Generative AI Will Change Your Creative Process—Here’s How

I'm really an artist, poet. I really wanna make money so that I could be an artist, poet. It's like I just wanna sit on a mountain somewhere, have my coffee, read a million books and write.

Welcome to the marketing team of one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. We have, uh, with us this morning, Ms. Sherry Horowitz, she is the proclaimed ai conjure AI whisper. She uses AI conjure, but I think of sometimes you're a whisper because you definitely have to tame this untamable beast in some ways.

But you are, uh, one of the few, I would put you on the cutting edge of developing AI for. I, we used to call it commercial art, but we'll call it marketing and design right now because we did an AI episode a few months back and. We was kind of tongue in cheek and I was coming across as being somebody who was a little bit like, oh no, I'm never gonna be using AI for that and I'm never gonna be using AI for that.

And it was just turned into this kind of funny thing about how, don't worry about ai, it's okay. I won't take steal your job and I still feel that way. But then I saw your stuff and I was like, wait a minute, here's somebody who's actually doing. Like commercial work with AI and also very successful at teaching others to do it.

So thank you for joining us, Sherry. Pleasure. Thank you for having me. You welcome. I'm so happy to be able to share it with people I. We're excited to see some samples. You brought some freebies, which I mean, yes. That's incredible. So we'll be sharing that in the show notes as well as on our freebies page.

Uh, but I wanted to start off by kind of learning a little bit more about who you were, where you started, where you came from, and then what turned you into the AI conjurer that you are today. Well, way back I was always an artist and a writer, so. I started out in fine art, a little fashion design. Um, and my life was such that I didn't have the luxury to pursue art for art's sake.

Hmm. I always had to work, so, but I knew I was an artistic person, so I had to channel those art energies into something useful because I am a writer as well as a visual thinker, I always was fascinated with advertising. Hmm. So I figured that I could channel both of the parts that I wanted to channel. It was like one, just visual and just writing were not enough for me.

I like to fuse the two so it, the only commercial avenue for that tho in those days was kind of like advertising combined the two. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So if I learned graphic design, I could also be a little bit of a writer. Branding always fascinated me. So when I went to school, I studied advertising design to channel both sides that I wanted to nurture.

Uh, and I worked as a graphic designer and I worked as a freelance commercial artist for many years. Um, but also because I became a young mother very early, very, very early on in life. I actually have five children at this point, but they're all big and grown up. Um, but. Because I had to be a freelancer, even though I always wanted to work in an agency, I educated myself as if I was in an agency so that I could bring the best work to my private clients.

Mm-hmm. Um, but because I couldn't work in an agency, I had to hustle and freelance. Uh, and I ended up working in many different industries. Uh, so I have a wide range of experiences in commercial design. I worked as a toy designer at one point. I wrote children's books with a toy company, kind of like if anybody remembers the Clutz books in the early two thousands when my kids were growing up.

Mm-hmm. I, I created a, a clutz book, mockup line for, it was called Pretend and Play for a, um, toy company. I did makeup design for teens. I designed all kinds of different things over my life. You were a visual artist, you did painting, you did kind of fine art stuff. Yes. So it was very visual. It wasn't sculpting that kind of stuff, right?

No, it was, it was illustration. Okay. And, and, and fashion design and product development. Uh, advertising. So it was graphic commercial. Graphic design. Mm-hmm. Okay. With, uh, you know, whatever advertising experience I brought to it and. Then, uh, when I had my fourth child, I ended up getting a Master's in poetry and I spent about seven years writing and publishing.

Wow. Uh, that's another whole podcast. But, but that as it may Yeah. That, that's the part where I, I really wanted to, to hear you talk about that. 'cause in the pre-interview when we were chatting, when you brought up the idea of poetry. Going back and actually you got your Master's degree in poetry, did you not?

I mean Yes. Yes. You went all in on poetry? Yes. Which, when I was telling people about having you on this podcast, they were like, oh, okay. That's interesting. And I said, no. What's really interesting is where she, the journey that she took, because she started off as kind of an OG commercial artist back in the day.

And you're based in New York. You've always been in New York. So you were able to really stretch your legs with that commercial art illustration side of things, but then you took a break and you were always interested in writing and you went into poetry, not writing, but poetry, which I think is kind of the magical secret sauce to what you provide.

