AI Art Image Generators: Things Are Getting Dangerously Good

We're in this second AI image renaissance. Right. The distance we've come in the last two years is mind blowing.

Yeah. Before, it was a fun toy, and now I think we're getting to the second stage. You can actually use this in your company.

People genuinely are not going to be able to tell what's real and what's not. I don't think it's like, in the future, you're not going to be able to tell anymore. Like, we're there.

Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolfe. I'm here with Nathan Lands. And today we're talking about current revolution that's going on in the world of AI art. There is so much happening in that world. We've got new tools coming out. The tools are getting more and more realistic. We've got all sorts of crazy deep fakes happening. It's starting to leak into the politics that we're seeing. And there's some really, really cool use cases of AI art in your business. And on today's episode, we're going to deep dive into all of that stuff so that you know the lay of the landscape of AI art and as well as how you can apply it in your life and business. So let's go ahead and get into it. Today we want to talk about what we feel is like the next. What do you want to call it, Nathan? The next Generative AI Renaissance. It's becoming more. I hate this word because it's a buzzword, but it's the first thing that came to my mind. It's becoming a lot more democratized. It's becoming easier and easier, and there's a lot more platforms that you can generate AI art with. There's a lot more tools rolling out. And right now there genuinely is, like, a pretty big opportunity to go and use AI generated art, whether it's for designs on your website, whether it's for generating advertising on. On various ad platforms like Facebook or Twitter or places like that. You know, even memes, right? A lot of companies are starting to embrace meme culture and realizing that by spreading memes, they're getting, you know, they're getting their message out there. Memes are much more likely to go viral than just, hey, take a look at my company. And if companies use these memes that go viral, your business has this opportunity to go more viral. And right now, according to this report From HubSpot, only 23% of people are using visual AI tools right now. And to me, that means that, like, there's 77% of people not using AI as part of their art in what they're doing in their business.

So that's wild.

It's crazy to me because it makes a lot of the sort of design elements and the visual elements of your business a lot easier to do. Now, this is from a report that HubSpot put out called How AI Is Driving Personal Productivity and Business Growth. It's a pretty good report. It's 36 pages and it's got all sorts of stats and data on how people are using AI right now and what the trends look like right now. I'll link it up below the video if you're watching this on YouTube. And yeah, it's a really cool report, but there's a huge opportunity right now to leverage these AI tools in your business. And I wanted to talk about some of the AI tools that have recently got released as well as, like, some coincidences that have happened in the AI art world right now. And here's what I mean by that. So right now you've got Ideogram, which just came out, you know, know the week that you're listening to this episode. It came out last week. But Ideogram is really, really good and you can use it for free. They let you generate 40 images a day, and it's like pretty much as good as Mid Journey. So like, wow. And. And it's fairly uncensored as well. So this one just came out. But the reason I say, like, it seems very fairly coincidental is the same day that they released that Mid Journey somehow decided today's the best day to start opening up free trials again. We're also temporarily turning on free trials to let you check it out. So Mid Journey is now allowing you to have up to 25 image generations. I think that's just. You can have 25 period. It's not like 25 a day or 25amonth. It's like once you've done 25 images, you either got to pay or get out of here. Right? But they somehow, on the same day that Ideogram released Ideogram 2.0 and made it available for free, decided now is the best time for us to offer Mid Journey trials again. So I feel like Midjourney starting to feel the heat a little bit from all these other AI image generation platforms.

Well, also, you know, freepik released was mystic.

So there was a tool called Magnific. Right? Magnific was that AI image upscaler tool that sort of hallucinated your image and sort of added more Creativity to your image. Well, Freepik acquired Mystic and then Freepik acquired Magnific. Right. And Magnificent is sort of the first project that they kind of collaborated on since they've been like a emerged company. Right. So.

Right.

Freepik's mystic platform, or AI art generator, is now becoming available. I think it's still an alpha. I don't know if it's available to everybody yet, but it's pretty dang good as well. Let me see. I can actually show off some of the images that I generated on it recently.

Apparently they Block. Or Journey blocked them on Twitter. I saw that. I think they thought they had this huge moat and. And then now all of a sudden, there's all these new services that are like. Right. Neck and neck with them.

