30: Using AI for Revolutionizing Creative Projects with Jessie Hughes

Today, I'm thrilled to have Jesse Hughes from AI image generation platform Leonardo AI. This was a fascinating discussion about the intersection of generative AI and the creative industries. See, Jesse's the senior creative technologist and artist in residence at Leonardo AI and brings a decade of experience in this space. She spends a lot of time educating creatives around the world on how to get the best possible output from their model, including product shots, ad creative photo shoots, and pretty much any application of images a growth hacker would need. Now let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Hey everybody. I'm excited to invite Jesse Hughes from Leonardo AI to the podcast today. And we're going to talk about something that's been on my mind for a very long time. Jesse, why don't, before we get started, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

For sure. Hey, Chris, My name is Jesse Hughes. I'm the senior creative technologist at Leonardo AI. I'm also very lucky to be an artist in residence there. So I have, you know, a 10 year career in the creative industries, been working across that space of emerging technology and how that kind of intersects with like the arts and the creative industries for a long time. And then last year, I think, as we were all aware, Generative AI really, really had its moment and it raised a lot of attention. And it was this kind of incredible moment as a creative where I went, oh my gosh, my practice has now just expanded tenfold. And I, you know, and I just couldn't stop exploring how my practice could now just expand in every, every vertical that I hadn't even considered before. And so that was what kind of drew me to Leonardo in the first place. So for those who don't know, Leonardo AI is an incredible, incredible generative AI creative toolkit for content creation. What I would say the reason I really enjoyed Leo was it was everything all in one place. Back when I was learning and trying all these different things, you would have to go to one platform to like make an image, another platform to upscale the image and make it like high quality. And then you have to go to another platform to add motion, you have to go to another platform. So it's just my subscriptions, guys. I'm paying for Netflix, Spotify, like, I can't have all these subscriptions. And yeah, so that's kind of where I ended up finding Leonardo. And the, the platform has grown just so much of a community within such a short time period. So Liro has the third largest Discord community in the world. So that's like, that's massive. A group of people who are all here to be like trying learning off each other and in 18 months we have grown to have over 15 million users. Like that is what that is. Incredible. Right?

Congratulations.

Thank you. I think we're currently Australia's fastest growing SaaS, which is absolutely insane. Wow. Yeah, so it started, I think it was Christmas 2022. So it was co founded by these creators who used to be our founders that used to run a game studio. And I think this is really, really important piece of the whole narrative because anyone who works in games knows the process. It takes a significant amount of time and money to make all of these assets which a lot of the time it's an additional texture for a sword or something like that. It's not really the center of the story and then out of where you need to be spending your time. And so our founder, co founder JJ like yeah, he just saw this opportunity for how we could be expediting that process in a way that allows creatives to therefore then focus their time and energy where, where it should be on expanding these worlds and expanding this creative process. So yeah, that was kind of like the beginning point and it has just not stopped since then, which is incredibly exciting. But if everyone's aware, like the AI space, space today is incredibly saturated and yet Leonardo time and time again has, you know, sat among those top standout gen AI platforms. And I think it's just a real testament to the entire tech team for building a product that is technically excellent. Like the actual capabilities are excellent but the user interface is incredibly user friendly. So I teach, I teach like AI to everybody. I mean like from school kids to uni people to like real old adults. And I had, I had a 67 year old woman in one of my classes the other day who has, you know, she's a traditional artist. She came to the class, tagged me on the, you know, a few hours later and she had trained, she trained a model on her body of art work to create more work. And this is a 67 year old woman and she. Yeah, but it was just like, it just is so easy. And I think that's what's beautiful about like these tools. They, the term like democratizing creativity comes up a lot when you talk about AI, but I think it is such a beautiful Opportunity in this space. People get upset that a 16 year old can do what took me a three year design degree to do, but I don't feel that at all. That competitor of when Canva came along and it was like, I have a three year design degree and someone can go jump on Canva and make an asset to me. That's not a threat because if somebody wants specific like a, like a, a top tier designer, they're going to find the designer who has that distinct style or aesthetic. Whereas for a small business, which I know is a lot of our listeners right now, for a small business or a founder, like, the fact that you can use these resources so easily is incredible. And so I think that's where Leo has such a massive opportunity for. Yeah. This space of business owners and creatives or. Sorry. Or any creatives. Yeah. So you've got this, you know, parallel of you can either have easy access and easy learning of skills of people who are just getting into the space or you can have people who are experts at that craft who understand composition and artistry and story and you know, all these absolutely beautiful elements who can then expand across all these other verticals. So if you are say traditionally a photographer, you can now expand your storytelling into illustration, 3D graphics, like all of these other spaces. And likewise if you're an illustrator, you can now have incredible photography and like this expansive. So to me, I find it so exciting as a creative, I'm like, oh my gosh, what else can I do?

