From Boring to Viral: How Businesses Can Use ChatGPT's Images to Stand Out

0:00People scroll the height of the Statue of Liberty every single day. It's not surprising that you only have one to two seconds to earn their attention. Welcome to the Talking AI Podcast, where we talk AI with both experts in the field and early adopters. I'm your host, Matt Page, and we're here to demystify AI for you so you can get some value from it. Let's talk some AI. There's one problem facing just about everyone using AI today, and it's what I call the blank canvas problem. And what is the blank canvas problem? It's essentially if you can do almost anything with AI and by AI, you can replace it with ChatGBT, Claude, MidJourney, Cursor, whatever, you name it, what do you actually do?

0:43So when the possibilities are endless, knowing where to actually start is often the hardest part. And that's why I'm excited to have Dan Skalka, entrepreneur, creative strategist, and the founder of Digital Lux and It's Better with AI on today's episode. He's built one of the most actionable guides I've seen on solving this exact problem specific to chat GBT's image generation tool. So going from just like a cool thing, Hey, I can generate images to actually having it provide real value in a business context for ads, you name it, all kinds of things. So in the episode, we're actually going to walk through his framework, do some live demos showing off how he thinks about prompting, how you go from boring to viral instead of in the image kind of context setting.

1:27and more importantly, this is an amazing example of how you put structure and process around how you use AI and you can apply that to any use case. Welcome to the show, Dan. Hey, it's good to see you again. Awesome. Yeah, great to have you on. This is going to be a fun one. For those that are on Apple, Spotify, when we get to the actual demo stuff, we'll let you know, but you may want to check it out on YouTube to get the full experience, but we'll be very descriptive as well. But before Before we jump into the demo and all that kind of fun stuff, I want to get your take, like this blank canvas problem.

1:59What has been your experience here? We had this like seminal chat GBT moments. Have you experienced this? And then how have you addressed it with all the craziest, crazy tools out there that you can do any number of things? Like, how do you handle that? Yeah, I think that's actually a really great question to kick things off with, because I think a lot of people jump into ChatGPT and it almost can be overwhelming. We have this, I call it like a magic box so that we can ask it anything, but if you can ask it anything, where do you even start? And so I think we're so conditioned as users of the internet and users of computers to treat ChatGPT in the same way that we would treat, let's say Google or any search engine where we would just go to it and we would ask it a question and then that would be it.

2:47However, with ChatGPT, I think it's better to use it almost like a friend or a coworker or like you said, a creative strategist. Try to give it a role to assume. And then from there, have a conversation with it. Don't be afraid to just ask it follow up. Don't be afraid to ask it follow up questions or really get into the weeds of what it is that you're looking for. That is the best, absolute best way that you can really be using AI in general is to really iterate, take an idea in your head and then iterate on it, right? Just try to use ChatGPT, this is the way that I use it at least, as like your second brain.

3:27Yeah, that's such a good content. You hit the nail on the head. So many people are still using it as Google, or I think like the most common use case is, rewrite this email for me to make it sound better for my boss. Right, right. So many people are using it for email, but an even better way to use it is rewrite this email and give me three different intros or rewrite it in five different styles. So that way, ChatGPT is doing the hard work. And then you as the human get to come in and say, okay, that's the style that I want. Or maybe I'll take that style and I'll combine it with this style. And we're going to get into some of this too, because like you hit on something, it's like this meta element, flip the script, have, I'll call it, When we say chat GBT, this could be anything, Claude, whatever.

4:11But have it ask you questions. 100%. One of the best ways. Ask it to clarify things. Mm-hmm. Exactly. And that's where I think context is king. It's one of the most important things. And context can be anything. You look at a reasoning model. And the best example of this, I think, is like DeepSeek because you can actually see its internal monologue thinking through. But that, like, it talking to itself is just adding additional context to better solve the problem. In a sense. Yeah, 100%. Quick break in the pod. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've been thinking about how to actually use AI inside your business.

4:46And that's exactly why we built the AI Opportunity Finder. It's a free tool that helps you uncover high impact, tailored AI use cases based on your business, your goals, your pain points, and your industry. No fluff, no generic use cases, just real ideas that fit your business and the ranked by ROI potential. It takes about three minutes to run. And it's like having your own personal AI strategist for free. If you want to try it for free, check out the link in the show notes or go to hatchworks.com backslash AI dash opportunity dash finder. And that is really one of the most powerful. I love that you brought that up asking chat GPT to ask you questions because that is just going to give it more context to be able to give you a better answer.

