This presentation was made for the local business members of the Trent Hills Chamber of Commerce, for our Virtual Lunch’n’Learn on February 23rd, 2023.

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Today I’m going to show you a few ways that AI is being used in the design and marketing industry, as well as a few tools you can use that have already become a part of my daily workflow, and I’ll give you a peak at what we can expect to see more of in the very near future.

Here are five ways that you can create art, design, copy, video and music… all via natural language input (talking or typing a prompt into a computer program).

#1 Text-to-image, art

Text-to-image models create high-quality graphics, images, and even photographs from a natural language input, called a prompt. You can create and perfect detailed and very specific works of art almost instantly, simply by describing it to a computer program in a few words. The more words you use, the more detailed the piece. And each and every piece is unique, made just for you, to be used in any way you like. You can use these images as supporting graphics or illustrations for news articles, blog posts, social media pictures, advertisements, or anywhere you need an engaging image or piece of art. The following three applications are the most popular.

DALL-E 2 from OpenAI was released to the public in September 2022. 20 free images to start.

MidJourney is a Discord-based chat server and bot that you can try for free for the first 10 images.

StableDiffusion from stability.ai is an open-source model that can be run at home for free forever (on a very expensive computer).

Google’s Imagen is not yet available to the public.

Here are some images and album art I created for my SoundCloud page at foxpress.radio. The prompts were variations on, “fox listening to music on a vintage hifi“

#2 Text-to-design, logo, branding

I use text-to-images models like MidJourney to provide design inspiration for branding, logos, and page layouts. By generating ideas for a new logo or product placement on merchandise, you can create unique, customized content tailored to your own specific brand and instructions. You can use these tools to explore concepts and design ideas, create production ready art, or use to inform and inspire your designer.

Here you can see a logo, layout, and graphic assets for an organic fertilizer company called “Kick-Ash!”. The logo was created by asking for “a flower growing out of a boot”, and the layout was inspired by generating, “homepage layout for an organic fertilizer company”, and then the supporting assets were created individually using various prompts, and assembled into a website.

I added the text to the logo and photoshopped the logo on to the box, then built the website using the graphics generated by MidJourney with my prompts. This took about as long as searching through stock photography or clip art sites, but yielded much higher quality results, that are entirely unique. See the website at kickash.foxpress.io

#3 Text-to-copywriting

AI algorithms can write high-quality marketing copy for product descriptions, social media posts, and even entire blog articles. ChatGPT, an AI assistant from OpenAI, was recently released and is available as a free research preview, a paid Plus version, and soon to be in the new Microsoft Bing search engine. You can use ChatGPT to get inspiration for new blog post ideas, develop content outlines, and write the content itself. This tool is currently best suited for marketing copy over factual content or essays, due to the AI’s tendency to “hallucinate” from time to time. Be mindful of accuracy and fact-check sensitive information. This is a great time saver for creating templates and drafts, but you’ll always want to add your own voice and make a few edits here and there to make it your own.

Here we can see ChatGPT’s response to, “Write some copy for a social media post, advertising the Trent Hills Chamber of Commerce Virtual Lunch ‘n’ Learn on Feb 23rd at noon. Five local marketing professionals will each be sharing 5 Digital Marketing Strategies”

It starts out by repeating back to me what I told it, and then it starts embellishing a little. You can see it’s even added some relevant hashtags to the post for you. Incredible. I especially like the part about enjoying your lunch from home. You can copy and paste this right into your event page.

#4 Text-to-video

AI can assist in the production of video content. Meta AI’s Make-a-Video and Google’s Imagen Video are both working on text-to-video models that generate short video clips, while NVIDIA’s Audio2Face application animates a 3D character’s mouth and facial movements to match any voice-over track. The end result is incredibly realistic and can be used in film, games, promotional videos, explainers, and real-time digital assistants and support agents.

#5 Text-to-music

AI-generated audio is revolutionizing the world of audio design, including voice, music, sound effects, and foley. From generating background music to full scores, AI algorithms are able to create music that’s both unique and on-brand, with endless variations, styles and moods to choose from. In addition, AI can automatically create sound effects and foley, such as footsteps, background noise, and even entire soundscapes. It can even synthesize realistic-sounding speech, with applications ranging from automated customer service to virtual assistants. You’ll see this baked into everyday video editing apps like iMovie or the camera app, and on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Google’s MusicLM isn’t publicly available yet, but they have a demo available on their website. They have a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as “Meditative song, calming and soothing, with flutes and guitars. […] creating a sense of peace and tranquility”.

These are just a few of the ways that AI technology is being leveraged to accelerate content creation and enhance the creative process. Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg, and there’s so much more to discuss about this emerging technology and it’s potential applications. Please reach out if you’d like to talk more about design and technology, or leave a comment below.

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