Nice. Yeah, we've actually that's. We haven't done a ton of image generation prior to our exposure to Leonardo. But honestly, now that we've gotten it is so easy to use and not, you know, competitors are out there and that sort of thing. However, personal experience, Dolly got the job done. It was okay, right? But it was obviously. And I'm not, I'm not here to talk bad about anybody, but just my personal experience. It was obviously, you know, generative effort. It wasn't, it didn't look like right and mid journey cool stuff. But dude, like I've. That's the only Discord server I've ever been in before. And it just compared to other generative AI tools, it was like, wait a minute, everybody else is making it easy. Why are you guys making it so hard? And then Leo comes along and honestly it's been the easiest of the tools that we've used. So that was pretty, pretty refreshing as well. So you mentioned a couple things. The growth has been phenomenal.

Yeah.

Why.

I think it's just what you said, it's easy. Like it's easy. The accessibility is truly there by design. Like we are the team was. And it's something that we're actually currently working on, on making it even easier because we are, we are at this kind of like crossword between do you give people like complete creative control? Which is our end goal. It's one of our like pillar values at LEO is creative control. So by that I mean the ability to literally like go in and edit like specific in the same way. Like you have, you know, high end creative software like whatever, Photoshop or whatever, like detailed. Like we have the capabilities of the tools with that within leo. But then we also want to cater for the people who are coming in for the first time, this is their first time doing image gen. How do we make that like a seamless experience? And so we're currently working on, yeah, some, some really exciting things which are launching quite soon on how we can be even easier. But I think there was probably that and then the other element of the images are fantastic. And that is the thing, it's like, like you said with your experience Dali, we can't gen AI will not break through to the mainstream if the images are subpar. And I think that is something that's very important is that I use the word indiscernible when I, I give my lectures and it's this idea of like AI works in a commercial context if the imagery feels indiscernible, as in, as in an audience isn't looking at that and saying oh, that's AI. The other thing is like audiences are incredibly savvy. They're also incredibly on edge about trying to like identify these kind of things. So it's a sense of like, well, what instance are you using it in? Like what example is this? Like use cases this being used in, Is it appropriate? Like, like where can you, you know, do multi layered stuff? Almost like if, like what, what is the use case and how do you want to build upon that is what I think is really relevant. You know, like I have a, I have a friend who's, she's a founder, she's, you know, building her business and she wanted this beautiful like stock photography. They were going to charge $500 per photograph for her. Yeah, right.

Ridiculous.

How in the world like honestly can a startup or found or the general public, like that is not an affordable, it's just not affordable. And beyond that, it's not photography that is the specific stuff that she wants for her, for her Brain. It was a sense of like, well, now we have the capability where we can, you know, define, define the models, define the scene, define the color tone, define the grade. Like the new tools that we're rolling out. We even have the ability for like style. So if she has say, a brand guideline of what her photography style is, we can go in and make sure that all of our images reflect that same style. Which is a really, really helpful commercial tool for. Yeah, for people who are trying to build their own, their own stuff, which is great. And like, I, like, I'm first and foremost an artist, so it's like I completely respect and love the photography. I love creative processes. Like, oh my God, there's nothing makes me happier on this earth and creative collaboration. But that process is and is, is expensive and it is time consuming. And I think there is a difference between a fashion, you know, fashion brand having this incredible photo shoot and, you know, being cutting edge and the, you know, beauty of possibility versus a small business owner who needs to have some photography of a, of a coffee cup because, you know, they're rolling out a new thing. So it's just, it's just about the use cases. We'll be back after a quick break. Do you want to start your own.

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Right.

And it sounds like you guys aren't necessarily in the same category as the other generative AI image tools that are out there. It sounds like, like, how do you guys see yourselves in the marketplace? Do you see it as Leonardo is in its own category?

I mean, I do, yeah. It's why, it's why I worked for them. Yeah, I think the I, when I came on board with Leonardo, I genuinely felt it was a step like to me it was like I see this being the new kind of Adobe in the sense of like this content suite. And I think that's what's very, very special and distinct about Leonardo is it is a content suite. We're constantly building out features and models and the kind of meetings that we have like this, it's such a cross industry experience. Like one day having meetings with game studios, the other day I'm having advertising, then I'm doing marketing, then I'm over talking to Hollywood and having film meetings. And it's just like the reality is every single industry in the world is looking at this right now. The other thing that I didn't mention earlier was we, Leonardo is operating well. So we have users from over 189 different countries. We are in every single continent in the world, our user base. And so this is a very distinct difference in the sense that like this is not just something that's happening in the States or Australia or Silicon Valley. You know, like this is something like a lot of our users come from like South America and like you know, just everywhere around the world. And we get these awesome submissions from artists and creatives and just verticals that we also have never even like even thought of. And then users come in and say, hey, we've got this use case. And immediately that goes to our team of being like, oh my God, we didn't think about this use case. Like how do we make this, you know, practical? And so we really are in a phase of taking on as much like we want to know what people need and want so that we can, you know, specialize that. And you've got teams who are doing like specialized, like refined models. So for example, I saw one today and like graphic novels. So there's a specific model that's like perfectly trained for graphic novels and there's another one that's perfectly trained for like different types of cameras and even like different lenses. We're at this point like one of my favorite, if anyone's going on having a play, like one of my favorite ones is like unprocessed film. Like we have all these different beautiful things. Like our photo reel, we have photoreal. So that's like really high quality stuff and you can do everything from like cinematic. So if you're trying to like create almost like cinema worthy scenes or styles all the way through to stock, stock photography where we have this model where you're able to, you know, if you want that more less creative like sticky thing, if you're trying to do clothing or Something I don't know.