Yeah. No, it's so fascinating to me. Yeah. This mystic, it's. According to their website, it's still an alpha, so. And it says coming soon. So I don't know if it's available to everybody yet, but, yeah, it's crazy to me that Mid Journey is like, oh, there's a new competitor in town blocked. Like, why?

Yeah, let's make some emotional intern or something managing the account.

Yeah, I can't. I mean. Yeah, it's so weird to me that they would take that approach because now it's just like they're sort of Streisand affecting themselves. Right. Like, they're bringing more awareness to these other competitors and the issues that are coming up.

And blocking a competitor does absolutely nothing. Like, what. What would that possibly accomplish? It's like, nothing.

Yeah. And again, I just want to sort of go back to the fact that I think there's a huge opportunity here for businesses and people to leverage a lot of these AI art tools for, like, memes. Like, I kind of mentioned that a minute ago, but I think that's something we can kind of dig in on a little bit more, is the fact that, like, memes get so much more reach than any sort of, like, ad that you're probably going to do, and they have so much more potential to go viral and get shared around.

Yeah. I'll show you one that's maybe not the best example. That's pretty silly and not the highest quality, but, you know, it shows that memes right now spread like crazy using AI. And so, I mean, you can tell here the quality is not really high, but it's still hilarious. And it got like, 55 million views on Trump's account. I think on Elon's, it got even more, you know, Elon joked about, like, you know, people are going to say this is fake.

That was a great line because obviously this is fake. Yeah, yeah, but, but there's, you know, there's a lot of things like that where I think companies should be thinking more and more about how they can be using AI art and those to market their companies. And I mean, this is, this is probably a better example. But like, you know, people are already starting to use AI, I mean like mostly AI video tools right now. The pro, the, the, the workflow is you create some great AI art and then you kind of feed that into the AI video systems. This one with McDonald's Japan came out less than a week ago and it's already got 12.4 million views just on X, which is like nuts.

Yeah, the Elon one, just, just to like add to that real quick. The Elon Donald Trump 1 had 55 million views on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This. Yeah, yeah, fake. The simple fake one, it was like low quality. This one's actually way better quality. But like this shows you like, you know, there's gonna be like really good commercials and things like that created with AI at probably less than one tenth of the cost of what it used to create that, you know, it used to cost to create a great ad.

Yeah, we saw that Toys R Us ad, like what was it a month ago where they used, I think they used Sora for it.

Yeah. And I think this looks better. Like it's already, you know, in the AI art and AI video both right now are getting, you know, better every single week now. Like it seemed like, you know, especially in the AI video recently, like it's every single week, like there's new versions coming out from like almost all the main players like every week or two right now.

Yes.

Yeah. Check this out. This is awesome.

I mean this is like a cool ad.

Yeah, no, I mean it looks like it was made to be like a short form video ad. Right, like for like TikTok or reels or something like that. Right.

But yeah, I mean, I think that's where the quality is right now. But like, you know, probably within the next six months. Yeah, like, I think full blown ads will actually, it'll be good enough for that. But yeah, this is, I mean, this, I could see something like this for different companies going mega viral and it would cost a lot less than your typical ad.

The thing about memes like this One, like this McDonald's one, is that, yeah, the people who love that they used AI share it everywhere. But the Flip side of the coin is people that hate that they used AI also share it everywhere, right? Like, yeah.

Which is good and bad. Like, so maybe you do get some, you know, hate to your brand. I think we have McDonald's at the reach, though, right?

Like, yeah, yeah. If I make a video that's like a meme video about my business in some way like this McDonald's one and all the people that love the AI of it, they all share it and say, oh, this is amazing. This is amazing. It gets seen by all of the people that love AI, but so does my brand. If all of the people that hate, I also go and share it with, you know, a quote tweet that says, oh, I can't believe they're using AI. These. These jerks. They're, you know, why would they go and do that? And then they share it everywhere anyway? Well, yeah, it still gets seen by all those people, and my brand still gets seen by all of those people. And not every single one of the people that sees it because it was shared by an AI hater is going to be an AI hater themselves.

Right.

So it just like the Reach can go insane right now with some of this AI stuff.

Yeah. And I think, I think it's a, you know, it is a valid point to think about. Like, okay, would right now, if you, if you shared this In America, would McDonald's America share this? Probably not, because McDonald's Japan did. I think there is a cultural difference there where, like, you know, living in Japan, I've seen that, yeah, there's some backlash against AI, but it's nothing like the backlash in America.

