever it may be if it's not the same character it's like tough to progress the tool but that's this new feature like you mentioned when it came out a few weeks ago maybe maybe a month or so ago at this point but that's a big step into making this something you can use past it just being kind of like a fun toy to play with right yeah you can use it commercially essentially but that's a whole other a whole other ballgame like we talked about before but you know yeah it's it's amazing but I what I'm finding is that because I know the tool so well I'm starting to try to take some of these features and use them in unusual ways so this is way that I think that, you know, would be interesting to the viewers, even though it's unusual, just to kind of show you that it's not always about looking at the surface of what features are released.

44:51It's really going into the actual depth of what these tools could potentially do. So in this case, I actually just want, so I'm going to morph, basically I'm going to take like a nice, beautiful print and pattern, but I'm going to morph it onto the robot body. so that's cool she will know so she so this robot this beautiful robot that we have here will no longer be white she will be integrated with the pattern that I'm generating so okay so basically what it's going to do is that we'll so we'll type in essentially a pattern that we want so I'm going to show you basically I'm going to say watercolor floral and then I'm going to say in the style of Japanese cherry blossoms.

45:46Then I'm going to also add color. So we'll do pink and maybe, and then we'll add it to, and we'll make sure we add a background because we want to make sure that like, so the visual that I'm foreseeing is that I want this beautiful watercolor that's, you know, like on a white background. I don't really want like anything else in that. And then what you can even do is you can add a parameter to this. So you can actually add tile. which is something that you could use in real life for other things is that once you if you add dash dash tile to your prompt you can actually get uh you can get a an image that actually will repeat on all sides which is really cool um so i'm going to output this watercolor so the the prompt you just put there it knows to relate it to that second image that's not yet okay now Not yet.

46:39Okay. So you're creating the pattern and I got you. This is a step in the process. Yeah. So actually this is a two-step process. So basically now what I'm doing, so I have the robot that I really like now I need to create the pattern. So what I'm going to do is now I'm going to use this pattern as my character, which is really unusual. Wouldn't think of it. So now I'm going to take the pattern and essentially it's going to sort of blend and you'll see kind of the magic that happens. It's really cool. So now what I'm going to do, so these are, I mean, these are all really beautiful patterns. I don't know which one to choose, to be honest.

47:13If you'd like to pick one, go for it. I kind of like the first one. Let's do that one. The first one? Okay. All right. Okay. Nuance too. All right. So, yeah. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the pattern and then I'm going to basically, so I clicked on the pattern. Now I'm going to go all the way to the bottom of my screen and you're going to see a use feature. Now I'm going to click on image. And so now what that does is that brings it into my prompt window. So now I have this in my window. And so you can kind of see it up here. There's a little icon. It's showing that that's the image that I'm using for this prompt.

47:52And then I'm also going to take my robot that we chose, which is the second one. and I'm also going to select her and move her to my window. But I'm also going to take the prompt because I need a prompt to sort of work in here. So I'm also going to select use and then click on prompt. And so now here I have - And that's taking the prompt from earlier that you used to, okay. Correct, the same prompt that I used to create the first robot that we're choosing. And so now I'm going to go in here, I'm going to click. So because I want my pattern to act as my character, essentially, and that's going to cross over into what the final image looks like and how it stays consistent across the image, I'm going to click on this little icon here.

48:42It kind of looks like a little human. And it's basically the character reference or what we're calling a dash dash C ref of that image. And so I have that selected. I have my other image of my robot. And now I can even add what's called character weight to this, which is a lot of experimentation to really try to figure out what works best for what your end use is. So in this case, I'm going to add dash dash CW, which is the value that will apply to this image or to the CREF. and basically so now i go in here i try to think about okay so for character weight you can go anywhere from zero to 100 so i'm gonna pick something kind of in the middle ish so i'll probably pick like or maybe towards the end i'll do like 75 for example so now that's the character weight for the the pattern is that right yeah and that's basically just defining how strong the pattern should stay consistent or overweight into the image or how would you define the weight?

49:54Yeah, it's basically the value that you're applying to your new generation. So right, exactly. Essentially how much you want that to impact your next generation. So 75 I find is pretty good for my use case. Some people, for example, if you're using it with a human, um you maybe so if you go really really high so if you go to like 100 c or if you go to cw 100 it will take over the hair it will take over the face structure it'll take over basically everything about the previous image but if you do a low weight it's going to not take as much over it might just take like the facial features for example yeah so that's like in in in the intended use of this feature, you would kind of use it that way.

50:45So I'm going to generate. So now I clicked enter. So I have my CREF, I have my character weight value, and I have my robot, and I have my prompt from the previous robot that we're trying to essentially create, but in a different way. So this output is generating. Yeah, you have to wait the anticipation. Yeah, I know. I'm excited to see this. And what's cool too, what's neat about this actual, the alpha platform is you can use just, you know, buttons to do this, the certain things. But I was playing around with character reference. You had to actually figure out that it was to your point, dash, dash, what is it?

