Hello and welcome to AI versus Marshy #39!

Well isn’t this the little engine that could!

I’m currently sitting in an airport waiting for my plane home, after doing a video shoot for a bank, working from the startup space Fishburner’s, eating too much gelato, and attending a HR tech conference.

But enough about me - let’s talk AI!

This week looks at:

• Midjourney solves the continuity problem
• If you were starting out as a content creator today - how would you use AI?
• Another ADHD project update

Lots to cover so let’s make like an envelope and letter it out*.

-Marshy

Repeat your character

Via VentureBeat.

I’m sure most of you have played with text-to-image at some point by now.

If not, stop reading and sign up for Adobe Express.

It will let you generate a text to image for free.

I just did this:

One of the options presented this amazing character who I am quietly impressed with:

But here’s the rub.

Say I wanted my business baller guy to hit the basketball court, or go for a ride on his unicorn, or start smashing some pasta and spaghetti sauce with glee - I can’t.

The short answer is because it’s using a “diffusion model”.

These run predictively from text - and it’s mind-bonkingly hard to get the continuity that we take for granted.

Midjourney is one of the most powerful image generators out there right now and is playing with solving this by adding a toggle called “-cref” - which in layperson’s terms means:

You know that person you just whipped up? Do it again. BUT WITH LIGHTNING!

Okay the last bit doesn’t have to happen but it seems to solve it fairly nicely so far.

However, Midjourney is still pretty painful to use for non-techie users and expensive unless you’re using it daily.

I had a subscription for a couple of months and couldn’t justify the cost.

Although if my subscribers keep growing that might change one day hey-hooooo!

What if I started creating content today and wanted to use AI?

Via me.

I do regular free lunch and learns for member-based organisations.

Sometimes this is strategic and business development-y - such as helping a startup community.

Other times I do them because I like being a good human.

I presented this week to Global Sisters a mission-focused organisation trying to create employment pathways for more women.

The brief was a bit different to what normally hits my desk.

Essentially they were doing an AI series on various parts of marketing and wanted a session on content creation and AI.

That’s a doozie.

But noodled on it and put a presentation together to try and answer that brief:

I’m not comfortable sharing the recording link as it was for an exclusive audience, but you can grab a copy of the presentation here.

In a nutshell:

• Keep a swipe file - track what works online and how via screengrabbing, newsletters, ad libraries, and social media accounts
• Get AI to teach you why it works - upload your snippets into ChatGPT and get feedback on what works and what doesn’t
• Use that information to create drafts with AI and make things authentic

I’ve also got a booking link for booking free lunch and learns - here you go dear subscribers.

Another AI-DHD update

Another via me.

As mentioned last week I’ve been plugging away with research interviews, playing with AI tools, and drafting an MVP as part of my Deep30 project with Starter Story.

I shared some learnings last week, and this week I decided to start drafting a guide on how to manage ADHD traits from more of a worker in tech perspective.

Everyone thinks about this stuff a bit differently, but I also noticed nearly everyone hasn’t gone rabbit-hole figure this out mode like I have.

So I intend to share what I know with who I’ve interviewed, and continue seeking interviews to see if a software solution makes sense.

The guide in progress looks like this in draft mode:

Also - there’s a number of new readers from last week and this week who I interviewed. Hi! 👋

Originally I was going to set up a separate newsletter update for the project - this isn’t going to suit my workflow so if you’re not interested in AI or following this solution - please hit the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this newsletter.

Trust me I understand!

–

So that’s a wrap for the week.

I was listening to a podcast between the authors of Ben’s Bites and Every and they were noodling on “just sharing AI tools” being quite boring.

I agree!

The feedback I’ve got so far on this newsletter is “keep doing what you’re doing” as it grows, so that’s what I’ll keep doing!

I’m enjoying investigating AI and its use cases and implications, and keep trying to anchor things in the NOW instead of what’s going to happen in the future.

After puzzling on this for about a year I’m completely and utterly convinced that nobody actually knows yet - so we may as well enjoy things as they change.

Thanks for reading and you can catch the video version of this newsletter tomorrow on my LinkedIn and YouTube (when I remember to upload there too!)

We’ve got this! 💪

-Marshy

*writing these stupid riffs is the goddamn best part of this job, I always smile when I write one each week