#45: "ChatGPT is mildly embarrassing at best" - Sam Altman

🤖 This week:

• 📅 A Week in Heatherland

• 👀 Let’s look around…Lummi, AI stock image generator

• ✨ You can now…use AI as a photographer

• ✏️ Prompt of the Week…landing page optimisation

• 🗞️ AI in the News

• 💰 Freebies…AI for Agencies

• 🎨 AI Image of the Week…colouring books

📅 A Week in Heatherland

Firstly - getting some beautiful weather here in the UK at last! Following a heavy week of webinars, I got a bit of a chill time in this weekend.

I was up at 5:30am (yes, I’m one of those people) enjoying some morning sun with the dog, listening to ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman’s talk at Stanford: The Possibilities of AI and jotting down notes into my Notion.

Here are the key highlights:

• ChatGPT is just the beginning of something much bigger: “ChatGPT is mildly embarrassing at best…GPT4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever use again”.

• It’s better done than perfect: “you’ve got ship early and ship often…we ship imperfect products but we have a very tight feedback loop….it sucks to ship a product you’re embarrassed about but it’s better than the alternative”

• People don’t want to be surprised, they want to be involved in AI model growth: “…they want a gradual rollout and the ability to influence these systems”

• Invest in the infrastructure - chips, computational power, energy, data centres, there’s so much involved in creating AI, we need to be aware of the process as a whole and plan how we’ll handle it

• How will the world feel in 2030? In some ways not that different at all, but we will have artificial intelligence in certain areas that can far surpass a human, and we can use that AI for research and development

• Resilience and adaptability will be more important for leaders than ever before

• On himself - it’s not about greatness, it’s about breadth - “I’m not great at anything but I’m good at a lot of things. And if you’re good at a lot of things you can seek connections across them and come up with ideas nobody else has”

Watch the whole video there, it’s a lot of food for thought, and an interesting insight into the vision of Sam Altman.

In other news, the AI for Non-Techies site is coming along really nicely. We’ll soon be adding:

• Categorised prompt library

• AI tool reviews

• Loads more content: masterclasses, resources, etc.

Here’s a brief tour of what it’s looking like right now:

👀 Let’s look around…Lummi

Do you ever get stuck with the same boring stock images? Especially the free ones from Pexels and Unsplash. I think we’ve all seen the same faces around, this fella for instance, I’ve seen a billion times.

It’s very limited. It’s frustrating. But there’s always a need for imagery - whether it’s an MVP version of a website, a blog, a social post, we’re living in an increasing digital world.

Lummi is an AI stock image site, currently rated #8 on Product Hunt in the AI category, next to some seriously big players (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.). It’s completely free, and it offers a range of stock images, all generated by AI.

Let’s have a look:

✨ You can now…use AI as your photographer

Sticking with the whole ‘we need visuals’ theme, showing your face regularly is crucial to build all-important trust.

The thing is, in addition to it being excruciatingly uncomfortable for most of us, who can afford fancy photoshoots? Let alone enough to have new photos almost daily for our socials.

Enter Artisse. Now, we’ve seen “AI photographer” programmes come and go since the dawn of Generative AI: Headshot and the like, but often they’ve produced completely useless, often nightmare-inducing images. But this one kept coming up in my searches, so I thought I’d check it out properly.

As with all of these tools, you need to train it with your image, so I uploaded 15 photos of me, and waited. This training took a fair while, I was waiting about 2 hours.

When it was ready, you pick a “pack” of photo styles, spend your credits and get your AI image in that pack.

Here are some results from the “Rustic Charm” collection. Annoyingly, you have to pick a hairstyle during training, and just normal ‘medium length straight’ is not an option, I had to go for this sort of pigtail style. But this is definitely much, much closer to realism than I’ve ever seen.

They’re a likeness (an extreeeemely flattering likeness) - but they were trained on mostly professionally edited photoshoot photos, so they’ve inherited that edited look. They’ve also made me very skinny, despite me picking ‘medium’ body type, showing off that AI image generation bias we’ve all seen.

What’s most interesting is that they’ve managed to muster some of my real expressions, without having had any training on images containing those expressions. This is the best I’ve ever seen it.

The “packs” you have to choose from are very limited, and do venture much more towards the ‘sexy’ use case, which is a bit useless for me. I’m looking for much more variation, something I could use in social posts and for event thumbnails. They’re also all female, there are no male options.

You can also use text-to-image and image-to-image prompting, to generate your own images, which would be great if I could actually use it. Generating just one pack of photos seems to takes upwards of an hour, and on the £6.99/mo plan, you can’t do two things at once.

I don’t think it’ll be long before we have accurate AI images of ourselves, in whatever pose/setting we like. I wonder what that will do for all those “social selfies”?

✏️ Prompt of the Week: 

Are you looking to increase the efficacy of your landing pages? If you’re at it and thinking “but it’s brilliant! Why is nobody converting"?” then this prompt is for you. This one needs a fair bit of data your side, but the results are incredibly useful.

🦾 AI in the News

• Claude has released a new iphone app AND a team plan, starting to rival ChatGPT even more

• Ukraine reveal their very own AI-generated diplomat, Victoria Shi

• Applications are now open for £7.4m of match funding available for AI training for SMEs in the UK (if you need a trainer, you know where to go!)

• X launches Stories, AI-generated summaries of the news

• HeyGen released AI-generated influencer videos

💰 Freebies

Last week, I ran AI for Agencies, an introduction to all things AI for digital agencies, from the perspective of an ex-agency owner. It was super popular and a lot of people requested on an on-demand version, so here it is:

View AI for Agencies on demand here.

FREE Panel Event by SEMRush

Global SEO masters SEMRush has assembled a panel of experts (including me - eek!) who will share practical tips and real use cases to help you get up to speed with AI and prepare you and your organisation for the future of marketing.

At this point, you probably know that learning how to use AI is a requirement to remain competitive. It’s not really a choice anymore.

But, where do you start? How do you go beyond the experimental phase to actually integrate AI into your work, and that of your team?

This free webinar is a crash course on how to think through these questions.

Register for your free ticket here: https://go.semrush.com/future-of-ai-in-marketing_21052024_en.html?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=course139

🎨 AI Image Inspiration

These ‘colouring book’ prompts are so useful if you have kids (or you just like colouring yourself). You can create entire books of whatever image you’d like, including images inspired by real photos.

To learn more about how to dig into Midjourney and do far more expert prompts, there’s an excellent masterclass by Midjourney Master Drew Brucker on the AI for Non-Techies learning hub.

Right, now I’m off to put my feet up and enjoy the rest of what is a bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and hopefully a lot more of this sun!

Have the most wonderful of weeks,

Heather

PS I run this newsletter on Beehiiv, it’s brilliant. Thinking of starting one? Check it out here.