So yeah, that's got me excited about, about creating images. This is awesome.

Yeah, I mean like, I find it so easy to get excited about because I've so I, I have a. Yeah, yeah. Bachelor in fine arts, but I also have a degree in screenwriting and I find this hilarious because I studied screenwriting so that I could articulate with words what I wanted to like share with the world and what I was seeing and feeling. And now I like literally use words imprompting to create these, these images and these words that I can share with people. And I think like even that basic example of pitching, like if you're using the screen screenwriting context, like nobody wants to read a 30 page script, by the way, it sucks. You put your heart and soul into it. Nobody's going to read it unless they get a compelling pitch deck or treatment. And so being able to like I can visualize in the correct tone like who. What my story is about. And that's just so much more compelling. When you go to the, in the context of the real world, you have to convince producers you have to give it like I think anybody who understands their niche field understands how many layers are involved with the steps and having convincing and compelling imagery to support that. If even something simple like pitch decks as a founder, you're going to be more compelling if your imagery is. We're just visual people. So yeah, I get pretty excited by the possibilities of, of that. But through to like the literal like commercially viable use cases of. I've had meetings with directors who have visualized their entire production before they have gone to set. And like when you're talking about a film production like that is millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars. So if you can spend, I don't know, $100,000 like a month or something before, a month or two beforehand, like you know, stretching it out. That's incredible to me in terms of like different shifting. It's a shifting workflow. And so that's the other thing that I would say instead of like your, your great reference you're saying about changing the paradigm. Like for me it's just a shifting of workflows. Like it's, it's not. Doesn't have to necessarily replace stuff like it, but I love it. It can change how I go about approaching my creative workflow. Yeah. So for me I think it's absolutely exciting. And there's so much cool stuff like every single week. I mean you have an AI podcast, you understand this. But like every single Week. There's phenomenal stuff happening in the AI world and like, to see it internally as well, it's just so cool. We're. Next week we're launching character consistency to the rest of the populars. I've been able to play with it behind the scenes, but this character consistency for me is, Is going to be the game changer because I can now have consistent character. And I mean perfect, perfect Chris. Consistent character. I'm ready all of my resources. It's been insane. I was doing like a, like a fake marketing campaign last week and just this to, to me, I just couldn't. It's a ha moment, like, and I'm sure you'll have it if you go in and play with these tools where you sit there and you're like, this is not real. You know, like, how is this happening? And I will sit, you know, go to my parents place and be like, I made this this week. And they don't know what I'm saying when they say that I made this. Like, what. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense to them. I made this. Like, what do you mean you didn't do a photo shoot in New York this week? I'm like, well, I did well, yeah. Yeah. So that's been like quite a fun process of the onboarding and like, under, like upskilling. That's a big part of my, just like a value that I have is bringing others along in the process and making sure, like, people are excited by these tools because it is, it is exciting. And I think until you, until you play with gen tools, I think there can be a bit of a misconception that you just like type in, make a picture and it's that like, oh, my God. That's not quite it. Like, you know, I spent hours refining and making sure everything's correct. And the fact, like, it's a, it's just a different process. It's a different creative process, but the outcomes can be spectacular. Yeah.

You made a comment and I don't think if you really realize the impact of it, but there's. In the world, there's intimidation around the tools. If people haven't had that aha moment that you mentioned, once you have the aha moment, you realize, oh, like, I'm in control here. It's not the, it's not the machine. But you mentioned that it's not really like a paradigm shift. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's just a workflow shift.

Yeah.

And that was. I hadn't heard it put that way. But, like, guys, there's nothing to worry about. We're just doing things a little differently. Right? So it's a very great way of looking at it. So here's my deal. I wouldn't consider myself a creative. Yeah, I am left brain like crazy. And like, however, it's, it's not that I, I wouldn't want to leverage creativity in the operation of my business. The portrayal of my messages, my narrative in the marketplace, it just, it, it hasn't been something that was easy for me, but, you know, my experiences using Leonardo have been that it is. I'm having the aha moment, let's put it that way. But as a business owner, you know, prior to this conversation, honestly, you've, you've, you've changed my opinion on some things. But prior to this conversation, I was, I was like, oh, yeah, it's cool. Kind of like the music stuff. Yeah, it's cool. But, like, how is that gonna, how is that gonna influence my, my prospects? But the way that you put it, like, instantly I was like, oh, yeah. And all of my pitch decks and all of my presentations and all, like, every place that I'm using any type of imagery, duh. So it was, it wasn't the barrier to introduce creativity into my business. Wasn't as hard as I thought it was. So thank you for, well, you inadvertently.