'cause poetry has to do the work with as few words as possible. This is mine. Uh, layman's interpretation of poetry? Well, no, you're on the right track. You have to use very few words to describe a visual world to people in poetry, which when you think about prompting AI and telling the robots, that to me is what you're trying to do is build a world in your head with words and then tell the robots how to do it as well.

Is that You nailed it. I'll take your metaphor or your description even further. Which is, and I took me a while to figure out why, when I adapted it, why I, A, I saw the potential early on why I was able to adapt to it so quickly. I was doing client work already in 2022 already. Yes, you have to distill very large, un wield the ideas both visually, metaphorically into a small amount of words.

Uh, and what that forces you to do is to think very wide. Hmm. In terms of like macro thinking? Yeah. And then this granular, um, expression, really it has to do with finding voice where I had to figure out this kind of thinking in order to talk who the invisible audience was, in other words. Interesting.

Which really goes more into also my personal topic that I was writing about. Okay. A lot of the subject matter, I had to write to two voices. But that kind of training is what made me able to think large and small at the same time. I like the phrase poetic thinking. If we were to try to train people, and we're gonna get into that because that, that's what's really amazing is you've taught hundreds of thousands of people through your class how to prompt AI and create.

You know, generative AI imagery, my course is really does dispel the mystery of why things work. Mm-hmm. When they work and what, why they don't work. But I wanna talk about you, what we were talking about before, which is to extend the point that poetic thinking is also rhetorical thinking. This is gonna get a little abstract, but we'll talk about it more and it'll become clear to people.

Mm-hmm. When we talk about it more when you're talking about a massive data set. Like midjourney, that it's trained on billions and billions of points of data, both visually and linguistically. The complexity lies in that you are talking about aggregate language conditioning. Mm-hmm. In other words, each word is a data set attached to then massive different visual data sets for, so let's bring it home to a very concrete example, is a bat.

A animal or is a bat, uh, something that you hit a ball with. Mm-hmm. Okay. And then when is a rectangle? A door? Wow. And so you have to think in, in this aggregate way, which is the macro way I'm talking about. Mm-hmm. And then think about how it might interpret itself in an average as it is a recipe in the prompt Now.

This really works well in Midjourney because Midjourney, one of the reasons that Midjourney is leading is because Midjourney has such deep language conditioning, and one of the things I teach in my course is how to understand these layers of technology. It's about understanding how the midjourney is constructed, the how the prompt taps into those layers of technology.

And then what it's doing when you put that recipe together. Let's pause a second and talk a little bit about specifically the platform, because there's a lot of different platforms out there that people are using and it sounds like your preference is Midjourney probably because you're, you've, did you go to some special training?

Do you have a brother-in-law who works at Midjourney who gave you all the code backend? None. So I think that also came with. Testing so much. Mm-hmm. Okay. Like in the beginning, I learned along the list midjourney as they were building the product. What makes Midjourney better for a person like me is that the depth of its knowledge.

Okay. And its interpretive ability. It's extremely artistic in its interpretive ability, but while maintaining a certain coherence to what. You have in your mind. So most artists or creative directors who get into using, uh, art directors who get into using the journey will tell you that's why they prefer, and they have, uh, I think over 20 million subscribers at this point.

Wow. Also, the ui, uh, in Midjourney is really attuned to the creative process and the creative thinking. I like the tool because it. It makes it, it breaks up the thought process less. It understands you deep, more deeply. For most of the time people train the robot, but you then the robot helped to train you and kind of, there was this back and forth between, do you feel like it was that in a sense or not?

They're trying to make it more personal so that you can train it to understand within certain parameters what you like. Mm-hmm. They have a global personalization code. It's not understanding anything in a reasonable sense. Hmm. It's attaching pixelated patterns to a word. Ah, okay. If you spent so many years in the visual field and you understand references as an artist might, or a commercial designer, but you know, before we go into a project, we spend a lot of time considering the best way to express an idea, the best aesthetic to have, and we're influenced.

Well, we look for influences and ins and inspiration in the outside world, and that could be anything. Mm-hmm. Now, midjourney is trained on a lay on five B data set, which is billions and billions and billions of things that are dumped in from the internet. So that when you, and again, this goes back to the aggregate thinking, so when you pick a word, you're tapping into every connection.

