Ep 76: Midjourney - A beginners guide to creating AI images

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Can you create studio quality, beautiful art in seconds? You absolutely can with Mid Journey. If you haven't heard of Mid Journey yet, I hope that you're in for a treat today. So my name is Jordan Wilson and welcome to Everyday AI. We are a daily live stream, podcast, free daily newsletter, and a whole lot of other things. But to help everyday people like you and me get the most out of AI. Because there's so many things happening, it can be extremely hard to keep up. You can spend hours a day and still be left behind, or you can tune in to Everyday AI, our podcasts on Spotify, Apple, or our live stream here. So welcome. I hope you're excited to talk about Mid Journey and to learn a little bit about Mid Journey before we do, just as a reminder, please go to your everydayai.com and sign up for that free daily newsletter. So before we start talking Mid Journey and I'm extremely excited for this one and I hope you all are too, let's talk about what's going on in the world of AI news because there is a lot, there is a lot today, maybe more than other days recently. So probably the thing grabbing the most headlines is Nvidia has announced a slew of new products and updates. There's going to be a lot more about this in the newsletter, but let's just talk high level here. So they've announced in an upgraded version of their Grace Hopper super chip, the GH200. If that sounds super dorky, just know this. The majority of generative AI that we all use, ChatGPT, Microsoft, Bing, Mid Journey, all of these, they essentially all use Nvidia's chips, their GPU chips, to power their generative AI. So they announced some new updates to their super chip that should be coming out, I believe in 2024. And they said that it is going to now run AI models three and a half times faster than the current model. So already Nvidia is so far ahead of any other chip maker in the world with their current chip. And their new chip that is going to be coming out is apparently 3.5 times faster. Wow. All right, next piece of news from OpenAI. So they didn't even really announce this. They kind of secretly released it, I guess. But a new web crawler has been, I guess discovered called GPT bot. So OpenAI didn't even announce this, they just added a support page and it got a lot of people talking. So what is this? Well, let's quickly talk about it. For OpenAI ChatGPT, they need access to the entire Internet. So this is the first time that they've kind of publicly showed how this is going to work and, or how it has been working behind the scenes. So they have this GPT bot and it essentially crawls the entire Internet. So now a lot of, there's kind of a showdown going on now because there's, you know, content creators and major publishing companies trying to block OpenAI and other kind of AI chats from crawling their website because this obviously the advent, I guess, of AI search is actually pretty bad for most websites because you're no longer getting those hits, you no longer getting those users and the ad revenue. So there's kind of a lot of big companies now are scrambling to block as many of these AI chats as possible. All right, and is AI generated music coming soon to you? Well, probably Google and Universal Music just announced that they are in talks on AI Deepfakes. So yes, official AI generated music. Could it be coming? Well, we'll, we'll find out. So make sure to check out more about that in the newsletter and also if AI is going to lead to a financial crisis. So we'll have that and more. But that's not why you're here. You're not. Well, maybe you are here to listen to the AI news. If so awesome. But let's talk about Mid Journey and if, if you're joining us live, I'm just going to go ahead and put this out. This is a beginner's guide. All right. And if you are, look, if, if, if you are listening on the podcast, this is one of those check in the show notes. We always link in the show notes to our website where you can watch the video replay of this. So if you aren't joining us live, this is one of those. It's going to be a little hard to describe everything, but I'm going to try my best. But for those of us joining live, go ahead, get your questions in. Now, full disclosure, I am not a Mid Journey expert, but I've been using it for months, generated plenty of images, use it multiple times a week. So hopefully we can get your the basics answered and we can get some of that going. But also go ahead, drop, drop your. If you have created a Mid Journey image, even if you're not a pro, go ahead and put it in the comments. We're actually going to feature our favorite one in the comments in our newsletter today. So go ahead, whether you're listening on live on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, wherever, go ahead and upload your favorite Mid Journey image that you've created. All right, so without that or without further ado, let's get. Well, actually, no, let's shout everyone out here. Juliet, thank you for joining us. She's saying super updates. Thank you. Yeah, a lot going on in the, in the AI news space