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Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why that is. I imagine Europe and America would be more similar, but with Japan, I get it. Like, Japan is all about technology and robots, even though parts of the society look like they're really left behind. But, like, in terms of media, they love all of it, right? Like, they want to have robots, all this stuff. So I. I think that Japan's gonna be really embracing this kind of tech. But I think, you know, like you said, like, even if it created some backlash, if you created ads like this for your company, that means more reach, like, in this day and age, more conversation. And, like, yeah, if you're selling fries, if somebody sees it and they find out it was AI, are they really gonna, like, not eat your fries now? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe somebody would, but, like, Most likely, yeah.

McDonald's probably isn't the best example because, like, yeah, you know, McDonald's is one of those companies where everybody says, oh, I never eat McDonald's, that's disgusting. Yet they're like, yeah, you know, they serve like a billion people a year or something, so somebody's obviously eating it, you know.

Yeah, yeah, it's like one of those.

Companies that people already don't want to admit that they eat at.

Well, in Japan, people is different. Yeah, so that's another thing too. In Japan, McDonald's is cool, actually. So that's very different because it's American brand and they don't have burgers much. So it's like most of the burger places in Japan are not that good. So McDonald's is actually one of the decent burgers, and they're actually higher quality or they seem to be than in America for some reason. But, yeah, here's another example I thought was pretty good. This one didn't get nearly as many views. But this is just really simple product showing how you can make product marketing stuff. Like, if you got a new product, I mean, this could be anybody. This could be like a grandma who's trying to start, like a little hobby business or whatever, stay at home, mom or whoever. You know, could now be able to use AI to produce stuff that would help market their stuff. They put this on Pinterest, on X, whatever. So I think there's a lot of stuff like that where it's just going to create so many new opportunities for people to create businesses and to market them with the help of AI.

Yeah.

You know, kind of going back to that report you're talking about with AI, and people are only using it 23% or whatever. I think so many more people should be using it.

And this stuff is stuff that would probably legitimately, you know, people would see it and legitimately think, like, oh, that's just a cool video that they put out. Right. Like, this stuff isn't even stuff that, like, screams AI when you first look at it.

Or you could even take it and, like, you could. You could edit it into, like, a video that's your face talking. But then you have to, you know, use it as B roll and this kind of stuff.

And the dolphin might be a little bit.

Dolphin other than the dolphin.

I wanted to see, like, the, you know, the blowhole, like, the water come.

Up, and then that would be cool, actually. It blows the product up into the.

Air.

Or, like, splats on the screen or something and, like, has the company's name.

That would be awesome. You could do that, actually. Like what I mean, they say how they do it, right? They shared the workflow. It looks like it's midjourney or flux. And then they use Luma Dream Machine. Right. You can see by the hashtag, and the way Luma Dream Machine works now is that you can enter a beginning image and a final image and it will animate between the two images. So you legitimately could have a picture of your product sitting on top of a dolphin and. And then the final frame be like, your logo on the screen and have it animate between the picture of the product on the dolphin into your logo on the screen and just see what AI comes up with to, like, fill in the gap. And it might be a blowhole blowing out water and then your logo splatting on the screen. Like, you could probably actually take quite a few rerolls to get that specifically. But you could probably do it right now, today.

Yeah, yeah. You could do it yourself if you had the time and wanted to figure out how to learn it. I mean, there's. I know there's people who are already doing this. Like, I've talked to people recently. You know, I may get involved in this somewhat, but I've talked to people who've been doing this for, like, the last year. Apparently they've had, like, paying clients for the last year creating stuff with AI video For, like, ads and stuff like that or like explainers or just like even stuff like a presentation. Some, you know, big CEO is going to do a speech and make a little something cool at the beginning of the, you know, the speech. So there's already a market for that and, like, people helping create these videos. And I think that's going to be a huge market in the future because, like, it's. I don't think it's going to take away all the jobs in terms of creating these videos. I think it's going to make more opportunities for people. Yeah, I think. And then over the last week or two, which I, you know, I was gone on vacation, so I was kind of just like checking X occasionally and, and seeing all this stuff. But, you know, I just kept seeing over and over, like, AI art stuff that was really awesome, especially from, from Grof, you know, the stuff where they're, you know, using flux, where people are generating insane stuff. You know, they were like, here's Mickey Mouse with a machine gun. It's like, oh, my God.

