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CarTrendIreland

Using AI art for stock images

Overview

Over the last year we have seen a revolution in the accessibility of new AI tools. Finally, many of these groundbreaking technologies have become available not just to large tech companies and researchers, but also to the general public. These models have been made available via public APIs and open-source projects.

MidJourney is an AI program that uses stable diffusion to generate high quality, original images by using text prompts.

Using AI Art for Branding

Using MidJourney is as simple as typing prompts to a discord bot, and getting back fully rendered artworks. I used MidJourney in CarTrendIreland to find an image that

You can see the series of prompts below in bold and my thoughts on how they would fit into my website in italics.

  1. Prompt 1: futuristic second hand car in the matrix. mathematics, machine learning and statistics are everywhere.
    Prompt 1 Thoughts: I think these are great looking concept arts but they have a few issues; the top right car looks a bit too used so I will remove the term “second hand”, also the colour scheme doesnt match my site theme I’ll try to specify the colour in the prompt.

  2. Prompt 2: futuristic sedan car in the matrix. mathematics, machine learning and statistics are everywhere. everything is blue violet. Prompt 2 Thoughts: The colour is great and matches my logos. However, I think now the cars look too futuristic. Also I would prefer saloon or sedan cars as the model so I’ll work that in also.

  3. Prompt 3: Amazingly detailed cartoon sedan car in the matrix surrounded by mathematics, machine learning and statistics are everywhere. everything is blue violet. Prompt 3 Thoughts: I think the style of the top left one is the best so far but the car still looks too old. Also we see that there is a tree forming in the bottom left picture again, perhaps because I included the term cartoon.

  4. Prompt 4: Realistic sedan car. blue violet background. in the matrix surrounded by mathematics Prompt 4 Thoughts: These ones were closer to my original vision. I like the style of the top right one but it probably is too close to a video game. A variation of the top left image is the one I ultimately chose. I did feel though, that I would like the images to be a little sharper.

  5. Prompt 5: Photograph of sedan car in the matrix. light blue violet background. Prompt 5 Thoughts: I think these turned out very well, especially the top right image of the Mercedes. I added the word light to the prompt on the colour and felt that the generated images were too bright.

  6. Prompt 6: Realistic sedan car. blue violet background. in the matrix surrounded by mathematical symbols in the shape of three leaf clover. Prompt 6 Thoughts: I tried to include three leaf clovers/shamrocks to give the branding an Irish feel. Instead they ended up looking more like Marijuana plant leaves rather than clover leaves.

Fine Tuning

I felt I had generated a decent sample of images for me to choose from, I decided to go with prompt 4 image 1. With this I was able to generate multiple variations on the image, with slightly different number patterns and angles. Finally I used AI upscaling to generate my final image for my front page.

Prompt 6

Conclusion

AI art is not only possible, it’s here. This entire art generation process took less than 30 minutes. In an incredibly short amount of time, I was able to iterate through 24 distinct images, with the only limiting factor being the speed of my imagination.

I was very happy with my final image, with perhaps the only criticism being that the numbers on the car are perhaps still a bit too abstract. Future text-to-image generation models such as Google Imagen have already taken steps to improve problems like this.

AI art will allow future businesses to iterate on branding decisions faster than ever before. However, I do not see this as a full replacement for a strong marketing and design team who will be required to fine tune and respond to very specific requests.