So let's start with a question... what does a procrastination monster, rearing its ugly head look like?
I was putting together slides for the recent cohort of Be Your Own Best Coach's Get Things Done Without Procrastinating when I couldn’t find anything on the stock image sites to connect with the emotion and mood we needed for some key moments.
Making changes to manage procrastination can be hard. Heck, all change can be hard, which is why we always inject the F-word into the equation, Fun. So, that’s why I switched to AI generated images for help.
We needed that procrastination monster to connect with the attendee on a visceral level so we could talk about what you do when that stress-induced, overwhelming procrastination feeling comes along. We also needed a procrastination pickle to use as an avatar for each attendee’s individual procrastination challenge.
These are some of the images AI created for both use cases… they still make me laugh.
I’m going to share how I made these images and some of the tools and guides you can use to make your own images too. Like many people, I’ve been a bit obsessed with these AI tools since OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a prototype at the end of November. Many of a weekend night since then have been “date nights” with AI.
Using a combination of AI tools and with the assistance of those "date night" hours on YouTube, I created a bunch of images that I could ask the AI to continually modify until I got just the right emotion and mood that we wanted to convey on each slide.
The tools are amazingly powerful and drastically more affordable than creating custom images like these would’ve been just a year ago.
I created these images using a tool called MidJourney that runs on Discord. You can create images for free for personal use or upgrade to a paid account for images you want to use commercially. A basic paid account is $10 / month. By comparison, our Adobe Stock photography account costs $19.99 / month, but without the complete customization and uniquely, branded imagery you can get with MidJourney.
I say uniquely branded because if you use some consistent prompts, you can create a library of images that all fit a specific look and feel.
Which brings me to those special prompts. This is where artistry comes into play. Writing prompts are so valuable an entire new career has emerged, prompt engineers, a “natural language processing (NLP) concept that involves discovering inputs that yield desirable or useful results.”
For AI language tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing’s AI, prompt engineers tend to speak in the style of a formal conversation. But for AI image creators, it requires a different strategy using artistic concepts and composition techniques to help shape the image’s style and tone.
What’s powerful is you can use the AI language tools to help you get more insightful words to use for the AI image generators. Taking our procrastination example, if I needed to learn more about the emotional state of someone who procrastinates, I could’ve asked ChatGPT to give me more and different words to use to describe them.
I did want the images to have a fun, 3D animated look and asked ChatGPT to give me some artistic-style words to use in my description for MidJourney. From there, I had a jumble of words to begin to experiment with.
“Prompt engineers can be fiercely protective of these word jumbles, seeing them as the keys to unlock AI’s most valuable prizes. The winner of a Colorado State Fair arts competition last year, who used Midjourney to beat out other artists, has refused to share his prompt, saying he spent 80 hours perfecting it over 900 iterations — though he did share a few sample words, such as ‘lavish’ and ‘opulent.’”
In fact, these word jumbles are so valuable, there’s now marketplaces where buyers can see AI-generated art pieces and pay for the list of words that helped create them.
Fortunately for you, I’m going to share my word jumbles here. Before I do, I wanted to highlight a few YouTubers who have been so valuable in my learning with links to their videos I’d recommend if you are interested in trying it out for yourself:
The Beginner Guide To Getting Started With MidJourney (A.I. Art) - Pratik Naik
The Ultimate MidJourney Prompting Guide - Matt Wolfe
How To Use Chat GPT by Open AI For Beginners - The AI Advantage
When you do make it into MidJourney, you can recreate our procrastination monster with this prompt:
/imagine procrastination monster, rearing its ugly head, cinematic lighting, photorealistic, psychologically inflexible, overwhelmed, stressed, ashamed
These two prompts kept the style for other images: cinematic lighting, photorealistic. For the procrastination pickle, we just needed to swap out the character:
/imagine procrastination pickle, cinematic lighting, photorealistic, psychologically inflexible, overwhelmed, stressed, ashamed
Honestly, just like the Colorado State Fair winner, you can spend endless hours tweaking these prompts. And I had a deadline, so I selected one and moved on. Ultimately, we ended up with this little monster for our presentation. Shared with all the emotion of the moment when it rears its ugly head, and with one of the most important factors for someone successfully responding to it… FUN