Yeah. Oh, man. Flux is pretty crazy because it's pretty uncensored. I don't want to say it's fully uncensored. It's pretty uncensored. It won't do nudity. Like, they've got some sort of safeguards on there, but other than that, like, anything goes, right? Like, they've got Mickey Mouse with machine guns and like, you know, blooded gore in the background and all sorts of crazy stuff with Flux. And.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I, I really think we're entering into this new era where AI art, AI image generation is just like, it's hit this next level where people genuinely are not going to be able to tell what's real and what's not. And I know when it comes to AI image generation, we've been saying that for a while, but I think we're there now. Like, I, I don't think it's like, in the future you're not gonna be able to tell anymore. Like, we're there. Like, I don't think people are gonna be able to tell anymore with some of these tools.

Yeah, the memes coming from it are great. Like, I don't, I don't. I don't know about the legality of all of it, but, you know, there's huge debate on that right now. But, like, the memes are nuts.

Here's one that I just came across. I'm actually not a member of Truth Social. I saw somebody else share this, but this is basically endorsements from Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift's fans for Donald Trump that were all generated with flux. And a lot of people. A lot of people thought this was real. Like, people were genuinely sharing this around, going, look, Swifties love Trump. And this is. This is, like, where we're at right now.

Yeah. And it's happening on both sides. I've seen. I've seen memes and pictures shared from both political parties that seem to be possibly fake or, I don't know, maybe not from the parties themselves, but people who are supporting the parties. Yeah, I've seen them from both. Here's the thing.

Look at who shared this. This post. This was literally shared by Donald Trump. This wasn't like somebody else sharing it. This was Donald Trump sharing these AI generated images right here. Well, here's another one, too. Once again, have you seen, like, this stuff on Facebook? I've actually watched a handful of YouTube videos recently of. What do they call it? They call it, like, boomers getting fooled on Facebook. And it's like, there's whole YouTube videos of people showing how people are sharing AI images over on Facebook. And then, like, there's just tons of threads and people resharing them, believing that they're real. And some of them are so unbelievably fake that I don't understand how anybody sees them as real. Right. Like, there was one with, like, shrimp Jesus. I don't know if you ever saw that one. That was like, half Jesus, half shrimp. And it got shared around, and people were like, oh, he has risen, or whatever. And I'm just like, what is that?

Kind of like, Is that kind of like seeing Jesus in the toast or whatever? Like, with AI art, it was AI.

Generated art, and there's a lot of that kind of stuff going around where it seems like people are getting fooled or. I don't know. Either that or they're just playing into it.

Yeah, it's hard to know, like, people. A lot of people. There's like, troll, right?

Like, yeah, I know, but it's just getting wild. And I don't know if there's lawsuits here. I feel like the fact that, you know, Donald is tweeting this stuff from Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift may be able to go and argue that, like, hey, he's spreading fake information. But I don't. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the whole legal implications. I don't know if there's a lawsuit there or not. But, yeah, it's getting kind of crazy. And I think the other crazy stuff is the ip, Right. Like people making images of like Mario with guns or Mickey Mouse snorting cocaine or you know, that kind of stuff. Like, I don't know. To me that seems like there's probably some pretty probable lawsuits there for the being able to use that IP inside of these generations.

Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, it does feel like it probably falls under fair use, I would guess, like, but I'm not sure. I think it's an area where there's not enough clarity around the laws around copyright with AI.

Yeah, but even if we're talking fair use, right, right now, in order to use Grok, you have to be a Twitter plus or an X plus member, Right. You have to pay the eight bucks a month to be able to use grok. So they're profiting off of being able to generate images using other companies ip. So does that still fall under fair use?

Yeah, I don't know. Like, I, I definitely, like, you know, on the, I saw the debate on X, like people were sharing, like, you know, they were sharing all these crazy images, they were sharing the prompts they used to make it, and they were like, you know, Elon Musk is going to be sued into oblivion. And then there, the other side was like, why the hell did you type in those horrible prompts? Like, what the hell's wrong with you?