today. Let's see, who else do we have here? We have Trevor. Trevor saying my Mid Journey game is wretched. All right, well, maybe, maybe it'll improve a little bit today, Trevor. Hopefully that's, I mean, that's why we're here. So hopefully, hopefully we can get that to improve. Michael, just saying good morning. Thank you for joining us. Brian, good morning. Thank you for joining us. Harvey Castro, thank you for joining us. All right, let's get going. Let's talk Mid Journey. Let's just jump straight into it. All right, so what is Mid Journey? Well, simply put, it is AI image generation. Right? You don't have to be a photographer, a graphic artist and illustrator to be able to get kind of amazing images. So Mid Journey is a paid plan. Okay. So there's no longer. When Mid Journey first came out, there were free options. There's no longer free options. So we'll start there. So I have on the screen here kind of the differences between their different plans. Anywhere from the lowest monthly plan is $10 a month. The standard plan is probably the most popular. That's the plan that we are on. That's $30 a month and all the way up to $120 a month. The biggest differences I think is the amount of time it takes and the limits or the caps. Right. So you can go ahead and read that chart and we'll obviously link it in the, in the newsletter today as well. So once you log in, if you haven't used Discord, let's start there. I think a lot of people have used Discord, but actually go ahead and throw in the chat if. Have you used Discord? Have you not? I'm just curious, but. So Mid Journey is run through Discord. Don't worry, we're gonna, we're gonna go through what that means. So when you sign in to Mid Journey, you're going to, after you sign up for an account, you're going to have something like this. And you can see I was playing around with actually some face swapping features yesterday. There's plugins for Mid Journey as well that can do Some amazing things. So you're going to see a page like this that essentially greets you. This isn't actually Discord and this isn't how you use the app. So a lot of beginners kind of get stuck here. So in the bottom left hand corner, again, if you're not already using Discord, you will go in and click the little three dots at the bottom left hand corner and click, go to Discord. All right, and that's how you officially launch Mid Journey. So I'm going to go through. Because there's, there's a lot of things in Mid Journey, so there's essentially different channels here on the left hand side. All right, so this is an announcement from Mid Journey, right? So this is the announcement channel. So if you've used Slack or something, this should hopefully look pretty familiar. But if you haven't, don't worry. We're going to walk through the basics. So by default, this is where you're going to land when you log into Mid Journey. So here's, here's how it works. And there's both good things and terrible things with how Mid Journey is set up. It is all the most part public and open. So you'll see here there are these newbie rooms. Okay, so let me just give you some advice on this. If you want to learn Mid Journey, this is how, by default, you think that you have to learn it, right? But you don't have to, you don't have to be, be, be stuck with this kind of, this newbie room. Because what, what's going to happen is if you try to generate an image, you'll see even since I've logged in, there's been dozens or hundreds of new messages that, that come by. Right? So let's just go ahead and, let's just go ahead and do something. And actually, I'm going to see if this can work. Why don't you just go ahead, just drop some ideas of, of something you might want to see of an image, right? So on here we see an example. It looks like there's an Elon Musk, an avatar of Elon Musk. There's a black owl in the forage, old vintage. So we'll, we'll go over what this is. But if you want to see something, if you want to see me do something live, go ahead and drop it in the comments and we'll see, we'll see if we can do this live. But. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe Your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too, just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen. If you are using the newbie channel, it can be a little difficult because especially if you're new to Discord, it is hard to keep up. So as an example, I don't, I don't see any comments coming up. Just quick enough. Oh, thank you. Here we go. There's always a little bit of a delay. So Trevor says, darth Vader eating cake. Fantastic. All right, we'll do this, Trevor. So I'm going to go ahead and do it in the main newbie channel. So here's mid journey literal 101. You do most of everything with prompts, quick prompts. So all you're going to do is in the messages down here, I'm going to click a backspace and then you'll see the most popular or frequently used ones pop up. So Imagine is kind of the prompt that you use to do almost any image creation in Mid Journey. So you can do settings, we're going to talk about, describe, there's a lot of other things. But if you just want to create AI art, which is what a lot of