And I guess this is also the poetry. Poet poets are very attuned to the nuances of language. Mm-hmm. So, because I'm an artist and a poet, I understand the context of language. Plus I have the art history genre, visual background, and it's tapping into the zeitgeist of culture. Hmm. I teach people that the four frameworks to use this tool is.

I think like a creative director, see like an art director, write like a novelist and then hack like an engineer. What do we mean with the last one? Let me give you a very concrete exam. Okay. Um, early on in one of the versions, there was a lot of, um, censorship and I was trying to create for a social media campaign for women in.

Dean, the project was using a Greek goddess, a fertility named Hara, so I wanted to create like a Marvel style pregnant goddess. Now, Marvel is a dataset. Mm-hmm. Superheroes are a dataset. Goddesses are a dataset. Greek mythology is a dataset. They're all there visually. And pregnant women are a data set. I couldn't use the word pregnancy or I would get booted off the platform.

Wow. But I was thinking to myself how this is ridiculous. Like, I know there's pregnant women in the data sets. It's not possible and it's not. So I con, I constructed a prompt that intimated pregnancy and I said, of fertility? Of motherhood? Yeah. About the most beautiful goddess. Against a blue sky, mythological Marvel style, pregnant gars.

That's amazing. Gorgeous. Yeah. Wow. And that was like a victory. It took me a few hours of hacking away, testing different prompts, because I, I was getting Marvel style, beautiful results. That was describing it like a novelist. I was directing as if I would be a, you know, creative director or talking to an art director.

But what I wanted to see. And I couldn't get the pregnancy in there, but that's what I mean when I say, um, that you can hack it. That's a fascinating journey. And in a, in a sense, the, the, the, the lifestyle of an illustrator, is that where you're, you're doodling, sketching, drawing, roughly. You're doing it though with words.

Yes, and I I was an illustrator too. Yeah. So. So that process is inherent in the thinking. Mm. Mm-hmm. And, and, and artists are, are kind of having this conversation with themselves Yes. When they're working on a project. Especially if you're doing something that's in the sense of, in the framework of creative direction Yeah.

Or art direction. Yeah. Then it's a very high level. You're, you're really using the language in your head the whole time internally. Yep. I really want to get into seeing the results of this. We've talked a lot about Oh yeah. What in, in concept. In theory, but as a visual person, I need to see stuff now. I want to see.

Yeah. Totally. Magic. This was actually a recently, the last six months, this was not possible a year ago. Hmm. To get a, to get it to cohere, to a prompt. Like, so specifically, like to put fish in a question mark shape, and that's, that's like underwater and the fish are swimming around to form this question mark.

Wow. Yes. And you can, Tex, there's a ret texture feature now on the editor and updated features where you can take this image and then kind of keep the, the composition and the basic subject matter and make it in another medium. So what I did with this one was I, I redid the lighting. You can access your imagination with language data sets or the new medium as we've discussed, which now you understand.

Uh, I was trying to talk about how you can mash up all kinds of interesting ideas, which you can see there. So that's a gentleman's head inside of a phish, uh, like a Yes. A jar or a glass, right? Yes. A fishbowl ish jar. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of fun with these. This is just a, you know. Be painting, using painting ideas.

You can add text. And this was for like a project I was doing. Wow. So that that was built completely with a prompt. You didn't go back in and say, oh, this sentence when then the client came back and said, no, we need to change that word 'cause we don't like that. And that, that just, wow. That just flowed out like that.

You just took, I use a combination of getting a prompt where I want it. And then tweaking it using all the different features in the journey. Okay. And using the editing tool as well. And, and the editing tool, is that more like an intuitive, like paintbrush type tool? Or is it, it's like a paintbrush. Yes. I could erase this area if I didn't like it.

Oh. And regenerate it. Oh, okay. I can expand the whole thing. So it starts out small and then I expand it. I add, add more. So you can regenerate parts of it too. Geez. Okay. Yeah, you can use your language and your own knowledge and a body of work to train a model to do the heavy lifting, which is where, why I gave people access to pimento as well.