Yeah, yeah, that's true. And I mean, you know, the other, the other argument and the other lawsuits that are happening right now are about obviously the training data and there's no real precedent for this yet, right? Where these companies are clearly scraping trademarked IP into their systems, right? Like they, they've clearly scraped millions of photos of Mario and millions of photos of SpongeBob SquarePants and, you know, name the trademarked IP and it's probably been scraped and trained into these image models. And that's where all of this stuff is sitting in the courts right now is the courts are trying to decide is it actually okay to scrape all this stuff into the training data because the outputs are transformative. Right. Like you're scraping it all into the training data, but then when you prompt something, supposedly it should be transformative enough to actually be considered fair use. But obviously we're seeing it scrape in images of Mickey Mouse and then turn around and output images of Mickey Mouse so that like, it feels very, very gray area. And I don't know how that's gonna play out.

You know, back when Uber started, you know, this is like a typical Silicon Valley thing. There, like were not laws about like actually doing an Uber service. Like there weren't clear laws. And a lot of people who were anti Uber argued that there were laws. And my understanding is when Uber started, they probably had a legal opinion from someone like that, yeah, we'll win this because it's vague enough that we can argue the case that it should, that there's no laws that protect against this or stop it or whatever. And so I think you're going to, I assume that like with OpenAI, they would have not have started the company and did, did all the scraping they did if they did not have a legal opinion already from like a top law firm. They're like, no, we can fight this and win and here's why. And because there's no clear laws about it. And we can argue, like I've said before, like, you know, yeah, they, they're, you know, copying it. But like, it's similar to like an artist going to art school and they look at lots of examples of art and that's how they learn. Or an artist going to a museum and learning from it. But it is, but, you know, but like you've said, though, it is complicated because, like, well then, you know, in the early days of Mid Journey and Stable diffusion, you know, people were able to just like type in the names of the artists, right?

Yeah, Well, I mean, OpenAI, they started as a research, right? Like ChatGPT only came out in November of 2022. Like GPT4 was already trained before anybody ever even saw Chat GPT with GPT 3.5. Right. So if there was ever a lawyer coming in and going, hey, is this, you know, are we going to be able to eventually get away with this? It was probably not until about the point that CHAT GPT came into the picture and more people started paying attention to OpenAI. Because in the beginning, if you're just doing a research lab and you're pulling in all of this data and just internally you're figuring out what you can do with it all, really no harm done when you start putting it out into the public and saying, look, anybody can use this stuff now. Okay, now, now is this infringing? I don't know. Right? It's, it's.

I, I assume that the league, the legal opinion was required before the Microsoft money came in.

Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah.

Like, I don't think Microsoft would ever put money in if there was not a legal opinion on this. So, so I believe they're like sitting at a very strong legal opinion with tons of things to back it up and a really solid argument. And so that's why Microsoft and all these.

Well, yeah, and OpenAI is also going now and sort of partnering up with like, everybody that would potentially be suing them in the future. Right? Yeah, that's more on the tech side, right? Like the, like the pulling in stuff from news websites and stuff like that. But it seems like their game plan is go and sort of befriend all of these companies before the lawsuits get out of hand.

And also they would probably not be able to befriend those companies unless they had a solid legal argument, because then it's like, okay, look, you're going to lose this fight against this, but it's going to be annoying for both sides and a lot of money is going to be lost. It's going to waste a lot of time. Let's make deals.

Yeah, right.

Like, there was not like a solid legal argument. Those kind of partnerships probably would not even happen. It'd just be pure combat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other, the other thing that I think is, is sort of weird and, like, I'm very conflicted when it comes to sort of the ethics of AI art. Like, I love generating AI art. It's so much fun to me, but there is some conflict in my brain. Like, a lot of these tools, like midjourneys and stable diffusion and some of these. These platforms, when they first launched, they were literally telling, you go generate images in the style of this person. Right? And that person probably didn't want you generating images in the style of that. They want their commission work. Right? So it's like.

That was kind of weird. They obviously knew that their tools were able to spit out images that looked similar enough to images created by these artists, which. That's where some of the lines start to feel a little like, unethical to me. Over time, a lot of these tools have put more and more safeguards in there and made it so that you can't generate trademarked IP and you can't put artist names in. And they started moving more and more in that direction, which is why I think Grok releasing flux onto their platform was such, like a culture shock to everybody, because all of a sudden they're like, you can do anything you want again.