5:29And half the time it asks really more than half the time, Really good questions, but it's like these unknown unknowns I hadn't even thought about. And it's, oh, that's a really good point. The other piece too is this like new starting line that's been drawn. Because I think if you were to like survey majority of the people out there, they will have the feeling that I'm behind right now and everything AI. So it's like, why even bother? But the reality is you've never been closer to a starting line in your life, probably since the internet came out. So that's the other thing. It's been reset. Yeah, 100%.

6:06I tell people that all the time is you are not late to the party. In fact, you are early. Even if you were, yeah, I can't tell you how many people that I talk to that say, oh, what is this ChatGPT thing? I've been hearing about this ChatGPT thing. Should I start using it? I'm like, yes. Yeah, because the quicker that you start to just play around with them. And I love this idea of play, of making it fun rather than everything having to be like, oh, we're using this to do this or make. I want it to be something that is fun for people because that's how you're really going to. You're going to kind of loosen up and you're going to be able to use it in a lot of different types of use cases.

6:47Yeah, you're early if you're using ChatGPT right now. That's the thing too. It's the element of play. Cause I think a lot of people, they look online and they're like, they see all this stuff. It's use this master prompt I have or use this exact thing. It's like, how the heck did they even get to that? Right. That's where they start. You just play around and you start to build up patterns and you're like, you start to do them more frequently and then you're like, oh, I'll just apply this on an ongoing basis. That's the best way. A hundred percent. To get started there. Yeah. So I got a question for you.

7:17So I was chatting with my mom the other day. She's finally asked me, she's like, should I download this chat GBT thing? And I'm like you, I do a lot of videos on AI. Yeah. She sees them. And she's finally made the determination that, okay, I'm going to download this thing. That's great. And then she asked me, so what even is it? And I like pause for a second. How do I describe this? So how would you describe it? Pretend you're talking to my mom. What would you, how would you describe it to her in layman's terms? I like to use. What it is. I like to go as broad as possible and tell people it is essentially think of it as whatever you want to in whatever context that you need to use it.

7:57So if you want to talk to it about your day to get clarification on some things that maybe went wrong, use it as your best friend. If you want to start a business, use it as your co-founder. If you're having technical support issues, use it as an IT specialist. is a magic box. It really is. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like you could flip the question on the person and say, what do you want it to be? Yeah, exactly. And realistically, it probably could in some form or fashion do that. I led with the, my garage door is broken the other day and it helped me fix it. It's like random stuff that you can do with it, right?

8:33A hundred percent. Yeah. Okay. So let's dive into more specifically the image generation side, because you have this awesome guide that kind of steps through how do you actually get to a good problem good output maybe share your screen here and start stepping through some of the process it's a really great example of how you start to break things down into a repeatable fashion we get a little bit of a and this is built with gamma too by the way yeah this is like ai tool is this your go-to yeah for For presentations, honestly, nothing beats Gamma because you can, again, because it's AI, you can use it in so many different ways.

9:17And going back to what we kicked off the podcast with, you're not staring, if you don't want to, you're not staring at a blank slate. You can go into Gamma. I know we're going off in a separate direction here, but I love Gamma. I'm not being paid by Gamma to say this. I wish they would. Maybe you should. I know. Yeah. I wish they would. But, you know, you can go in and you can say, hey, make me slides on this and it'll just get the ball rolling so that even if it's not perfect. And that's the thing with AI is even if it doesn't give you something that is perfect, you at least are not staring at a blank slate, a blank screen, a blank page, whatever it is, however you're using it.

9:55It can spur other ideas. And that's something that we're going to be going into today. So that's real quick. That's another, I think, mindset that needs to change too. There's too many people that are like, it's not perfect. This thing's garbage. And they just stop using it. But if it gets you 80 % of the way there, the bar should be, where can a human get it to? If I'm working with a human that's drafting something and we're going back and forth, it's the same thing. So people need to reframe like their, I guess their standards and expectations in a sense. Right. So they don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

10:27A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Really look at it as a partner and someone you can rely on to keep going back to, to follow up with things and iterate on. I love that word because that's really what it's best at. So yeah, we kind of did an intro on me. I love ChatGPT's image generator. When it came out, I was enthralled. I was just amazed at the fact that you could, one, create images based on literally anything that was in your imagination, but two, the fact that you could take a reference image, right? So I'm using my profile picture or my picture of my face to show you what is possible.

