In the very first episode of Content Furies, Alex (the marketer) and Polly (the designer) dive into the exciting world of artificial intelligence and explore how it's shaping the landscape of content creation.
Join us as we take a closer look at two AI-powered platforms, Chat GPT and Midjourney, and their respective capabilities in generating written and visual content.
Throughout the episode, we share our own experiences and insights on working with AI-powered tools and offer tips on how to make the most of them. We also touch on the ethical implications of AI in content creation and how businesses can ensure that their use of AI aligns with their values and goals.
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Artificial Intellingence for Content Industry: Is It Worth the Hype?
A: Chat GPT itself is something cool and new, and I will describe my experience with it. But overall, in terms of SEO optimization and SEO strategies, we are very far from the point when an AI tool can create the text on its own. Competing corporations make tools that detect artificial intelligence text. Then copywriters or "artificial intelligence" managers have to rewrite the text, and I guess there will be no point in creating such content from a closer perspective.
I also have some news to discuss with you, Polly and this news is about product design which is an exciting topic to discuss regarding AI implementation. So the Apple car was generated by artificial intelligence. I was blown up by that picture. How is the AI utilizing the idea of a car, what is this car for, and what can you say about it? This picture was generated by John Mauriello, a designer (not from the initial Apple Corporation), who used the artificial intelligence named Dall-E 2 to create this conceptual car. What do you see here?
P: I can definitely see the resemblance to some more popular sports cars here, so it's not something wholly unique as in the shapes and then, as I read here on this article, that when generating this text cue for the AI, he mentioned that it has to be inspired by a Macbook and a Magic Mouse and I don't know if I can see either of them here. Maybe a little bit of Magic Mouse shape and colours.
I have had a very controversial experience with AI tools: sometimes it's cool, sometimes it's entirely a topic, and I have personally not generated anything that didn't need any retouching. It's more of an idea but never a finished product.
P: So it doesn't have any information about anything over the year 2021.
A: The thing is, I've been scrolling TikTok lately, and the TikTok influencers, who know everything, so they told me that you can ask chat GPT this one script that can enhance the writing. So I asked, "Pretend that you're an expert in the field of content marketing," and I even pushed it a little bit more and I asked it, "Pretend that you're an expert in the field of content marketing and you are bragging in front of your colleagues with out of the box thoughts."
Guess what? It gave me something ridiculous: "I am not just a content marketer; I'm a Content disrupter. I take the industry to new heights and deliver results that no one else can" - that was the text.
I wouldn't say that it's shaping the industry somehow. There is nothing new to acknowledge so far. So that's why, I guess, we are not at that point in history when we can just replace copywriters with AI tools. But I have some really interesting things to share on how to use this chat GPT and how to incorporate it into your writing practices. For example, as you said, it's really good for creating meta tags for already existing texts. You create the unique piece of copy, and then you just upload it to chat GPT and ask it to create some meta titles and descriptions and maybe some headings. You can create lots of them and then pick the most suitable ones, but the thing is that this tool has to know what the text is about, what your thoughts are, your concepts and your context.
P: When people on TikTok say that chat GPT is about to replace content creators, content writers, and copywriters - that's not true. That is more of a tool for those creators to use to utilize their time better, especially if they're writing on a topic that they don't know about.
A: I would say it is a tool for overcoming your writer's blog or coming up with some general concepts you want to use with your text. If you are doing serious copywriting, you cannot rely on chat GPT or most other AI tools, as they usually do not show the links to where the information is coming from.
Chat GPT pretending to be a content expert
They are just scanning the pages from Google search results, so some SEO specialists could technically make some false information appear on top of the search results. The copywriter will end up being tricked (unless, of course, they double-check the information given). It can surely generate some ideas, but, from my perspective, the AI writing and designing tools are truly generic, and they are limited while our mind is not,
I want to underline that all texts created for brands and businesses are created first for people, and people want to be up to date. They want answers to their pain points and questions that they have today, not three years ago. Any tool can be useful if you know how to utilize it correctly, but bluntly relying on it might get you in trouble. So, Polly, what's your experience with AI tools?
Midjourney and Chat GPT from the Designer's Perspective
P: I've already used a few of them, actually. I also used Chat GPT, but I've used it for a different purpose. I'm no marketer, so I've used it from a designer's perspective. It is perfect to generate text or menu items. For example, I was doing a project for a fine restaurant and needed menu items to fill in the mockups. Googling would take me more than the 5-10 minutes I spent explaining what I needed to Chat GPT.