Every, um, model, platform, data database, like Flux versus Midjourney is optimized a bit differently and trained a bit differently, so. What I love about pimento is that it's really designed for commercial use. Mm-hmm. And it, it allows you to be proprietary and, and maintain privacy for branded assets. So that means that the data set or the prompting that you're doing is not sent out into the universe.

Correct. Shared by else. It's not public. Okay. You can upload your own assets. So say you have a model that belongs to your company, you can take all those pictures, train a model on it, and then put it in different clothing. Wow. Oh wow. Put a product in a any setting you want and do really cool things with it.

And it's designed better for commercial U end use cases. Mm-hmm. Than Midjourney is. It's not that one is better than the other. It's just really well done. There are other models. There's another model called CREA ai and Magnifi ai and other models that will do all these different things, but their UI is a bit more confusing, a bit broader.

And pimento is really sharp in the way they help, uh, big agencies and even, and anyone can use it, but I'm saying agencies are adopting it and I like it very much for that reason. Interesting. So you can use the code that I give away for a free month. So this exploration was around the, I, uh, some of the, uh, keywords were aquarium, aquarium, costume, scuba.

And there's a lot of very clever prompting in these. I think one of them has the word sunk in it at the end. And the order of words does matter. The order matters. So yes, what you start with, does it kind of start with this funnel? Is it like a vision of a funnel where you start with real broad terms and then narrow?

Um, um, that's a whole. That's a whole class by the class. Right. To, to make it very, to right. To make it very simple. There's a subject and then there's a description around the subject. Mm-hmm. And whatever you wanna, if you have a, an a, you know, a vision, you kind of direct it as like an art director would.

Yeah. Blend visuals and reference ideas to create new images. This is, uh, this is a long process of blending and. My own photography and a bunch of different things. Well, you can create any model in any setting. Oh, wow. Look at the variety in that. That's amazing. Yeah. This, I did a, I did a, I did work for a eyebrow booming company called Mrs.

Highbrow in, I think they're in Amsterdam, and I created a whole series of AI models for one of their campaigns. Wow. Manipulate and then iterate your idea. In other words, you can start and then stretch the canvas change. You know, change it up. I love cats. Yeah, I love cats. Especially when they're drinking coffee.

Yeah. In any time period. Oh, look at that. That's, yeah, I do. I did a lot of fashion design ideation. Uh, this is, you know, commercial design. Perfect moment again, photography.

This is, um. Wow. This was a very long process of iteration to get here. A lot of blending, a lot of mixing. Um, but I was just doing some ideation. This is really neat. This one I discovered by accident. Wow. Couldn't even, I couldn't even have predicted it. The whole thing's made outta water. The faucet. Yeah.

The water and everything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, yeah, it does look like that, but I, the faucet's like, sort of suspended in the water, but yeah. Um, this is, uh, also a lot of, a lot of iteration goes into these, so that's what, what you said is accurate. It is a new sort of medium because if you're an artist and you're a creator, there is time that's needed.

You know, you don't, even if you have a vision, it's like when you start with a, with watercolor, right? Mm-hmm. You might have something in your head. It doesn't always come out just 'cause it's in your head the way you intended. There's, there's a certain sense of error. In iterating that you just need to go through.

Well, and there's, there's even parts of the creative process that I think that surprise element is what is so refreshing about it. Yes. Yes. I mean, I, in my own personal work, I remember I. I would throw phrases into a bag and just pick out three different things just to get some sort of a random influence that you can't calculate in your own brain.

You have to let the universe kind of make happen and you're kind of doing it. Yeah, so Midjourney is really fun like that. That's how I sometimes use mid journey. Sometimes I, I'm purposely vague and ambiguous. Because I'm not a hundred percent sure what I want. This is a, uh, a, a fake spec ad that I created for a booking.com because I had an idea that I wanted to flush out for content.

I used a whole series of these. I think I might have more of these here. I. About stress free c cancellations. When we talk about going through the process, how, how many words make up a prompt? Is there a, is there a 10 50? Is are you writing paragraphs? I guess I asked. Um, there's some sort of, there is some sort of limit.