Yeah, well, I think that's. That's because of Elon Musk. It's that simple. He's like, okay, bring it on. Like, I think this should be. He obviously thinks it's fine. He's like, you know, bring it on. I think it's going to be a good thing, though, because there will be lawsuits. I'd be shocked if there's not lawsuits around this. And it probably will speed up the laws adjusting for copyright and AI in the age. Because, like. Because right now a lot of things are vague. There's a lot of gray area, and the lawsuits will probably help clarify things, I think.

Yeah. Well, if I had to guess where the first lawsuit is going to come from, Disney. Probably pick Disney.

We all remember what Elon said on stage about Disney, don't we?

Yeah. Now you've got Disney, you know, you got Mickey Mouse doing terrorist attacks.

Yeah. I mean, he went on stage and literally told Disney to go laugh themselves. Disney's probably not a fan of that. Yeah, well, there's a. Here's a clip that I want to play. But, like, I don't know if you saw this, but the. The CEO of Procreate, like, you know what Procreate is, right? Like, it's an iPad app that is like a drawing.

I know, I know. I know of it. I've never used it.

Yeah, it's basically like an iPad app that has, like, layers and brushes, and you can. It's. It's basically for, like, it's like paper on your iPad with different colors and paint brushes and stuff.

I used to sit next to this artist in San Francisco when I used to work on my laptop at a coffee shop. And he was the main colorist for Spider man and a few other comics, and he was always on his iPad and there was layers and all that. So that's probably. Probably what he was using, I guess.

Yeah. Well, here's. Here's a clip from him. So I think it would be kind of fun to listen to this and hear what you think about it.

Oh, geez.

You've been asking us about AI. You know, I usually don't like getting in front of the camera. I prefer that our products speak for themselves. I really hate generative AI. I don't like what's happening in the industry, and I don't like what it's doing to artists. We're not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products. Our products are always designed and developed with the idea that a human will be creating something. You know, we don't exactly know where this story is going to go or how it ends, but we believe that we're on the right path supporting human creativity. So that was. What's his name? You're going to. You're going to get a kick out of his name. James Cuda.

Oh, my God.

So Kuda is, you know, related to Nvidia and AI. Like.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's just kind of ironic.

Yeah, People were joking about. People were joking about the simulation. This is all. Yeah, yeah, like, like, like, obviously this was generated by the simulation to see who would actually pick up on that.

So, yeah, the CEO of Procreate basically came out and, you know, he's got a very, very popular a. Or not AI art platform, but he's got a very popular art platform on the iPad that even my kids use it. It's like very, very.

Very popular. Everybody's using that on their iPad if they do, like, drawing and art. And he's coming out and saying, we will never put generative AI in our platform.

It's like simplified Photoshop for iPad. Is that the kind of the gist.

Of the sort of. Not nearly as complex as Photoshop. It's really just designed for, like, you use your pen and you draw on your iPad.

Yeah, I made, you know, watching that video, it looks like he, you know, he plans to be like one of the leaders of the AI. I mean, the anti AI rebellion or something. You know, I don't know. It's like, Like, I think there's def. There's. There's gonna be a huge divide in society. Right? Like, the people who are for AI and against. I think it's gonna get more extreme. Like, it's, you know, like we talked about before, like, people, you know, burning the, you know, driverless, driverless cars in San Francisco. Like, that's. That's gonna be a trend that's probably going to accelerate because it's like. It's like with any new kind of technology, especially anything that changes what people think is important about themselves. Like, I'm a great artist. That's what I am. And now this is doing a better job. And it's possibly not only doing a better job, but taking my job. Yeah, that. That creates so much emotion there and understandably. But I'm on the pro AI side. But, like, I get the feeling like I. I get like, being in that situation and being very emotional about it.

Yeah, well, I mean, I actually, to some extent really respect what James is doing. The CEO here and actually coming out and making a stand saying that I don't like this. I run a popular art platform and I'm against this. And if you're against this too, then, look, we're all. We're on the same side here. I actually think it's. It's commendable because he's sort of going against the trend in the tech world right now. Like, this is not obviously the consensus of Silicon Valley who's developing all these tools right now. So for someone like this to come out and sort of take a stand against pretty much all the other tech companies out there, to me there's something very commendable about that. I don't agree with his take on it at all. I think saying we'll never use generative AI ever, I mean, never is a long time. Marques Brownlee actually put up a tweet saying, like, you should save this video and look at it 10 years from now and see if they actually held on to that. Because, like, he's basically promising never to add features that maybe your customers might actually want in the future.