Bringing me to Anyone who runs a business. Like, you know, story is. Is vital to how audiences engage with you, story and brand. And whether you want it, like, it's, it's, you know, people. I think people think it's like the fluffy stuff on top. And I'm like, it's literally how you talk to your users, like, or audience. It's, it's, it's your entire. It's the outfit that you're wearing. Like, it's vit. And so I think the fact that these. And the other thing that I would say is, previously you wouldn't have invested in that content because it would have been correct, it would have been incredibly expensive and just not. It wouldn't be a business need for you, immediate business need. Whereas now I'm sure you could say, yeah, you know what, I am going to spend two days building out whatever it is that I need, and instantly, your business looks sexier, it looks better, it looks like it has more personality and people are going to connect with you significantly more. And this can be everything from, you know, I haven't really gone into all the graphic stuff, but, like, we can easily make graphic resources for You. So if you were having like, you know, like, like expanding your logo or putting your logo across things or if you had. Oh God, I get character. Like honestly it is, it is endless with these possibilities. But I think in your case, yeah, just being able to make resources that are more compell with a distinct aesthetic and that is the difference, the business point that I want to get to because yeah, obviously if you're going to go make a suite of images that have no consistency and no cohesion, then it's just going to be images. Whereas. Whereas if you have, if you think about it strategically from like a brand or a messaging standpoint, it's like what, what imagery is actually going to be convincing, compelling to audiences and what is say the correct style? Like I think when you go through that process, like you're just going to be able to tell stories better to your audience and therefore they're going to engage better. And people in like you can do like, I mean bloody Google have done like a million studies. It's like with, with advertising and stuff. It's like if you have the same thing that you're advertising but across like three different images, but it's the same thing. It's like the same thing shot in a few different ways. People engage more. I don't know why, we just do. Maybe it feels more realistic but like these little almost like psychology tricks that people use in marketing or whatever like that. It's just the content creation is so much easier now that we can make it a priority at a really, really, really accessible entry point with a not steep learning curve. Because that was the problem before last year. Like last year I think there was a bit of a learning curve. Whereas now you jump on the platform and it's like okay, what are we making today? Let's go. Which I think is quite special. The other thing that I would add, which I haven't really got into because we're talking about small businesses, but last week I announced the launch of teams. Now this is our enterprise ready production suite for teams. And by that I mean in the same way Figma has collaborative, you know, collaborative tooling and like the Google suite does collaborative stuff. We realized this was a point if we wanted to be this, you know, gen AI superpower that I think we, we're on the trajectory to be. How do we have an enterprise suite that everybody can use? And so if we say, say you and I are in a business Chris, and you know, I might be leading the creative direction on something, all of a sudden you can Use the same prompts, the same model that maybe I've gone in and trained myself so for, for our business. And, and I've got my characters that I've built out. So my job might be to like, you know, design the brand or whatever. Then you can go in into teams, have a folder and be like, oh yeah, I want, I want that. But actually I need, I need a water bottle in the shop because I'm selling a water bottle. I don't know, whatever. And you can go and just add it to that in. And it's all looking at the same stuff. It's like this collaborative.

So does that look like the creative team could come in and almost create the style guide inside the images? And me as a marketer who didn't want to have the time or whatever to go back and forth with, I could go in there, I could use your standards with my prompt and get on brand images that I need on the fly 100%. Okay.

Now as a business person, that sounds pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Because that was something that we realized was just like the reality, like people in businesses do not have all the time in the world. And when you're trying to learn new things, that is, we realized that was a, like a barrier and so we're okay, how do we make this seamless and easy? And it's this sense of like you could dedicate, say whoever runs your creative in your team or something. Like they can be leading more of that, that defining what the aesthetic is and defining all that kind of stuff. And then you could go in and use those like presets or whatever they're talking about and jump and make stuff. And so I think very cool. Yeah, it is really awesome. And I think these like privately trained model stuff is really cool for enterprise and teams. And it's just, it's just, we're just trying to make it like, how do we make this practical? Like, that was everything that we're thinking of. Like, we don't want to this short. We definitely have like users who love, like, we like have different categories for our different users. But say you've got the hobbyists, so people who are AI forward, people who are like early adopters and in there like playing, making cool stuff, like awesome. We love those people, like, oh my God, obsessed. But as we grow as a business and scale, we really have to think about the market and think, okay, who, like, what business cases are we going to be able to solve and who are these verticals? Like, currently, I think we're really looking at the advertising industry, marketing industries, film, even stuff like architecture and, like, design and all of these different categories who are really creative Forward as well is something that we really can't. Like. We have a thing called Leonardo's Creator Program, which is. I love it. I'm so excited by it. I'm stoked. And that's where we, like, highlight top creators. And so it's this sense of, like, if you are a top creator from your platform. Yes. And so for people. Yes. Yeah. So we want to. We want to be able to find, like, I know you're friends with Matt Wolf. And so, like, we want to be able to, like, find people who are doing incredible, incredible things with generative AI and, like, look, you got full access to the platform. Like, go and have tokens galore. Like, very cool.

So, Jesse, I need some advice.

Yeah.

We have creative talent that we work with and we like them, but I don't know that they're using the tools.