I don't know what it is and I never hit it, but you can get very, very long. The thing is that there is a, in the documentation it'll tell you. How it calculates the references. Mm-hmm. Uh, it sometimes more language doesn't do anything. Hmm. Um, that's, that's like a very technical question, but I, it's not, there's no like immediate limit, but you're referencing maybe how many iterations do you go through on, is there an average number or sometimes you just hit it right away?

Or is it, yeah. It depends what it is. If I've done some work before, I can do it really fast. Wow. Um. And I'll go back to some of my earlier work to, you know, re remind myself what I did. Yeah. But there's certain things, like I said, that you just do so many times again and again. You test, test, test, that you kind of just become used to what it needs to hear and what you need to research if you need a new data set.

Yeah. One of the other examples that I've seen people use is they'll actually, and this is maybe more from a photographic background, if they were photographers or are photographers, they'll actually enter in the type of camera, the type of lens Yes. The angles. Yes. The, the F stops and the shutter speeds and the film type and things like that.

Do you get into that as, as much? Definitely. That's a, that's one of the hacking techniques. Ah. Is that you can hack a data set where you know it's found. I go through this in my course where I show, show you different data sets that I hack to co-opt a certain effect so that I don't have to describe it at all.

It's just, in other words, you're, you're, you're, you're referencing an arch type, let's say. I wanted, um, a guy. Wearing a flamboyant suit with a certain kind of vibe to them, right? Mm-hmm. So I would say Hollywood movie director. Hmm. That Hollywood movie director has associated with it. Already. Many implied features.

Sometimes I make up genres. There's a, a prompt that I, I did with, um, Hollywood movie director, where I, I wanted a certain, um, aesthetic. So I made up of a data set called formal formalism. I, this came after trying many things. Hmm. But this is where the language part comes in. Yeah. Where I made up this sort of idea, which I don't think formal formalism actually exists, but it understood does now, and it did what I wanted it to do.

Interesting. So it made an ism out of something that was already Yes. Itself. And it was like a meta. This also references a mashup of genres. Yeah. And this was a product of tons of iteration, huh? And also back and forth between the different versions. 'cause some versions interpret things differently than others.

In other words, the journey has several versions, so there's a lot of manipulation that goes into it. I, I'm observing this work that the, the lighting is just incredible on that car. That's amazing. Yeah. I looking, I'm, I don't remember this crop by ho I'm looking at a lot of your work is very, in my mind it's central.

There's a central figure and then there's a backdrop background that gives it context. There's singular images. Is there, is that really the kind of, if there's a look to this design, is that. Just kind of your style or is that really the best way to work within this medium? Um, no, I, that's a good point, but is still tricky.

I mean, it's getting better all the time. Look at that, but multiple people, like here, I, I was able to manipulate the tattoo a bit. Mm-hmm. I, I would still probably play around with this more, but here's where it gets a little mind vending. Mm. Wow. Where I do like concept work. Yeah. And, you know, building characters with expressions.

Yeah. Did you, is that a mashup of three, three images in mid that came out of Mid Journey or you said No, this is a, um, this is pure prompt, no visuals. Wow. Pure language. Just digging into the data sets. Butler frantic. Maybe I wrote some crazy adjectives. Boy, that's something that's complicated. And then, you know, this is part of that other.

Um, exploration that I was mashing up Film noir. Yeah. With dastardly, looks like Cruella Deville or something. Almost. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then like, and just to all kinds of stalk art. Really fun ideas. Now that looks like you were referencing illustration from the 18th century or the 19th century. Yes, I actually was.

Yes. Um, Harlequin was in here. Yeah. Carlo print. I don't remember the whole prompt by far. And it's also iterative, so I don't always remember what I did. Um, this is just fun things that I experiment with. There's a, a term called this, you learn when you go into the communities. There's a term called rainbow four or a rainbow punk.

Um, all these cool things that are in the documentation where you could find you mash upwards. You can make upwards. It, it, it's really, really cool. That's so great there. I love that. Yeah. Okay. I go prompt hunting sometimes, and then I fix the prompt or I, I adapt it or tweak it or use it as part of another prompt.

Oh, wow. Imagine the weird, and there's a series of hybrids. Imagine the beautiful bridal company. Just my own projects. Oh. I'm always experimenting. Wow. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah. You're not gonna get that shot in real life. No. Right? Imagine the impossible.

