Want Great Art from AI? Be an Art Director!

If you don’t collaborate with AI, you end up with what AI can do by itself—which is often less-than-satisfying, or with what you can do on your own. You’ll have to judge the quality of those results, yourself.

So how do you collaborate with AI?

How do you use AI to boost your productivity and enhance your creativity?

The new Remarkable Stories website was built with a comic book theme. (What could say “storytelling” better than that?)

But … we can’t just ask AI to “build us a comic book-themed website,” or even provide it with examples and let it run. The authentic comics look is difficult to achieve. AI gets the general gist of it, but…

CHatGPT Prompt: Create a mockup image of a comic-book themed website for the Remarkable Stories, inc. business communication consultancy. Use Silver Age Marvel comics as a reference. The business offers coaching, training, and speaking programs that help organizations deliver presentations and pitches, craft persuasive messaging, and map out their brand stories. Conference keynotes on business storytelling are also offered.

The result looks as if someone took a screenshot of a dream about comics. But the limitations are not only with AI. Consider the array of huge and complex expectations implicit in the prompt. It may sound detailed and thorough, but a proper website description would be many pages long. What clarifying questions would you ask if you were given that prompt by your boss? Will a long prompt help or confuse the AI even more?

The solution? Limit the scope of what you ask AI to do, and give it careful instructions for each step.

Here’s an example:

One image from the final site was touched by three separate AIs—not including the one that wrote the code. Each had a particular “talent.” Human Intelligence researched the comics design aesthetic, found AIs that might get the work done, tested them and selected the best ones, created a workflow, and tweaked the output at each stage. 

I started with a concept: Albert Einstein says “Got a big idea? What will happen if you can’t explain it?” 

So many of us have “the smart person’s curse.” We start talking and the story gets ever more tangled. That meant we needed two elements: an image of Einstein and a tangle of rope. 

I found a photo of Mr. Einstein on Wikipedia.

That was a good start, but I needed a color version. The easiest and fastest way to accomplish this was to use one of Adobe Photoshop’s “neural” AI filters. That gave me the next version:

Then I researched a variety of AI image-processing tools. Befunky.com offered a comic-book-style image filter. The result was closer to the hoped-for look.

What was missing was the halftone dots we associate with comics. I found another AI tool for that at https://anymaking.com/fun-comic-photo-maker-effects 

Finally, I dropped the image into the panel layout, gave my rope image the same treatment, and added my text and word balloons using Adobe’s Captain Comics typeface. The word balloons came from Creative Market.

This is AI-assisted creativity. A human with a “big idea” can—with research and experimentation—employ Artificial Intelligence to create images, words and code that make people smile, feel, and think. 

Will you “ask ChatGPT” or research specialized AI solutions that serve your needs?

What questions can you ask AI that will refine your ideas?

What AI strategies can you innovate that will multiply your team’s productivity?

Are you using AI to tell your own, authentic Remarkable Stories?  Explore the possibilities for you and your organization at https://remarkable-stories.com.