Right.

I think that they're, like, a lot of people, they're. They're waiting to see or whatever. They're afraid of the learning curve. What would you tell a business owner like me who had creatives that they didn't want to replace necessarily? Because those people, they understand our. Our brand story and they, like, they've been with us. Right. But we want them to start using or at least exploring. Right. The tools. What advice would you give to somebody like me?

I would.

Or to tell them.

Yeah, no, I would encourage you to incentivize them, to give them the time to learn these tools. Because I think if, you know, in the reality of a busy workday, you're like, oh, I don't have time to learn. The executives need to dedicate time to whoever they want to execute. So let's say you're a creative team. So, like, hey, here's three days. You have three whole days to just go in and, like, figure out this platform. Because I think the first two days you can get some pretty, like, whatever, like, trying to learn. And by the third day, I think they're going to have their. Their minds kind of really captured on the sense of, oh, I get why we are doing this. And that is the. That is great. That is the aha moment. Because if someone doesn't have time to learn, they're not going to prioritize it ever. No one, in whatever context.

Agreed.

But if you was. If you. As an ex. If I was an executive at a company, I would. I would seriously invest in, like, one week of giving my Employees time to really nail in learning how to leverage. Leverage, leverage. Because the investment in the long term of a one week's pay versus in the long term of having a skilled workforce will be phenomenal in the sense that instead of you having to like whatever you're like whatever your creative team pays.

Great advice.

It's. But this is unlike, unlike this across every single business. Like the fact that we are not. So I teach, I teach at unis like I mentioned and I had a graduate class last year going into industry. Having never touched AI, I felt sick to my core. Chris. I was sad. I felt sad that these kids were leaving university having not been trained in any capacity on how to leverage, you know, ChatGPT or Leo or like any of these skills because it is one of the most desired skills today if you can do these skills. And so like I think it's the smartest business move you will ever do is to get is you upskill your team internally because and I, and I think it's interesting that you said about this idea of replacing. I'm in no way encouraging replacing people. It's. You need to train your people to be able to nail Jenny because the long term benefits to your company will be expensive. So yeah, to me it's a sense for a sense of expanding your business potential as a. Yeah, it's just, it's like a no brainer to me. And it's not just like these, it's everything. I mean like government, like schools, like it should be, it should be this next phase of like I remember in primary school we had you know, learning how to use a computer and like learning how to use the Internet and like learning how to do these things like learning how to leverage AI is just a vital like fourth industrial revolution skill.

True. You know, like and I do this podcast, I talk to smart people about generative AI all the time. I'm immersed in it on a daily basis but I still have aha moments when I'm talking to people. And the way that you put that of that's an obvious no brainer investment. So next time that I'm working with a client or advising a client, I'm going to say look, a week, great. But if you can't do a week, a day, two days, something. But if your people will, if you give them the space to have the aha moment and like, I don't know, teach them, guide them or whatever that individual once expanded, the mind doesn't contract to its original state. Yeah, they won't forget that. Oh this tool is here and it, once I figured it out, things got easier, things got faster. So that perspective of train them on leo, train them on whatever your tools are, but that perspective of taking the time or allowing the time for your team to actually like saying, hey, this time is just for you to go goof around on the tools, figure it out. Those people will be huge. I mean the data all shows that once somebody's upskilled on Gen AI, they're like, they're gone. You can't catch them. They're like unstoppable. So great advice.

Again, I think you'll also find that you'll have front runners in your business. So people who like, are they like, they get in and they just get it and they just get it. And if those people can then be the ones who are leading your teams in what I was saying earlier about like setting up those early stage team stuff, it's then easier for everybody. So it's like the, yeah, it's just, it's just exciting. And, and the other long term like money that you will save in the sense, like I don't know what your business is, but say whatever, like that you're spending on licensing, you know, stock footage or the other things you're not settling because when you use stock a lot of the time you're trying to be like, oh, this is kind of close to. Or your alternative is to get like a photo shoot which is probably going to cost about $20,000 as an entry point. And so like these little, these things like the long term, they add up. And it's what I like about like Leo is this creative control element of like I can get specifically exactly what it is that I'm wanting. Like that is like I was doing a, I was doing a photo shoot yesterday across like a mountain and it was like to do a photo shoot like on a mountain to you know, advertise a jack. It's just. I would love to but again it's.

Who is the Patagonia or experience of that, please?

There's a difference. Like obviously if I'm like the marketing director of Kathmandu or something like that, like, yeah, probably it's beautiful to go and do those experiences. But I think it's, for me it's always thinking about what is the, what's the actual use case and who is the person. Like if it's a small marketing team because like you probably hire a 3D team to create assets anyway. And like 3D is incredibly hard, it's incredibly expensive. Whereas now we can do like currently where we're at, we can do like 2D, 3D. So like it's, it looks 3D, it's actually like, like flat image currently. But the if you're doing a poster, you know, like if you're using, doing a flat Instagram post or something like that, you know, you don't need those elements. So yeah, I think it's a lot to do with what is your use case, what are you trying to achieve? Like how do we kind of work around that like Leo. One of our most popular tools with LEO is the upscaler. It's I think probably best in industry and it's this ability to kind of upscale imagery to a really, really high quality. And so say you spend your day working on a whole suite of different images and there you get your final output that is a you know, just fine image. We then take it into the upscaler but all of a sudden you have this incredibly high resolution either photograph or illustration or you know, whatever it is to the point that, that indescend like that indescen. Like that's what I'm getting to like I can't believe that every day I can have aha moment. Yesterday I had an aha moment where I was putting most character consistency was this character that I was working on last week and I put her in this photo ship on this mountain and I was like the wind's blowing in her hair and she's you know, looking its expression and I was like how is this what is happening?