Wow. What if Fox guarded the hen house? Oh, this is that. That social media campaign that I did. Uh, Mrs. Highbrow. Yeah. They wanted some coral androgynous models with, and they're fine letting people know that they used AI for this and, you know, um, yeah. They gave me a recommendation on my site and they loved it.

Yep. They were not shy about it. They're just like, that's how we are. That's how we roll. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, they're good. Yeah. Uh, this is spec work that I did to, to test an idea that I had for Sephora, for my, to build up my portfolio when I was doing more client work. And just really fun. You can just go crazy.

Here's my, uh, stress free bookings. Some things you have to stress about. Yeah. Different part of that whole campaign. Really. You've designed an entire campaign around this. Yes. You can do an entire, that's, that's the point of this is to show that you can, if you have an idea, you can design and you're in advertising or marketing, you can design a whole idea.

No, you have to know how to prompt, but you can design an entire idea. That was the point. I did fashion. Here's some things I wish were in my closet fall. I studied fashion design in my early life, so just, I'm just, I don't wanna take up so much time, but just to show you, it's almost done.

Well, it definitely show, oh wow, that's, yeah. Motif. Yeah. Yeah. All kinds of prints you can imagine. Anything. So that's that. So what is, let's talk about the limitations then, because you said that there were, and obviously they have, it sounds like there were guardrails around certain prompts earlier.

Pregnant women was Yeah, still censorship censor. I think if you're try, they, they, they're trying to make it safe and, and, and avoid deep fake, so, uh, I could do a politician in the early days. And, um, now you can't, especially if they're in office. Mm. Interesting. Okay. On those hacks around it, but I won't mention them.

Yep. Um, but any case, uh, there are certain things that if you have a unique idea mm-hmm. That's not in the data set. So, for example, if you want to go on the community, you can search any idea and get a head start and start looking for prompts. I show this in my course too. Okay. How you can use the community to just get started and brainstorm.

Mm-hmm. And then what to do with those prompts. And the advanced course that's coming out will show how to dive deep into prompt structure and, and how to really do advanced think. But the course as it is, shows you just how to use midrin, what's possible if you have a really original idea. We need to get very creative to get midjourney to do it.

Ah, that's when you use visuals, that's when you blend, that's when you use editing. Um, takes a lot more work. A lot more work, but it's doable. It just takes work. It's a medium. It's like when you go out shooting photography, are you always gonna get the shot you're looking for? Right. Sometimes you don't even know until you open, you know, go through it or crop something or deal with it afterwards.

So. So same thing. It is a new medium. It's a new tool. When the training data is not there, is when it, it can be difficult. It just, that's where you're, in a sense, training your own unique Yes. Version of your model. Yes. That that is, and that part is getting better all the time. And again, that's why I have mento in there.

Mm-hmm. Because com mento gives you a, a, a different way of controlling a tight model. Whereas Middy uses mood boards now. Okay. Their, their mood boards don't work quite the same as, as Pimentos does. So what I do is I, I'll test back and forth between the two models. Mm-hmm. Which one gives me a result that I like better?

Do they have open like documentation around this? I absolutely read through every single piece of documentation they had. Wow. I also spend time on the Discord channels. Mm-hmm. There is an excellent, um, grassroots, um. A discord group called AI Creative Community. Okay. You can find them on LinkedIn. It's called A ICC.

We're in, we get together on LinkedIn and have live chats about the geek out, about prompting. Mm-hmm. The journey does have communities, they keep the communities up and running on discord, and now they put it in, putting it up on the website. Um, and finding grassroots communities was very helpful. Yeah.

Could, there was no one to teach anybody any Instead of coaching people, I created this one course, I made it, you know, nine and a half hours. Wow. Where I just break down all my case studies, my client work, how I arrived at the conclusions, what I did, what a person needs to do to, let's say, improve their skills, which.

Skills you need. Yeah. And I use it sometimes to brainstorm. It collapses the process of ideation and research sometimes. Uh, interesting. Yeah. And it gives you back ideas you didn't, you don't expect sometimes. So what I teach people is, um, how do you use it intentionally? Mm-hmm. With contention and how to, how and when you will lose control.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, so I, a lot of what I teach is how do you use language to drive the prompt when to bring in imagery? Which aspects of the features give you more control? Which give you less control, why you want, might want less control. Hmm. In terms of creativity. Yeah. It's a very powerful tool. I'll tell you a really weird one.

