As I sat down last week to select a featured image for our most recent blogpost – 15 Awards to Make Your Startup Stand Out in 2024 – Josh pinged me on Slack with a reminder:
With all the excitement about Midjourney and the like, I thought generating a usable image with iStock would be a snap. Better still: Getty’s model learns from their own images. That means it reduces concerns about creating content with copyrighted material.
So how’d it go? You be the judge.
For a preview of Getty’s AI Image Generator, read on…
Strategy #1: A Literal Description
Prompt: Feature image for a blog post about 15 awards that can make startups stand out in 2024
Curious. The computer appears unusable. The pendants, incongruent. The text, surprisingly, Cyrillic (I think).
I went back to the digital drawing board and asked the AI to give it another go…
Prompt: Photorealistic picture of a startup leader receiving an award on a conference stage
This one didn’t appear particularly realistic, to my eye. A fact I ultimately appreciate, in light of the overall dystopian vibes.
It was time to try again.
In the upper right corner above the AI Generator’s text box, I saw a potential lifeline: the “prompt builder.”
I clicked, revealing…
Who, what, where, when, why, and how. Seems helpful.
Onward!
Strategy #2: Create a String via the “Prompt Builder”
Prompt: Public relations for startups, Receiving an award, Conference stage, Photorealistic
As a guiding principle, photorealism seems a miss. Better, I figure, to give the prompt builder another go and this time direct it toward a focus on quality…
Prompt: Photograph of business leaders receiving an awards plaque, on a stage, professional, high quality
Many hands. A surprising number of hands. Multiple, it appears, extending from a single wrist. No plaque. No stage.
Quality: debatable.
Two pocket squares adorning a single jacket.
Is that a house on that belt buckle?
Strategy #3: Keep It Simple, Silly
Prompt: A colorful geometric rendering of first-place award ribbons and trophies
It was worth a try.
Strategy #4: Enter Only the Blog Title
Prompt: 15 Awards to Make Your Startup Stand Out in 2024
🤔
Prompt: 15 Awards to Make Your Startup Stand Out in 2024 (exclude text):
🧐
Prompt: 15 Questions Every Reporter Will Ask About Your Startup
😭
Strategy #5: Use ChatGPT
Like knows like, as they say. So I turned to AI for reinforcements. What could it hurt?
The first prompt ChatGPT generated for me exceeded the character limit. So I halved it. Still too long.
I further reduced the prompt to under 240 characters…
Prompt: High-resolution, photorealistic image, professional setting, a person confidently writing engaging content about numbers on a sleek laptop, creative atmosphere, subtle mathematical elements seamlessly integrated into the surroundings
Is that an eye in the middle of the left shoe?
I tried again…
Prompt: Generate a crisp image for a blog titled “Concrete Ways to Revise for Clarity.” Showcase individuals revising with pens and paper in an organized workspace. Convey professionalism and clarity in the revision process for a B2B PR and marketing firm's post
Like a plant potted aloft above a tri-armed, noseless executive, I was out of my element. But what if I mined text in a blog post for representative images, rather than literal descriptors? We believe in the power of concrete, specific writing, after all.
So it goes…
Strategy #6: Use a Simple Image Described in the Text
Prompt: A coffee cup full of legumes
The cup is, notably, not full. And coffee beans are not legumes.
Strategy #7: Use a Complex Image Described in the Text
I figured more specificity might help. Was I right? You decide…
Prompt: A multi-panel image that includes cream writhing through the coffee, an editor working as hard as an ox, friends drinking green tea by the bucketful, and a man buying old tires
Maybe, just maybe, my prompts were too emotionally restrained. Copy that converts, after all, elicits desire – doesn’t it?
Strategy #8: Desire
Prompt: An attention-grabbing featured image, in a surreal style, evoking the difficulty of mathematics, featuring a successful and imaginative writer
Evocative! In a stock image kind of sense, anyway. I wondered whether I could refine it just a touch to be more specifically aligned with a particular blog...
Prompt: An attention-grabbing featured image, in a surreal style, for a blog post titled, "How to Write About Numbers When You Hate Math"
And how.