Like I'm sitting still at a desk.

I know, right? And like as a kid, as a creative kid, you have this imagination of like if only people could see my dreams. If only people could see what's in my mind. And I sit here and take what's out of my mind and put it, give it to people and print it and tada. It's on a wall. Like the workflow to me is the is, is the, is the comparison, sorry comparative to when photography came about. I think like it's that sense of oh my God, the game has changed. And what photography did was expanded an entire new industry in the sense of like social media. God, social media doesn't work. Doing oil paintings. I don't think so. Like you know, it's just a shift and the, the opportunities are going to be. We can't even imagine. Like I do a lot of like futurist envisioning like a lot of future planning and it's just like you get so far and then it's Kind of like. Well, I don't know if we can see beyond that, to be honest, like at that point. And yeah, I would, I would just encourage everybody to give it a play because that's the only way that you're really going to learn and see, see the business opportunities as well. Like we even just like little things like we have. So we also do an API. And what I mean by that is if you have a small business, you can actually plug into Leonardo's functionality to then bring AI. Oh, are you.

Oh my God.

Cool. Oh my God. Awesome. Yeah. And so we have like API clients who do so many different things. Like there is someone that does like elearning and being able to like visualize stuff for E learning is really, really, really helpful because a lot of people are. Visual learning.

Yes.

And then we have like, people who are filmmakers and they use it for vfx. So being able to add like VFX stuff, which typically have been really quite hard. But using leo, we're able to create, you know, that asset that you then combine with your existing, you know, video production workflow. But you've got this additional asset which makes it so much easier. And I mean, honestly, I could go on and on. We've got like interactive storytelling API clients, so like people who tell stories and being able to generate the next scene as it kind of unfolds, which is just such a beautiful way of leaning into the capabilities of generative tooling. And I can go on for literally hours about all of the amazing use cases, but it's just this thing of, I would say, like, think about your business and where are you, like, what are you, like, are you buying things? Like, where are you putting it and how can you be doing it? And beyond that, it's like, where are you trying to tell people stories? Like, where are you trying to connect with your audience? And a lot of the time, social media is massive for businesses. It's like email marketing, headers, pamphlets, banners and stuff. Like things that aren't particularly overwhelmingly exciting, but are very, very, very important for having high application.

Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you. So we've been for the past, probably, I mean, actually since January, my team has been working on a content creation and distribution process that uses the podcast as kind of like the seed of that context for all of the other gen tools that come in. And how we're using Leonardo is they are creating blog posts based on the content. And I think there shouldn't be a video walkthrough of everything right now. Actually, I Think what they're doing is they're now running that through a prompt that's specifically for the, the image generation and they're sending that through and then they're pulling. So we are telling a story. The images that are coming back, they're not just like, oh, cool image. It's an image that was because of a prompt that we use extracted the appropriate language from a blog post. So now we've got like killer images unique on brand from a blog post. Pretty cool. And we're using the API for that. So it's pretty cool stuff.

Hell yeah. Oh, awesome. That's so good to hear.

We do a lot of Tinker.

We're. See, Tinker is. I love it. Tinker is hackers. Like, what else can you figure out? But it's funny that you say that because we even, we even use AI in our internal teams. Like, I saw a post today, we had like one of our designers had a series of images and we weren't sure which was going to be like the header. And she got ChatGPT to be like, hey, here is the series of images according to you and click, like, click results, whatever, like, which is the best image out of this suite. And like Jen was able to be like, yo, this one's going to be the highest click rate because of these reasons. And so we're like, awesome, thanks for that. And you know, picked that one out of a suite of images. Like, yeah, that like, yeah, the strategy and like the strategist in me is just like, holy moly. Like the. Yeah, it's phenomenal because we have the capabilities to do like so many options like years ago, I mean, like university days, I don't know, 20, say 2012 or something like that. I remember seeing a car company show me that how they use Gen AI or they would use like very early days gen to generate a series of like car designs of how, like, which had the best, like, you know, with physics of wind and all this stuff. Yeah. Yes, yes. It was like an engineering thing of like using a software. And I sat there, oh my God, imagine having this exponential capability with your, with your process. And that was, to me, I think it must have been like, I don't know, Lexus or Honda. Someone who has a lot of money to be able to invest in the engineering case.

Yeah.