I think that's what it's going to look like in the future, but in the moment it's hard for people to see that. And like I said, like, people are going to lose their jobs. I do think it's good. I mean, look, he did seem to be very genuine. Like, it didn't seem to be like, I could be like, you know, he's just saying this because his users demand it. And I'm sure that is true. His users are artists and so they probably do. Like, they would be upset if he was like super embracing AI probably. But he did seem to be like genuine about his feelings. So.

Yeah, no, I mean, I like that he attacked the tech and not the people that use the tech. And I think that's a big difference between like his statement here and what you see a lot of on, like X is on X, you see a lot of people attacking the users of the tech as opposed to attacking the tech where this, where James in this video, he's like, I do not like this technology, therefore I don't want it in the tools that I'm building. But he didn't go out and say, if you use AI art generation tools, you're a moron. Right. Like, and that's what most sort of anti AI folks would, that's how they would approach it. So I think that's why this feels a little more respectable than the way others would approach it typically.

I mean, he probably thinks that though.

People are using, as a CEO of a company that, you know, a lot of people who both like AI and don't like AI use his platform. It would be a really dumb move for him to attack potentially, you know, 50% of his user base.

Yeah, I mean, I think AI in general, unfortunately is going to get more and more Political, you know, whether it's people who just love AI, are against it, or because of the other things we've talked about, like energy and things like that. That's going to get very political with AI.

They're all making it out to be very binary. You're either for AI or you're not for AI. And I, like I mentioned, I'm conflicted. I live in that middle ground. And, you know, I actually made an ex post not too long about ago about how I live in that middle ground and I got attacked by people going, oh, so you're a fence sitter? And I'm like, on this specific, specific topic, yes, I'm a fence sitter. I don't care. Like, I kind of. I kind of understand both sides of the coin here. I still use the tools because I think it's awesome technology. But I'm also conflicted about how it's trained. I'm also conflicted about the potential for all the sort of deep fakes and scams and the, you know, all of the nonsense that's going to come out of it. I'm very conflicted about a lot of that stuff, but it's not stopping me from using it either.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this may be like a controversial take, but it does take a certain level of intelligence to have to be able to hold two, you know, contrary opinions in your mind and, like, understand the merit of both of them. And unfortunately, a lot of the conversation on X, like, it seems to be one way or the other. It's like people are very angry.

Yeah, X is a very binary platform like that. It's like if you're nuanced, you're, you know, you're not part of the conversation.

Yeah, yeah.

But I think, I think we kind of covered a lot of ground on this episode. We talked about a lot of what's going on in the world of AI image generation. Touched on the video stuff a little bit. Anybody listening to this episode should have a pretty good grasp of the sort of AI image generation landscape. And just to sort of bookend it with how we started this episode, that's kind of the reason we think we're in this second AI image renaissance. Right. The beginning was just like, like, look how cool this is. We can take ideas from our brain and turn them into images. They look like crap, but we can do it right. Fast forward to now and it's like we can make images that people can't even tell are fake, which, whether that's good or bad, I mean, that's up to debate, but, like, the, the distance we've come in the last two years is mind blowing, but.

Yeah, but like, they're actually becoming useful now, like with the. The product stuff. I mean, you, you know. Yeah, before it was a fun toy, and now I think we're getting to the, you know, the second stage is you can actually use this in your company.

Yeah, yeah, we're getting to that place where it's actually a tool that you'll want to use for your business, where before it was just a toy, you know, so.

Yeah, exactly.

Pretty cool. Well, though this has been a fun discussion. I think this is probably a good spot to go ahead and wrap this one up. If you want to hear more discussions like this. Nathan and I, we are going to start doing more episodes where we don't bring on guests and we just kind of pick a topic and. And share our thoughts and deep dive into what's going on in it. And we're still going to do our guest episodes as well. But make sure you're subscribed wherever you're listening to this or watching this. If you're watching it on YouTube, subscribe on YouTube. If you're listening to it on Spotify, follow us over there. We really, really appreciate it and thank you so much for tuning into this episode.

Yeah, thank you.

Sam.