51:24C-R-E-F and then figure out how to put it into the prompt. And if you have like one bit of syntax off, it kind of messes it up, right? Yeah. So you actually need to include the URL. you so you do dash dash c ref then you include your url and then you get um you know and then you can and then after that you can put in your parameters and then you can also put in your your character weight or your dash dash cw and look at this so this is interesting how it so yeah so i can scroll through i can kind of show you each one so basically you know this is interpreting the print and kind of essentially putting it on the robot which i think is just so cool the fact that it's taking you know the essence of of the pattern and yeah just like morphing it onto the body of the robot it's it's wild so without even so instead of complicating a prompt and saying i want to write you know a white robot with you know flowers and like a really really long prompt now you can kind of fine-tune that and do it a little bit uh faster with, you know, say, for example, if you have an aesthetic or a color palette that you need to integrate, this is another great way of doing that.

52:38So if you want to get, you know, a color palette faster based on an image that already exists, you can kind of morph them together. I can even show you now, this is another thing that I use a lot. So for example, I'm going to pick this robot. I think she looks pretty cool. She's got these like navy details that are picked up in here, almost like a leather effect. And then I'm going to go into Remix, and I'm going to, so remix is my favorite mid-journey feature of all time. So this allows you to take your current prompt and manipulate it. You could do anything with it. So I can even go in here, I can say remix and then do strong, select strong here.

53:19And it brings back everything that I had from before. It's just now I can go in and I can even edit, like I can edit in here. I can say like, instead, maybe I want a male robot. Maybe I want, you know, extra details in the robot, but here, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to, now I can say, I don't know, a female robot. And then I can say wearing a glossy ceramic body suit, but I can add like tentacles or something crazy. So I, which I love doing.

53:55so i can add octopus tentacles um and then i can even go further and add in some token weights which is a whole other rabbit hole that you can go into which token weights are basically one to five is basically putting now an emphasis on your prompt like within your prompt structure of things that you really want to highlight. So, but I won't go there yet. And then what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to remove, I'm going to remove my pattern. I'm going to remove the previous robot because I don't need any of that anymore. I just want to see how this takes over by editing my prompt through Remix.

54:36So now I hit enter. Oh, oh, I still had CW in there. See, mistakes happen. It's totally fine. Strong. So then I'm going to do what I did there. So I have to get rid of... Did it throw back an error there? It threw back an error because I forgot to get rid of my character weight value, which is important because if there is no image that you selected as your character reference, it's going to be like, I can't do this. So now we hit enter and so now it will generate. So now it's going back. Yes, and it says creation failed and it makes you feel like you did something really wrong, but it's totally fine.

55:14it's totally part of the process i've been in my journey for how long and i still do these things does it let you know what what failed in the the prompt does it give you any kind of yeah so or does so i'm highlighting on it right now can you see that it says cannot use dash dash cw without a c rep indication basically so i didn't have any c rep indicated so now it's totally confused it's why did you do that yeah um so now it's generating did our did our octopus tentacles carry over into this prompt so they didn't yeah so it it it got it it's not as much as i would like i mean so this is where i kind of wanted to touch upon the next step in remix that what i find is that remix doesn't always register your first go around sometimes you have to rerun it which is something that mid-journey just it has actually been pretty transparent about uh so sometimes you'll have to either remix it again but like so for example it started to sort of connect some of these like tentacle-like images within this one in particular the first one you kind of get this little bit of like hairline was it even a thing when you pasted oh man see that's what it was okay but it's funny though it did register that so i don't know if that's something that you know we can yeah so here we go so let's do that again but but that is actually like a really true thing that does happen in remix where you don't get you don't always get um here let me go back and see click on this guy let's remix this guy octopus tentacles okay perfect and then i guess the answer to that is just keep trying right right?

57:01Just keep playing around with it until you get something you like. I mean, honestly, that's how like really, like when you do, when you get these happy mistakes, I think that's kind of a cool thing because then you start to, you know, you know, find new ways of using the tool and new ways to experimenting with the tool. And I think that's kind of, you know, half the battle in this, in this platform. So yeah. So now we're getting, we got some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We got some amazing stuff. So now you can kind of see just by adding, you know, just a few different words to the prompt, you're getting this output of, you know, some tentacles or you're getting like, you know, such crazy stuff, which you wouldn't even have expected from, you know, what the original output was.

57:45Yeah, so I'm just scrolling through here. And like, so you're kind of seeing it in the design a little bit more. But I could even rerun this again, and you'll probably see more of it because in Remix, when you do rerun things, it tends to actually accelerate as you go through the remix. So you're remixing for this one that's running now. Are you remixing the Remix one effectively? Correct. I'm rerunning. So basically, I go down here. I go to my four outputs that I just remixed. And now if I click on the rerun button down here, basically now it's going to rerun that again. And I think what's going to happen is that we will see a little bit more tentacles this time around, which we do.