I've used MidJourney, which actually has quite a lot of tools, but its main one is image generation, so you just type in some text cues, and then you receive 4 image alternatives. I am terrible at coming up with long and detailed descriptions, so I asked Chat GPT to write it for me, and then I just copied it to MidJourney. I do not know if it's just me because most people seem very pleased with the tool, but it took me a lot of tries to generate something good. The majority of the images that it gave out required additional photoshopping for them to look decent, so I have no clue how people are so extremely happy with it. It's a good tool to generate ideas, but I do not think that it is excellent to come up with a final product that you could just take from there and use straight away.
Moreover, I noticed that it is bad for generating fingers and teeth on people and cylindrical things. For example, I asked it to draw a table with a jar of pencils on top of it. While the table was okay, the pencils came out all shaky. So I just wonder if it is something about cylindrical shapes that the AI cannot fully handle or what is up. Also, the eyes are often weird, but it is, perhaps, the easiest fix.
I've also seen a lot of people using AIs for NFT purposes, which I don't get, as the purpose of NFT is that you are buying art created by people. If I want AI-generated art, I can just go and use this AI tool and generate it, and then that's about it. Pretty much anyone can do that. What's the purpose of buying it? If you really like it, go on Mid Journey, describe this image and get something similar of your own.
With MidJourney, you can also paste an image link that you want to refer to and then add your own description on top of that. So the AI's algorithm analyses the pictures and makes the generation based on it, and I would say that the results are much better than just the text-based cues.
AI Pics Instead of Photographs?
Content Furies hosts portrayed by Midjourney AI bot
The thing that I like, though, is when I was doing a restaurant app design and I needed pictures to insert in the design, I asked Mid Journey to generate them, and they were decent and did not require much retouching. I needed something more sophisticated and cool to fit the restaurant's vibe, so I did not want to simply go to stocks and pull some images from there. Moreover, the usual problem that designers face is using the same stock pictures for similar niches, and I am trying to avoid it.
If this was to replace someone's photography, it could definitely do that, the sizing is small, but you can enlarge and enhance it, and, I think, different subscriptions give you access to different image sizes. So I asked the AI to generate a few pictures in dark tones for a fine dining restaurant. Then I put: "Ultra detail, and whatever everyone else was putting, flying food, realistic photography," so I actually put a bunch of random words separated by commas, and the result was actually really good. I liked it a lot. There were a few tiny mistakes, like smudged edges here and there.
Food photography like that is quite expensive and time-consuming, so if the person were to generate exactly something that they needed to have, they could save up money. I also scrolled through their channel to see what other people are writing in their descriptions, and it is mostly really long texts, around 5 lines of text, to generate a good image that would not need much editing.
Another thing I saw on TikTok is how some designers refer to it as the Holy Grail that can generate UI designs and save you so much time, so I tried it. I was working on a website for a modern movie theatre, so I wrote a description of how I wanted it to look and asked to generate the UI of a home page. Considering the amount of description put in there, the results were terrible and generic regarding design solutions. I could Google the same "inspiration" picture on Pinterest, Dribble, or Behance.
I also asked it to generate a movie card or a listing of movies that cinemas have on their home pages. The AI probably did not get me right and generated some faces with some text lines, which looked like a board game card design or something. Then again, people on the internet say that's your Holy Grail, and it will save you so much time.
A: The question is would it save you so much time if you need to come up with all those descriptions.
P: Maybe I'm just that bad with giving descriptions, but I feel like I would spend so much unnecessary time coming up with a good description when I can just browse through the projects that were already posted.
A: Yes, you have to come up with a good description, then you have to come up with editing of an unknown result, and actually, it is for me, as a control freak, that could be quite a difficult thing to do. So the easiest way to work with artificial intelligence tools, for now, is to come up with tons of references of what you want to have.
P: I wonder when people talk about it so much on their TikToks and Instagram if I'm doing something wrong.
A: Honestly, if you do have these references, why wouldn't you create something yourself? Unless you don't like to create, but then you better do something else. I also think that the human touch is really winning over the AI thing right now.
P: The perception of it is very different from what it truly is. I would say it's a tool for content creators and not something to replace them.