Um, I was doing a, a vintage sardine can. And I wanted that key in the old vintage Sarine cans. Yeah. Yeah. It was not in the training data. I actually messaged, so one of the prompt chat rooms on my journey and they, they just sent, not there. Wow. 'cause it's such an old reference and there weren't a lot of photos of that that they could train on.

Right. It wasn't in there. So that sometimes you'll hit that and sometimes you'll hit like a really weird idea. So like last week I was trying to do. Monster dishes in a sink. Like I wanted the dishes to look like little monsters and have little faces. Mm-hmm. And it's not anywhere. And I can't, I'm so, I'm, I'm like being all clever and figuring out, you know, it's giving me a headache sometimes, but I, if I'm tenacious enough, I'll get there because I hate Photoshop.

I love. I, I'm doing sorry for Adobe now. Oh no. Oh no. I love you Adobe. I love you Adobe. I still use Illustrator all the time. I'm sure they can handle the, uh, abuse. I think so. They'll be fine. I. You said before you ran into issues when you were doing some commercial work and you were trying to get a partnership with a, a, a art director who said, yeah, we'd love to bring you on, but we can't because they don't want to use ai.

And I know that it's a controversial issue. The controversy, I guess, would come in when it's consumer package goods that are using human models and then they're not gonna be using human models. I would think that would be maybe one of those borderlines of where it would. They may not want it publicly known that they're using AI generated, generated models.

Yeah, that's, that's right. Um, I think we're still at that point where a lot of people, I mean my children, they're very much against a lot of this AI stuff. 'cause they feel very threatened by it. And I could, I could see that as young person. Yeah. My children too. Yes. We've seen a lot of these dramatic revolutionary technologies come in and completely transform our industry, and now we're at a point where, yeah, you have to embrace it and get excited about it and use it as much as you possibly can learn about it so that you're ahead of it.

I think if you don't, a hundred, your kind of. At risk. And there's a lot of misunderstanding around it. Like the once I think that the pendulum is swinging the other way because people are realizing it does take so much creativity. Mm-hmm. And it's still time consuming. Mm-hmm. The difference is that I'm so much more productive and efficient at the work I do.

Mm-hmm. So, whereas I would have to either take a photograph. In the old days, old days photograph, but take a photograph and then put it into a digital tool like Photoshop. Wow. Antiquated, and then doctor it up for a client. Now I can give the client a hundred ideas in a week. And that's, I think what's so limiting for people is the idea of like, before when art was hard to create or or design and annual reports and traditional graphic design, we didn't see a lot of branding all over the place.

When it became more democratized and more and more people were given the tools and the digital tools. You saw more brand expression, you saw more growth. You saw brand and advertising in a lot more places. So that's where I feel like in talking with my kids, don't worry about it, because yes, in this model of this set amount of commercial art, we'll call it, yes, there's, we're gonna have some sacrifices in there because if we keep it in this small box.

What the idea though is the box gets bigger. I think that the barrier to entry for, for manipulating a medium is no. Has been lowered. Yes. In other words, I don't need to spend 10 years mastering photography. Mm-hmm. I just have to understand what photography does, understand the history of it, understand the medium.

Mm-hmm. And then I can have my art assistant read it. Right? Yeah. Which is a tireless uncomplaining. Machine. Yes, the dream, right? Do it. Now. I look at all of the AI tools out there as something that gets me about 80% of the way there, and then I need to finish up with the last 20%. What's amazing about what you've done is you've really kind of completed that journey to the a hundred percent.

Here we are, we're done. Oh, I can do a a lot and I'll tell you why. It's because. I love Adobe. Yeah, I don't like Photoshop.

I lucky you. Really? I can't stand all the buttons. I still find Photoshop very tedious. Yeah. And I like, I figure out ways to hack. Midjourney so that I don't have to go into couple. You don't have to learn Photoshop. Smart. It's a matter of survival. Well, and I think that that, that speaks a little bit to our audience because marketing teams of one don't have a lot of time for that stuff.