58:30So now I can scroll through those when it's complete. So yeah, it's cool. Yeah, that one's cool. It's really cool. Yeah. And then I can even, you know, I could go much further in this, but just to show you that this is, you know, what this tool can do. And it's pretty, pretty wild. Yeah, this is neat. And there's some other things too, like in painting and stuff like that. Is that still in, I'm assuming that's an alpha where you can kind of select an area and then adjust the prompt to tweak, whether it's like the helmet or, you know, the body or something like that as well, right? yeah so uh in all transparency i think in paint in painting is not perfect at what it does right yeah i think that they have a lot of work to do on it so for me i prefer actually to take it into adobe photoshop and use gen fill um so obviously i'm using another platform but that's sort of my preference so i actually do a lot of that i so i think that goes to show you that it's really important to integrate multiple platforms into your process and not just use one tool because then you're kind of limiting yourself so I do use Adobe a lot Genfill is one of my favorite features in Photoshop like you can take things in and you can add like all sorts of crazy stuff but I think you know so for example if I click on very region in mid-journey that brings up your in-painting so for example if I wanted to change something here like I could I honestly sometimes I don't know if it's going to do it or not but if you select your little lasso tool you go in here you can kind of um you know like for example if i wanted to select this part of the helmet uh like a little circular part of the helmet i could go in here and say like uh you know i could type in octopus tentacles see if anything comes out uh so let's let's check it out so now i put octopus tentacles in the prompt window it's just varying that one piece there it's going to vary that one selection.

1:00:35I think the big point you mentioned there is starting to integrate different tools in your process. Like you may take an image and take it to something at Adobe and play, play around with it there and take it further. So it's, it's working it into your process in essence. Yeah. I mean, I find that that's the only way to, to get what I need. So I think that that's something that people don't realize is they think, oh, mid journey is going to give me everything I need immediately right I think that if people have a lot of false hope in that I think there's still a lot of um editing involved that you need to do to really like brush and clean up what you've created in mid-journey or any other you know text to image platform so I always try to preface that that you know you can't always rely on just one tool so yeah yeah like so these yeah yeah so like to your point though it didn't quite get the the tentacle nature within the part you you focused on right so it's kind of like an example of so you're kind of seeing this here yeah a little bit right you got a little coils in there like this one's like not too bad you get a little bit of like this coil situation almost like a shell or something yeah right i mean it's just random so i think the very region definitely needs some work but you know what's amazing about that that I've been able to figure out another alternative that works.

1:02:00And that is, you know, bringing it into Adobe, which, you know, not all, not everyone has that option, but, you know, it is just about the way that you're thinking about, you know, other alternatives to the one tool that is provided. Cause they all have their glitches. They all have, you know, the things that we like, the things that we don't like, um, in any platform, but it's just about integrating, uh, as many as you can to get, you know, the final result that you need. No, this has been awesome. Even like Adobe Premiere Pro I saw the other day, they've started to integrate some AI stuff. And I don't know if you saw that video, but that's where it'll be cool to see.

1:02:36Yeah. You can kind of in the video, you can say, hey, remove this from the background or add this or change this, you know, Rolex to something that's not a branded watch or it was really cool type of stuff they're doing there. but this has been awesome, Meg. Any other tips or tricks you want to show off before we wrap it up here? I mean, I could go on for another hour to be honest, but I won't, I won't do that to you. So hopefully, I mean, hopefully I think even the fact that I made a mistake at one point is, is kind of, you know, it's more leverage to say it's okay. Like this is something that, you know, is happening organically in real time.

1:03:16You know, you can always go back, you can always adjust. You can always, you know, take, you know, you know, what you know and apply it to any platform, but not to be fearful of it because you're really going to come up with, you know, such amazing, you know, works for whatever your needs are at the end of the day. Yeah. And the last thing I would end on too, is just a lot of people look at some of these new tools and like, oh, it's just a cool toy, but it really is accelerating the process depending Depending on the domain, which was interesting, whether it was fashion or in marketing or in some type of graphic design, the level you take it and where you insert it into the process will be different.

1:04:00But I think, too, it's allowing non-creatives or people without that deep expertise to start using some of this stuff, which is really interesting and cool. But Meg, where can people, what's the best spot to find you, to reach out to you if they want to get some help with Mid Journey, which Meg's awesome at that. I'm sure she would love to connect with some folks that are looking to go deeper in this area. Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. I am there quite a bit learning from some of the best, obviously. And you can find me there. DM me. I'm also on Instagram. so that's so both of those are the extension meg ball creates that's awesome well i appreciate you being on today meg and thanks for taking us through a live mid-journey session that was the first for for built right so i appreciate that no it was so much fun i mean i i wish we could do it more it was it was so cool so cool we'll have to set up a round two once once a new feature clutch.

1:05:04Sounds great. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you.

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