And I was very jealous of that capability. And now, you know, a decade later, and it's just sitting, like sitting on my computer and I just, you know, play around with it and all of a sudden I have an Entire suite. Like, I. Yeah, it's just, it's just never ending with the possibilities and the use cases. And even like, if somebody wants like a fun, a very fun intro to, to the tool, like we have a thing called Live or Real Time Canvas. And it's pretty much like if you imagine a kid with an iPad, you can, you can be the kid, it can be you, it can be any of us sitting there with an iPhone and just doodling, like, even like we used to doodle in paint back in the day and the AI can like interpret your doodles and instantly real time render into imagery that is like, that is picture perfect. And so I was doing like a silly little tutorial last week and you know, I think I was doodling a koala or whatever, but there and then, depending on which model I put onto it. So if I wanted it to be anime, if I wanted it to be photography or painting or ray trace or 3D render or like a vibrant sketch or cinematic, like whichever thing I wanted it to be, and it was instantly rendering like these, these excellent, like standout things. And then what's even cooler? Okay, so I can do that and then I can save that, upscale it, you know, get it to a nice quality image and then, and then use that into my image gen so I can like, okay, thanks. I've got my particular koala, which is now like the mascot for my, I don't know, Vegemite business. You know, this is very Australian. Sorry. And then be able to take that and build an entire entire series of images of photography and branded content and T shirts and whatever, whatever it is that I want that day built off that. So the workflow is like, usually as a, as a designer, I would sit there at my desk, at my table, you know, sketch on paper and then take it into, I don't know, probably like Illustrator or whatever. The tools which require a lot of learning, require, you know, now I can doodle directly in platform and use directly in platform into my suite of content.

We're underutilizing the functionalities. I can tell you that this, this call has really, you know, I just, it was one of those categories, you can't, you can't do it all. And like music, it was interesting. I played with it, I made my kids a couple songs and it's fun, but I'm not going to be in there regularly. Yeah, I thought the same thing with the image stuff. I've had a Mid Journey account forever. I. Dolly was free. You know, it was included in GPT plus And I just didn't use it. I mean, I'm still paying, I don't know, 10, 20 bucks a month, whatever, for midjourney. And I just, I just don't use it because I just didn't see the application. But unintentionally or intentionally, you have like, I'm interested to go in there. Certainly it'll be cool to see what creative, like, hey, wait a minute, maybe I am creative kind of experience. I have, however, the ability because I got a 25 year background in marketing and I know you're gonna love this. Oh my God, yes, I'm seeing that now. And I'm like, man, I need to be more intentional with the use of the image Gen AI. So for anybody listening, the advice that Jesse gave earlier about giving your employees some time to learn the tools, do the same with yourself.

Oh yeah, right.

Because a couple of things, One, you're, you're now going to have a new tool in your toolkit. But on top of that, you now can go into your own team or your business or whatever, your clients, businesses. And you, from having spent that afternoon having your aha moment, you're now a bit of a subject matter expert, right? You're, you're, the perception in the marketplace is that you are now, your economic viability has improved because, because of the afternoon you spent on Leo getting used to the tools. So for somebody that wants to, that wants to do that, what obviously Leonardo AI. But is there any particular, like what would be first steps for somebody that was going to be trying it out this afternoon after this podcast episode?

Yeah. Cool. So I do it the way I teach in universities. So I would start with real time canvas or like so Leonardo, there's like a few, like real time canvas is just a good way of being like, I'm going to have a doodle and have that instant kind of like adrenaline hit of being like, oh my God, it's making what I want. And so like start with your little sketch, do something silly and then play with the different models. So like the ray trace, the illustration, the sketch, like just so you get an idea of when, when the system knows what it is that you want, it will give you what you want. And if you're getting not very good images, it's because you're not probably not telling it the right things or you're not using it correctly. Like the results are phenomenal when it works, when, when you can articulate things correctly. So I would say probably start there and then going into the image generation area, like Image generation is where we is like our better bread and butter. I mean, we also do like motion. I haven't got into all our other features because there's a zillion, but you know, we're able to do motion as well. But let's just keep it simple for today. Yeah, yeah. So you would, you would type in a prompt and I think when you get into prompt writing, using AI to write prompts is really helpful. It's a feature that we're going to be rolling out publicly I think soon. I am obsessed with it since. So I think it might only be available to me right now, but this improve prompt. So I will write like a simple dodgy prompt. I don't know, whatever. Like in Leonardo. Yeah, in Leonardo. So directly into the prompt bar. So like a woman, it's got a.

Prompt improver that's coming.

Yeah, Chris, very cool. Game changer. I'll write maybe like 10 words that aren't very good. Oh, here, here we go. Okay, type of prompt. A woman hiker on a mountainside photography. I don't know. This is my excellent morning brain and oops. And all of a sudden if I press improve my prompt, I'm going to get this. So it goes from a woman hiker on a mountainside photo to a resilient, adventurous woman stands proudly on a rugged mountainside, her gaze fixed at the vast horizon ahead. The photo captures her, a mid height with windswept hair and a determined expression. This stunning photograph showcases the beauty of nature and the spirit of exploration. The vibrant colors and sharp details bring the scene to life, making it a truly captivating image that conveys a sense of freedom and awe.