And it sounds like it still takes a lot of time to figure out how to prompt it, but you're not. You're, you're more in this kind of literal word based universe as opposed to this technical, you know, beepboop, boop, touch the buttons. Yes. And sliders, all that stuff. Yes. It lets me, it lets me ideate in real time.

Yeah. All kinds of stuff. So you said something interesting earlier about your process when you said, knowing when to. Prompt it with other visuals. And I know a lot of times when I'm in there, I immediately am like, here's this style of this poster. Do me in one just like it except for Albuquerque or whatever.

You know? Like is there a moment where you, where you're like, okay, I've prompted enough with words, now I need to train it on a visual. Yeah, you can now guide it with a visual, meaning another pixel pattern, which makes it more, Hmm. Diff more difficult sometimes because it's interpreting the pixel pattern in a different way than the language I still think, and I still have the most success when language is the driving force.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Although blending gives me excellent results. Once I'm iterated to a point, you know, when it's not working, I'll hack with a visual or blend. Interesting event like at the end of the process. Yeah. And then I get. I mean more what I need. It's like it just puts that final like spin, like, oh, bingo.

That's exactly what I'm looking for. Yes. And us and also often a word or two at the end. Prompt. How long are your prompts? I'm imagining paragraphs or stances? No, it depends on the project. Depends on the, you know, some things it does really well that you get to know, like portrait. Will give you great composition for a portrait.

It's a data set. Mm-hmm. It's a great data set. Editorial magazine. Um, gorgeous composition, like I'm thinking visually, like I, as I, there's my palette of all my acrylics or my gache Yes. Or my colored pencils as where you're like, here's this data set, here's this data set. Yep. I'm gonna pull from these and then mix them together in this, and then boom, here we go.

Is that kind of the, I'm so glad you said that because I tell, I have been saying this already for two years, that it, the, the data sets are the new medium. It is a little bit of a learning curve, but if you are a creative person and you don't mind spending a little bit of time, there's a lot of work you could really do for your clients.

Especially in terms of, you know, a lot of times the branding messaging really intersects with marketers work. Yep. 'cause you're doing all the messaging for them. And I have a free guide in my, give my little giveaway where I give away a whole prompt template. For marketers. Oh, awesome. And it'll really get you started.

Um, it will really help you a lot because you can plug in to the template. It's a whole prompt structure. Test it out. I have a lot of ca like visuals that go with it, so you can really break it down, understand how I apply the principles to it so you can do a ton of, um, visual work for your clients. You can create amazing ads.

Social images, being a team of one is hard, but there's tools more and more now that are enabling me to do what I'm doing in researching how I could automate my marketing to promote my course work. And the other courses which I will be building, which is Advanced Coursework. This was a Prompt Fundamentals course, is I found an incredible platform called Stella.

I've blown away. Because they created, they pieced together all these no code bots. I don't know what she did behind the scenes, but she's a, a marketing genius and she built this amazing platform where I could, instead of like doing a prompt, uh, like a content in LinkedIn, yeah, I could just use her platform and it'll reformat it into any other social media channel that I want.

Wow. But not only that, it also. We'll do really high level AI generative post ideas based on your personal brand, the brief that you outline, and the com com competitive market analysis. Oh, wow. So she offered a three month, um, uh, 20% off code for anyone wants to try it. Oh, perfect. So I, I will give you that.

Thank you. From your view viewers afterwards, I am going to be using it. It is. A very interesting tool and I have been searching a lot for something like this and trying to build it myself. That's really great. Well, thank you so much for all of your insights and all of your freebies and. Uh, just your story is fascinating, the work is incredible, and thank you.

I take everything back that I said about having AI do final work. 'cause I do see the potential is really amazing to see. Uh, you've taken it so far and, uh, it's an honor to really talk with you. You, you're one of the leading ai, we'll say conj, uh, in the world, and it's just fascinating to see the development and listen to you talk about all this stuff.

I appreciate it. I, I appreciate you letting me geek out anytime. Um, thank you. And it's nice to talk to a fellow artist Yeah. Who has been through the tre in the trenches, so you understand. Got the scars. Yeah, it's, well, it's so nice to meet you. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you so much, Sherry. It's been a pleasure.

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