11:08And some of these have gone viral before. Like we had the action figure, everyone was turning themselves into action figures or plushy dolls for a little while. And that was fun. But it's here that you see the capabilities of what these image generator can do. And these are just some of my favorites. and just to go back real quick yeah for those listening like we have like we have the sesame street style we got the what do you call them the beanie babies the one on the top right though is looking at this before and i was like what does that remind me of does it look like you remember the movie the brave little it's based on disney okay yeah so that's i was like oh my god that's that character yeah which would be from our childhood exactly and also by the way we'll hit it at the end, but another great way to get the juices flowing.

11:55Dan has an awesome Instagram and TikTok. I think those are your primary ones. Yeah. Yeah. Search it's better with AI. Go give him a follow there. And he does a lot of like detailed how to's on this stuff as well. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I try to post about all this kind of stuff on Instagram and TikTok. So feel free to give me a follow if you find all this stuff interesting. So one of the reasons I put this together specifically for any type of business owner, or any type of business, whether you're a small, mid, or large business, is because in today's day and age, if you don't stand out, you don't exist.

12:28So people scroll. And one of the best things about doing this presentation, why I wanted to put this deck together is because it allowed me to play around with all of the images, if you're watching this on YouTube, are from ChatGPT's image generator, right? The Statue of Liberty with the phone and the Starbucks is my favorite. Yeah, yeah. So people scroll the height of the Statue of Liberty every single day. So I, which is, is that true? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's pretty incredible. So it really, it's not surprising that you only have one to two seconds to earn their attention. Again, this is backed by research and it's, that number is not going up anytime soon.

13:06If anything, it's going down with the amount of people that are now coming into creating content, creating businesses and AI generated content too. So you really have to be mindful of standing out when it comes to generating visuals for your brand. And now we have Chat ChibiT, which as I said before, is essentially this magic chatbot, this magician that can take any idea, no matter what it is, and turn it into a scroll stopping visual. And you don't need design skills. You don't need to be an expert. I think that's where a lot of people get hung up. They think, oh, I don't even know where to start.

13:43And if you watch this, I guarantee you will know how to go from A to Z when it comes to all this. So quick example, we got two images on screen here. One, we got a stock image of doctors all looking like doctors. And then on the left side, we got a Lego set of a doctor's family office. If you were scrolling on social media, which one would stand out to you? I think it's pretty obvious. It's clearly the Lego. Yeah. And that is the beauty behind ChatGPT's image generator. It allows you to take these boring stock or stock photos or boring photos that were shot on your iPhone and turn them into wild or luxurious or weird or crazy images that will capture people's attention.

14:35Yeah, and the one on the right is like your traditional stock image that you can just spot from a mile away. I'm curious, did you generate that one? So that's one of the ones I did not. I wanted to make sure I picked that from a stock image website just to... Yeah, I was curious what the prompts would have been for that. It's create a generic stock imagery of doctors. On the huddle. Yeah, exactly. As I've been alluding to, ChatGPT's image generator essentially gives you unlimited creative power. I'm going to go through three main examples of how businesses of all sizes can use it. The first one being organic social media, right?

15:16So I have a, on the screen right now, a picture of a cold brew or an iced coffee put into ChatGPT, uploaded to ChatGPT. And I said, create image, turn our iced coffee into a superhero flying through the city, Cape and all with the caption, fuel your mornings. So even if you were a small business, if you're a one owner business, you run a coffee shop and you're trying to do everything. run the business, run social media, you can take, you can snap a photo on your iPhone, whatever phone you have, upload it to ChatGPT, and literally in one line, get an image that looks like it was done by a professional designer.

