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…
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…
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!
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…
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?
It was worth a try.
🤔
🧐
😭
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…
Is that an eye in the middle of the left shoe?
I tried again…
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…
The cup is, notably, not full. And coffee beans are not legumes.
I figured more specificity might help. Was I right? You decide…
Maybe, just maybe, my prompts were too emotionally restrained. Copy that converts, after all, elicits desire – doesn’t it?
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...
And how.