Much better picture, I'm sure.

I think that's a bit more detailed than a woman stands on a mountain.

Yeah.

And so the, yeah. So I think tools like that is really helpful. But beyond like those are like the beginning entry points. It's for me, when you get into the elements of style reference, of content reference, depth to image, edge to image, pose to image, like these are the phenomenal tools which are to me the step up of people who can actually use Gen AI tools. Because if I'm doing a content reference, so say there's like, I don't know, a scene of people playing basketball or something like that I can, I can use as a content reference to then be like, okay, I also want to make a scene with a basketball, but I want it to be particularly like in this, in this layout or pose. The pose thing's really helpful. So like if you are doing a clothing shoot or something. Like, I could literally, I could get somebody in my office. It could be you. You could be standing in front of me. I can take a photo of the model, you know, with a hand behind her head or whatever, whatever pose you want and use. Yeah, it's a beautiful pose. It looks, it's stylish. And use that pose to then put your. Your model, like your character into that same position. Phenomenal. You know, we've got edge to image. So if you wanted to have like, say you've got your, your brand or your title, like say the word Leonardo, I could then do Leonardo in a black font. Just like, whatever, you know, whatever my tool is test, have Leonardo in the font and, and then take it in and do edge to image. And all of a sudden I've got picture perfect Leonardo text use as to create a scene. So it could be like graffiti on a wall or it could be on a. I made a silly thing for someone on a birthday cake the other day, you know, like Happy birthday, Chris. And it's. I've made, you know, I've just got black, the black and white text. But instantly I've now got it written on top of a cake in the same, exact same font, exact same outline. And that was simply by using like an edge to image reference thing. And like, again, I can, I can go on and on and on and on.

This has been great. I was hoping that this would happen. So how this got started was.

I don't know.

I think maybe Matt might have introduced me to. For some reason I reached out.

Yeah.

And I had a call with somebody from your team.

Yeah.

And then I mentioned the podcast and I, I thought there's gonna be. Okay, Jesse, tell me how I can use, you know, art in my business. I'm not that guy. However, you've made like, the way that this conversation has gone, it's made it much more accessible to somebody who, like, I'm a businessman. I'm not, you know, art is for other people. But now I'm very, you know, that's been challenged and.

Yeah.

So thank you for doing that. So listen, I would like for people to be able to follow what you're doing and what Leonardo is doing. Are there specific places online where you're showcasing some of these aha. Moments that you're having?

Yeah. So that's something that we're really keen to push out. I think we're going to be starting doing monthly demos where I actually help, like, run through the platform and to be able to upskill the community. Because, yeah, it is. It's like there's new stuff comes out every single week. So it's like, okay, well, let's make sure we bring everybody along with these developments. Yeah, I mean, I'm quite active on LinkedIn and Leonardo is also quite active on LinkedIn. Obviously our Discord is the place to be if you're a Discord person. But again, I'm people. We've got 3 million people. It's a lot. I know. It's, it's, it's a global community of incredible, like, incredible creators. And what's cool about our Discord community specifically is I say, like, they're predominantly early adopters and like they are people who have been at the front of this AI wave from the get go. They have seen it all, they get it all. So it's a really great community to be a part of and see what like our front runners and what they're doing for the, for the rest of the populace. I'm sure, like, again, there's not really that many marketing people who want to jump on a discord. I would say our LinkedIn is definitely a place to be for that. We also have Twitter, so Leonardo I across all of those. I speak a lot because I do really love engaging in the community. So my LinkedIn is just Jesse Hughes at Leonardo I.

Well, very cool.

Hopefully I'm looking forward to seeing video demos. Yeah, for sure. I think the reason repositioning in, in the head I would have is this sense of it's a content creation suite. So whatever content you have as a business, how do we, how do we touch that content to have story and beauty and narrative and, you know, create compelling, specific niche content for your business needs.

Yeah. And it takes it even a little bit further if you're going to be a generative AI expert, but you're siloing off. Well, I create this type of content and I don't really know anything about that. I think that that would be a mistake. And if you were going to try something, I would recommend obviously Leonardo AI just because of the ease of use. I'm telling you, haven't tried every image generation tool out there. But the ones that I have, it was like, nah, that's why I don't use them. Right. However, but with Leonardo and with all the examples that you shared and the stuff that you guys are doing, it's a different, it's a different category. Very cool. Thank you so much for sharing all this with us, Jesse. You're so welcome so Leonardo AI. And once they get there, just dive in.

Yeah, make an account.

Just follow Jesse's instructions.

Yeah, make an account. Jump on in playing the tools, I reckon. Go start with Real time Canvas and then go into image generation. Get your employees to spend a day. If you don't want to give it a week, give them a day. I mean a full day. Because you do have to really start to learn. You have to make mistakes to learn how to use these tools. So invest in a long term incredible upskilling of your workforce.

It's great advice. All right, Jesse, thank you so much. All right, guys, we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. special thanks to our producer Evan Desaunier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle using AIAWORK and visit www.usingaiatwork for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.