Daily Inspiration: “Make your imagination matter more.”

“Make your imagination matter more.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Much of the focus on AI these days has to do with the potential disruptive business opportunities and challenges.

Yet in addition to that, there is something perhaps even more profound underway, and that is exponentiation in the baseline tools that are available to all of us to enhance and accelerate our creativity. Let me explain.

Just over a year ago, when I first began to use some of the AI-to-image generation tools, I asked it to draw a picture of a deer staring into a webcam. What I got back was, at the time, mind-blowing – and yet, rather primitive.

One year later, things have changed – and improved – dramatically.

That image is generated by the exact same prompt, and represents a pretty staggering update in the sophistication of the systems available to us today – and this is what has evolved in just one year!

This brings me to Baby Viking Summer Camp from Hédi Orvos-Clark.

I first saw this post some months ago. What caught my attention – and that of tens of thousands of others – was the explanatory detail she created around the concept of the camp through the written word that went with the AI-generated images. Parents everywhere were enthralled with the idea – with some of them perhaps thinking it was real, not just someone conjuring a fantastic concept using an AI text-to-image generator! Read the absolutely wonderful description of what the camp was all about. The storyline is magical!

What is happening today with AI is the marriage of stunningly fascinating new creative tools involving images, video, and more – combined with the imagination and creativity of those who are able to maximize their potential. We are only beginning to see and understand its potential with the explosion of wonderfully creative new ideas like Baby Viking Summer Camp.

All of this creativity is being enhanced, obviously, by the connectivity and mind-sharing that is social media. Over on Facebook, there is the MidJourney Prompt Share group. Anyone can join, anyone can participate – and share not only their images, but the ‘prompt’ they used to create them. The group offers up a cornucopia of staggeringly beautiful, mind-numbingly wonderful creative experiences. This is just one of what are probably thousands, it not tens of thousands, of creative communities sharing ideas.

Back to my deer-in-the-webcam – it’s important to realize just how far these online image generators have come in just over a year. On the Facebook group, I saw this image of an owl in a knitted outfit. The prompt used in MidJourney to create this imaginary scene is shared as a part of the process.

Anyone can generate anything – give it a try!. I went over to another image tool, DreamStudio.Ai, and typed in a simple prompt: “Baby Viking.” The results were magical, and kind of cute!

The important thing to realize is that every single AI model out there acts and generates information in a different way, based upon the underlying model. With that, another AI tool generated this image for the same prompt: a rather serious Baby Viking.

Here’s something you need to know – we are already at the edge of the ear in which we are moving beyond mere text-to-image generation like this, into a world of text-to-video generation., You will see this first emerge with AI-generated short clips, followed by a video that will be a minute or a few minutes in length. In your lifetime, you are bound to see the first completely AI-generated full-length feature movie, generated entirely by someone working at their desk, typing in prompts, and carefully massaging the content.

And obviously, there’s a positive and a negative side to this. The Hollywood creative community is obviously worried and is expressing that worry through their strike action. At the same time, millions worldwide are busy exploring these new tools accelerating their creativity capability.

This begs the question – are you doing the same? Do you recognize that perhaps you need to dive right in and explore what is going on? It’s not difficult – visit MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, DreamStudio.Ai, Ideogram.Ai or one of many other tools that are out there. You can try a lot of this for free, and perhaps discover within your mind a new form of creativity that you never knew you had – a form of creativity enabled by machine intelligence.

Generate an image of a Baby Viking, and send it to me! I’d love to see what you come up with!