people are probably trying to learn, you just go to Imagine. So I'm just going to go ahead and put what Trevor said in here. So I'm going to say darth Vader eating cake. So as we talk about this, I'm going to go over and you're going to see here live why it can be hard to learn Mid Journey and to use it because of these newbie channels. Right. So you'll see right here it says waiting to start. And you'll see now. And I'm Going to try to zoom in on my screen, and I'll kind of let you know what's happening. But you can see it kind of rendering in real time. And again, when we talked about the pricing plans, it also determines how fast it renders. So I'm on the standard plan. So it goes pretty, pretty fast. So you'll see it slowly rendering, and you'll see these four different options in a grid. And you'll see it's now at 46%. Now it's at 62%. So it's slowly rendering these images. Okay, and we're almost done. And here's. Here's what's. What's. What can be tricky. You'll see right away it jumped and I lost it. And I said, all right, where. Where is my Darth Vader eating cake? That's because I'm in a newbie channel and it gets pushed, and sometimes it's extremely hard to find where it is. There's. There's other ways that you can go back and click, but I have to. You. You sometimes just kind of have to scroll through and find it. Okay, so I found our picture right there of. Of Darth Vader eating cake. All right, so let me go over some basics of Mid Journey. This is basics. So that's what we're talking about today. We're not going to get into advanced topics like styles, parameters, seeds, you know, like chaos commands, weird commands. We're not going to get into that today, at least. Right. But here's. Here's the basics, right? Here's the absolute basics of Mid Journey. So we are in our newbie channel. We typed in slash, imagine, and then we said darth Vader eating cake. And you'll see now there's four images that have fully rendered, and I have some options. It says U1, U2, U3, U4, and V1, V2, V3, V4. So essentially, think of it as clockwise. So upper left hand corner is 1. Upper right hand corner is 2. Lower right hand corners, 3. Lower left hand corners, 4. So if I want to, U means upscale, V means variation. And then. Or I can click. There's kind of a recycle arrow type thing. So if I want to redo it, I can click that. All right, so let's just. As an example, let's say that we really like number four here. So if I want to save that image. Again, we're going over the basics here. You're not going to save it like this. It's going to be too small. So I'M going to click u4 and what that means, it's going to upscale just that one, just that lower right hand Corner. So version 4. So again now I have to kind of scroll down and find it, which is a little hard. I know there's a different way to do this, but this is how most people. I'm showing you how most people. If you've never used Mid Journey, this is how you're going to be using it. All right, so now I have Darth Vader eating cake. Here's our upscaled version right here. All right, Also important to talk about now, there's different kind of versions of Mid Journey, right? So right now it's on 5.2, which is amazing. I think the 5.2 update was probably one of the biggest and best updates since Mid Journey has was released. And there should be the 5.3 update coming out here in a couple of weeks. They only update every couple of months, so pretty big updates. So 5.2 introduced some new easy options that you can do after we upscaled. So we can do this that says very strong, very subtle zoom out 2x zoom out 1.5 or custom zoom. So this is really cool. And you've probably seen some animations on Twitter where essentially people, you can start with a very close up image and then keep doing zoom out to over and over and over. And then people will use something called Runway and to do a technique. I'm probably going to get this wrong. I think it's called interpolation, where essentially you can keep zooming out and it'll almost create like a, like, like a movie with these Mid Journey images. So I'm just going to. Just to show you how this works, I'm going to Click zoom out 2. Right. So this is basics. We're going over the basics here, y'. All. So now I'm going to scroll down again. The newbie channel. It can be hard to use. It can be hard to find where your images are after you upscale them. So I'm even having trouble. There's another way you can go back to your Mid Journey page and launch from there. But I'm going to go ahead and let's just skip to. Before we get out of the. The newbie channel, I'm going to show you two things. All right, I think our upscale zoom out is done here. Let's see. Here we go. We found it. So here's, here's our zoom out version. Right now you can see more things that weren't there. You know, so before we had kind of a, a closeup of Darth Vader eating cake. And you'll see it just got jumped off my screen. But now there's, there's other things on the screen. There's, there was apples, there were candles. So very cool. All right, now, before we jump out of the newbie channel, just two things to note. You can probably already see if you're