How can Midjourney or DALL-E2 help marketers?

Welcome to our third post in our AI marketing tools review, we’ve explored the much-promoted hype around ChatGPT with the executions for content, search and user research. Now we turn our focus onto image generation, with two players firmly leading the way – Midjourney and DALL-E2.

How can Midjourney or DALL-E2 help marketers?

Generative AI as it is known, creates images based on text prompts. Image generation from scratch sounds appealing, especially when you want to create something that you can’t easily find on an image library or requires an agency to create bespoke in what may take a fair amount of time and fees!

Midjourney

If we start with Midjourney, to use it most efficiently is to join a community on Discord or the Web, where thousands collaborate to create new worlds, fantastic characters, and unique imagery from short text descriptions.

Once you start investigating signing up, the interface isn’t straightforward, it seems to only work through Discord, which is a separate site. Discord describes itself as; A place where you can belong to a school club, a gaming group, or a worldwide art community. Where just you and a handful of friends can spend time together. A place that makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. Once you get over the painful signup process between Midjourney and Discord and see your morning evaporate, the experience of generating imagery is pretty incredible, especially the speed!

We found the more specific and descriptive you are, the better it was in giving you something that’s useful. For example, ask for a person in a medical appointment and you’ll get something generic, but add more descriptions like age, gender, window, time of day, desk, computer screen etc and you’ll get back a range of much tighter options. Once generated, you can then play with options further from the style, the zoom, adding more imagery left or right, it’s something you have to play with to really appreciate.

DALL-E2

Unlike Midjourney, DALL-E2 is pretty easy to get started with, though again you’ll have to pay $15 for your first credits, as none were provided as part of my test period for a new account.  There are no hoops to jump through to get started, you just provide a text description of the image you want to generate and click ‘Generate’. Dependent on the complexity of the request, you just need to wait a minute or two for your images to load; we found it was usually between 1 and 2 minutes.

From getting your image options back, it’s a little clunky. You can’t actually edit an image that is 90% ‘there’; you have to go back and update the description in the tool and re-run the image generation. A lot of images often tend to be a little blurry or pixelated in the results, so you need a bit of luck and be a little flexible with your expectations.

We often found that our favourite images were those which were slightly ‘off-piste’, so the unpredictability isn’t always a bad thing!

So, are they any good?

Midjourney and DALL-E2 are great if you want to generate specific images for your blog or social media. Give it a go and if you keep it simple you are unlikely to be disappointed. Just be aware that if you want to use it to create more complex imagery, you will need to increase both your budget and the time it takes to find the right image.

For us Midjourney is better with more options, controls and better quality, oh and of course there is the same debate on image rights so beware!

Is AI image generation worth using?

Having experimented with a number of image generation options it’s incredible to see how quickly they can create a variety of 4 images at a time. However, we’ll leave you with a warning from their own terms of service…

Both the Services and the Assets are provided to Customer on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You are solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using or redistributing the Assets and assume any risks associated with use of the Services.

So, which other AI tools are useful in marketing?

In our next blog, we will look at AI website builders that promise the create your site in just 30 seconds! We’re packing up now 😉.

If you’ve got any questions about this post, or how you should be approaching the use of AI for your brand, please get in touch.