16:01And this is like tip of the iceberg of what you can actually do, right? I'm trying to essentially get the gears turning in people's heads. You can make, you can add your logo. You could say, or put your tagline instead of fuel your mornings, you can make it Dan's coffee company or Matt's coffee company. You know what I mean? So a lot of, that's a great unlock too, is it doesn't just have to be text to image. You can add a context with other images. Yeah. A hundred percent. That's another big unlock when you're doing this image generation, any kind of context you can provide, just going to make it even better.

16:36100%. And we're going to actually go into ways that you can utilize other reference images to really make that image stand out and really make that image fit whatever your brand or style or whatever vibe that you're actually going for. Another use case for this, specifically when it comes to businesses, is email marketing. I know this firsthand because I've done in my digital marketing agency, I've done a lot of email marketing. And one of the hardest parts of email marketing, or I should say one of the most tedious parts of email marketing, is actually the design. So actually taking whatever the idea is for the sale or whatever product we're trying to showcase, and then turning that into a design for an email marketing campaign.

17:24With ChatGPT, specifically their email, their image generator, you can create these designs in seconds. So I'm on screen right now. I'm using Yeti's coffee travel mug as an example I've uploaded to ChatGPT. And I said, create a minimalist promotional image with a clean white background. And on the left side, show a traditional version of a product. add a visual effects to make it look outdated, burned, or crumbling to represent being replaced. So essentially what we're trying to go for is have a before and after or a comparison ad or comparison email marketing campaign where we're taking the new product, the Yeti, and we're comparing it to this old outdated coffee, paper coffee cup, and we're making it look, we want to make it look dilapidated, right?

18:09And then on the right side display, the modern product uploaded and placed cleanly and centered with shadows for realism. And above both items, you can include a bold title that says, Out with the Old, In with the New. And then below it, include a Shop Now button under the products. And as you can see on the right side of the screen, we now have exactly that. It did an incredible job in actually building what we were looking for. Like the shading in the coffee grounds around the old cup. Yeah, it is. The level of detail is absolutely insane. Yeah. And also such a good prompt you have there too that can be applied to essentially any product because you have this base idea before and after.

18:54Right. The old versus the new. Like you could literally steal that prompt, replace it with whatever your product is. Exactly. And can create something like that. So I'll let you in on a little secret. That's exactly what I did. Yeah. I found another before and after ad and I'm actually going to go into this a little later on, but I did exactly that. I took an ad and I brought it to ChatGPT and I said, create an image generation prompt based on this ad. I like this ad. I want to create one, but make it for my style. And so what it did was it wrote the prompt that we're looking at on screen right now, create a minimalist promotional image with a clean background.

19:33And that's a secret hack. You don't need - Such a meta hack. Exactly. And again, going back to how we kicked it off, you do not need to stare at a blank screen. Whatever, wherever you're stuck in the process, I want you to think, how could ChatGPT help me get unstuck? That is - I'll give you another trick for the audience too. A lot of times I struggle with this. You're at the blank canvas. You don't know where to start. And there's something about physically typing something in the prop that even feels like there's an additional barrier. get your phone out or even on your desktop turn it in turn on the dictation mode right and just start talking because that that for whatever reason is like a more kind of natural free-flowing form so that's another hack you can do if you really don't know where to start just start like talking into the app or your desktop app and whatnot yeah no that is great i love chat gpt's voice mode specifically their advanced voice mode which is available on the plus plan something that I do.

20:33Sometimes when I'm not listening to music or podcasts in my car, I will turn on advanced voice mode. If I'm trying to work through a problem, and I'll just have a conversation with it. And then I will know that when I get home, I now have a message with our conversation that I can refer back to. And it has been wonderful because you're not locked into typing on your phone or anything. You don't have to be in front of a computer. You can just have a natural conversation. And sometimes that's when the best ideas come out of your head. Yeah, I know people that literally they do that in their community.

21:10They talk to ChatGBT. I've done it a few times too. And it's fun to see where you end up. Yeah, it really is. Sometimes. It's great. So the next kind of use case here is the one that I think most businesses will gravitate towards, and that is advertisements, specifically like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, and things like that, because those really the bottleneck for Facebook ads is generating, or has been, I should say, in the past is generating visuals, right? So generating nice visuals like the ones that we see on screen right now. But with ChatGPT, you might hear my dog barking in the background.