watching how it can be frustrating because there's so many new messages and this is by default. Right. But the great thing is it's a great way to learn because you can go, you can go through and scroll and see other people, what they're creating. Right? So this is a very cool picture of a. Looks like a sun, sun, sunset or a sunrise over the ocean. So I can go in, I can copy and paste this prompt and I can make some tweaks to it and then I can try it for my own. So it's a great way to learn the newbie channels. But it's a, also, it's, it can be extremely frustrating. So what you'll want to do, and I'll actually do an AI in five on this today, which you can just create your own dedicated channel and essentially invite the bot. It sounds technical, but it's not. But essentially all you're going to do then is you are going to have your own dedicated channel. And there we go. So I was, I was messing around with some face swapping things and some blending techniques last night. So let's go ahead and run that same prompt here and then we're going to go through some other advanced topics. So actually, let me jump back in. I saw another suggestion. So, all right, Jay Israel said, darth Vader eating a cake on a Pegasus. So let's do that. So let's do Darth Vader eating cake on a Pegasus. All right, so again, slash prompt and we're going to go Darth Vader eating cake on a Pegasus. Hopefully I spelled Pegasus correctly there. All right, so when you are in a private channel, it's not terribly hard to set up and a lot of newbies don't know this, but now you can see it's so easy to go ahead and just only see your images. So if you are new at Mid Journey and you've been going into these newbie channels and you're a little lost, huge hack. Create a private channel, invite the Mid Journey bot. It's very simple to do and I'll have a video today showing you how to do that. And now it's very easy to work with Mid Journey. All right, so now we have Darth Vader eating cake on a Pegasus. All right, so we're almost done. Now we have some great colors. Very otherworldly. I like this. This is a great suggestion. All right, so let's go ahead and use the variation because we haven't done that yet. So let's say I like this one, the fourth one, the bottom right hand corner. It looks like Darth Vader may be using chopsticks to eat the cake. So let's just go ahead and click V4. So what's that? What that's going to do is we're going to get four variations of this one in the lower right hand corner. Right. So again, the U is to upscale. This kind of swap button here is to redo the generation. And then the V's are to just do variations of whichever one that you like the most. All right, so now we're getting variations of this one in the lower right hand corner. That was Darth Vader eating cake on a Pegasus. All right, we're almost done here. And then I'm going to show you pretty simple, but how to save, how to save all of these. All right, so we are at. We are done. All right, so I'm going to go ahead now and click. Let's go ahead. Let's save this, this third one here in the lower left hand side. So we're going to click U3 to upscale that because again, if you save it straight from here for straight from this grid with the four, it's going to be pretty, pretty low quality. All right, so if you want to save it, the best way to do it is after you click Upscale, you don't just right click it from there. You're going to click Web. Okay. And then I'm going to click Visit site. All right, and now we just have just that one. And then we can right click it and save the image. All right, cool. So that is the basics of Mid Journey. I'm going to try to show you, show you all one or two kind of advanced things. But I want to, I want to jump into the comments and make sure. And make sure I get to some questions here. So Val said, good morning. Thank you for joining us. Haley, what's up? Haley says she's tried, but she hasn't get it. So shout out, shout out. Bolani customs. Let me just see. Let me make sure that we, if we have any questions here. All right, Brian, Brian is asking, is this being recorded? Will there be a link? Yes. So you can always every single day in our newsletter. So make sure you go sign up at your everyday AI dot com. There's always, we send links to the YouTube recording. You can listen on the podcast. But yeah, even on LinkedIn you can go back and there will be recordings. Fabian saying, yes, I love Star Wars. Dr. Ross, Dr. Rasvagaras saying, here for the AI hot tea. Absolutely. Ryan, Ryan wants this as his, his profile picture, asking if we can send it to him. Okay, here's, here's a question from Cecilia. Cecilia, thanks for joining us. So Cecilia is saying my only concern is how do we know which images are real and how many are manipulated imaging? So yeah, I'm not sure. So in mid Journey, obviously nothing is technically real. Everything's manipulated or AI. So if we're talking as a consumer on the back end right now, there is no good way. A lot of different companies, so Google has said that they're going to try to institute an AI watermark. Different social media companies such as Instagram, I know Instagram has been testing