21:50No, good. It's a fake bark. We'll take it out with AI on the back. Perfect, perfect. But yeah, so as you can see, I essentially did what we talked about before I took an ad that I saw online and I thought would match the style that I was looking for. Then I took my product photo and I simply said, this is a very simple prompt. I said, create image, create a one by one square Facebook ad using my candle and make it look like the attached Yankee candle ad. Make the title introducing our new hotel lobby candle and add a shop now button at the bottom. And to be honest, this is the one that I'm like most, I guess not necessarily proud of, but I'm really blown away at the fact that it was able to take everything, the vibe.

22:35And if you're watching this, you can see, but if you're not, it really captured the essence of the reference image that it gave me with the image that it generated. And it did everything to a T. I mean, it is quite amazing. It looks like a professional photo shoot, which is just crazy. And the big unlock with the latest chat gpt image generation model compared to like dolly 3 is the text it has gotten so good yeah at text and i believe too i can't remember if it's if i'm thinking mid-journey but i think chat gpt has this too but you can actually go in and lasso or pick a certain area and say i want to tweak just this or it could be like just the copy or something yeah so you can get it to the fine tuning elements.

23:17Yeah, exactly. So if you get back an image and it isn't necessarily pixel perfect, that is one of the ways that you can get it to make very specific changes. So if you needed to change just one piece of text or update one little thing, you can lasso, click on the image. There's a little paintbrush icon, and then you can essentially just paint over what you want changed and just let it know. Just tell it, hey, get rid of this, change this. It isn't perfect. It isn't like I tell people this all the time. It's like ChatGPT, it's almost like when the iPhone came out. It is amazing. And we're on like iPhone 2 or 3 in terms of ChatGPT right now, which is it's amazing, but it's not 100 % perfect.

24:05And I'm going to get into a little later on ways that you can fix little things. If there's ever any issues, ways that you can fix it. And that's another mental model too, I think, is a lot of people see it today. They're like, oh, I can't do this. And they write it off. That's not the way to think about it. It's like the whole Wayne Gretzky's quote, you got to skate to where the puck is going. You just need to make the assumption it's just going to continue to get better because it is. So that's the frame you almost need to work within. Like the Veo Google model. I saw today that Will Smith is finally able to eat spaghetti and it doesn't look crazy.

24:41So people a year ago, two years ago, were like, oh, this is garbage. It'll never amount to anything. And now it's like that. Plus you can add audio to the video, which is crazy. Yeah. People are doing the past few days. I, yeah, I don't think like most people realize how fast AI is evolving, not necessarily on a month by month basis. sometimes even on a day-by-day basis where something incredible will happen on day one, on a Monday, and then on a Tuesday, something even more incredible will happen. So I tell exactly what you just said. I tell people that all the time is this is the worst it'll ever be.

25:24Just think about that. What we're talking about right now will be the worst it ever is. And guess what? It's pretty amazing right now. Yeah. We had Michael Liu who did the whole vibe coded the free docuset placement on the podcast. And that's exactly what he said. This is the worst it's ever gonna be. Just always have that in mind. A hundred percent. So now I think it would be really fun if we went through an actual step-by-step kind of tutorial so people could see the thought process that goes into going from that blank slate all the way to actually creating a beautiful looking, in this example, a beautiful looking ad, right?

26:05So let's take the most boring or one of the most boring products that everyone has, a toothbrush. So we're looking, if you're just watching this, we're looking on screen. It's just a blank, but it's just a photo of a toothbrush just laying. This is the toothbrush you use to clean a toilet. Exactly. Not a toilet brush, but like this is the one you get at the dentist that you don't use. Yeah, exactly. It's plastic. It's being like the grout cleaner. Right. Yeah, exactly. It's boring. It's not like an electric, cool looking like Oral-B or anything like that. Can we make it cool? Exactly. So how are we going to make this cool?

26:41And really what I said before is where we like to start this off is simply asking ChatGPT. And even if you don't know what to ask ChatGPT, you can even go a step, take a step back and say, upload the product photo and say, what would I need to ask you to get to make this look like a cool photo or make this look like an interesting ad and then work your way there. But for this example, the prompt or the way that I kicked things off by asking ChatGPT was act like a world-class creative director. Always try to give it a role to assume so that way it isn't taking a shotgun approach and trying to go as broad as possible.