this, that if anything was created or edited with AI, that they would denote that. So right now there is no actual way, Cecilia, to know what has been generated in Mid Journey or dall E from OpenAI stable diffusion. There is no way. I didn't even talk about this, but I been a photographer for a very long time. I've taken probably in more than 500,000 photos. I have a bunch of DSLRs and even for me, if you are trying to create photos, right, this is more of a fantasy fiction, Darth Vader eating cake on a Pegasus. But just go ahead and, let's go ahead and try something else because this is a great, a great thing. So I'm going to do something very, very broad and because with the 5.2 update, it's made it actually so much easier for beginners to go in and to, to, to create great images without much, without much prompting. Okay, so let's just do, as an example, let's say, let's just say street, street style biography of young man. I'm going to say man in his mid-30s. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna use a word. So in mid journey there's, you know, people talk about, you know, kind of like power words, but essentially you can, there's words. I'm just gonna go ahead and say unsplash. All right. So I typed in slash imagine and then I just said street style photography of man in his mid-30s. Unsplash. So we're obviously going to Get a lot of crazy variants, right? But let's talk real quick about power words and kind of to Cecilia's point, with, with real imagery. So I, I typed in the word unsplash. So if you, if you're not sure what unsplash is, it is a stock image photo site. So there's, and we've done some testing, but there's, you know, great people who write and talk about Mid Journey. So using words, power words like photorealistic, cinematic, unsplash, product photo, stock photography, you used to really have to use a lot of different words in your prompt to be able to get high quality images. But with the 5.2 update, not so much anymore. So you'll see little prompt that I put in here is not very good. It just said a man in his mid-30s, street style unsplash. Right. But if we look. Let's go ahead and upscale these. You know, there's. These look kind of, kind of real, right. I'm going to upscale this one in the upper left hand corner to, to Cecilia's point. You know, if you didn't know any better. Right, let's go ahead and zoom in on this. So to the untrained eye, this looks like it could be real. It's a man. It looks like maybe he's in Europe. He's got a trench coat, he's got, you know, glasses, you know, his hair. Right. All from a prompt that I made up on the fly. Took 10 seconds. It looks extremely high quality. Right. So Cecilia, Cecilia. There is no exact way to tell if something is real or not a giveaway, usually. Right now, AI generators, AI image generators are not good with extremities. They're not good with hands, they're not good with feet. So even in this photo you can't see it because this man in his 30s has his hands tucked in his pocket. But that's usually a dead giveaway. But other than that, especially people who are using Mid Journey a lot, it can be pretty hard. You know, like I said, I've taken more than 500, 000 photos. I've gotten published all over the place. And with the new 5.2 update, and if you are getting into some of these more advanced techniques, you know, we didn't talk about seeds and styles and parameters because this is meant to be kind of an entry introduction to Mid Journey. When you start to use those, it gets even harder. All right, let's talk. We don't have time. We, we went super late on this. I wanted to get to some new advanced techniques. But actually, if you want more on this, let me know, drop me a comment and say, hey, let's do another Mid Journey episode and let's talk about blank. So go ahead and let me know. So also in the show notes today and in the comments, I've linked a couple other recent episodes that we've done with David and with Rory. So we've, we've already done a couple Mid Journey episodes. So if this piqued your interest and you want to know more, make sure you check in the show notes or in the comments here. If you're joining us live, we have links to those other episodes. They're great. You know, there's, there's plenty of great creators, but you know, we were lucky enough to have Rory and David on our show and they kind of shared us some of their, their tips, tricks and techniques. So I hope this was insightful. Right? Yeah. Juliet says this, this photo here looks like he's in Prague. Great session, Jordan. Thank you. So as a reminder, if. Go ahead, run off to Mid Journey. If you have an account, go in there or any AI image, come back here, load up your favorite. We're going to feature our, our favorite AI image that, that you all have shared, that our community has shared. We're going to go ahead and feature our favorite in the newsletter today, so make sure to go upload it. Let me know what you can create. I hope this was helpful. Let me know, drop a question, leave us a comment. And I hope to see you all back again tomorrow and every day on Everyday AI. Thanks.

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