Ep. 146 – AI Image Generation SECRETS? ➡️ GUEST: #1 MIDJOURNEY Expert ==> Drew Brucker and Navigating AI Image Tools!

Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday.

I'm Jay Schedelson.

Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this, not that. And we have a dude here today who's way smarter than I am. That's not really that hard. But who do we got? We got Drew Brucker.

Now, if you don't know Drew, this dude's really smart. I mean, we get into, like, AI stuff, which is what we're going to be talking about.

We're going to be talking about AI image generation, because this is the guy on the planet on this topic. There's nobody that knows it better than Drew.

He's also an American Marketing Association 40 under 40, and he has been a part of and helped to steer hyper growth companies, SaaS, companies, things that are on the cutting edge of all of it. He's incredible, and I'm just excited to have him here.

We're going to really dig into what I think is something that we all need to know more about, needs to know more how to do, which is AI image generation. So, Drew, welcome to the podcast, man.

So, so grateful to be here chatting with you, man. It's.

It's been a long time coming, and I think it's going to be a home run if we can deliver on things that are actionable for listeners today and just give them something new to think about.

Love it. All right, so prove to us now that you're not an AI bot and tell us, how did Drew become Drew before we get into all this stuff?

And maybe you are an AI bot.

Yeah, I mean, you never know, right? I mean, deepfakes, what do we got? The debate too. So, yeah.

So my quick story is I've been leading marketing teams, specifically in SaaS, for like the last nine or 10 years. I've primarily worked on those small two to, I would say six, seven people teams.

Right.

And you're constantly under that pressure of, what's the priority today? What's the priority this week? And those things shuffle around and change quite a bit for me.

Right.

Just watching the AI evolution take place, I immediately saw the opportunity as this is a huge moment in our lives.

Right.

Like, the last time I kind of felt this way was when I was a kid and I was using Dial up Internet, you know, and connecting. And I knew it was a big thing, but I was a kid, I couldn't do anything, anything about it.

Now I'm grown up kind of, you know, and so I really jumped at that opportunity to implement AI into my, to my team, right, and start playing around and experiment with those things. So obviously we're talking about large language models for sure, chat, GPTs and clods of the world.

But for me, as like somebody that's always been interested in creative output, photography design, you know, I took that a little bit of a step further and started playing around with the tool called Mid Journey, which is essentially an AI image generation tool. And there was a real interesting moment in time where the quality went from just okay to wow, this is pretty damn good.

Like, we could probably use this in business. And so that was really the moment in time for me where I was like, okay, how can we use this? What are the use cases?

And started putting that into practice. And you know, the first thing that we did was we had a customer event where we're creating a landing page.

We had a live event, we were creating swag slides for the presentations, all that stuff, and created a logo for that particular customer event, created images with the swag, created images for the landing page, right. And saw that come to life not only like just from a marketing side, but I attended that event in person and it was amazing, right?

It was like one of those light bulb moments. And so I went all in on that.

We're still early, but I think if anybody is listening to this coming out of today, what you want to think about is AI powered visual content is just at the beginning stages and you need to have some understanding of it, even if it's just a little bit full stop, right? You or somebody on your team, because you think about something like Canva and how that developed over time.

Not everybody's got a designer, but now, right, like, everybody knows a little bit about Canva. Everybody can do enough to be dangerous. This is similar in that aspect.

But I think, man, we're just getting started with the future of what it can do.

So I love that story. I love that you jumped all in. I think it's also something that people should really think about where we are at the beginning stages.

And if you want to become known for any part of AI, you could just do it. You could wake up tomorrow and do it, because we are at that starting point.

But Drew mentioned the platform, I guess you call it, that he's really all in on and I don't think that marketers in general are really super aware of it. It's called Mid Journey. Drew does not work for Mid Journey. Okay? Midjourney is not putting a dollar in his pocket.

We're talking about Mid Journey today because if you're not familiar with it, you got to write it down and you got to check it out a little bit. And Drew's going to take us through why.

And the real thing is that what you can do on Mid Journey related to AI image generation is light years ahead of what you're going to do on some of the more well known platforms that are out there. And so instead of generating boring clip art looking stuff or stock photo looking stuff, this is next level.

So, Drew, can you like, take us through at a very basic level? Like, how do you access Mid Journey? What is it? How does it work? What's going on? Awesome.

Yeah. So Mid Journey, you know, if you're not familiar with it, again, starting at a basic level, this is an AI image generation tool.

The reason that, that I'm so bullish on Mid Journey specifically is because of the quality and the versatility and the consistency of the tool.

Right.

There are obviously other tools out there probably that you're familiar with, like something like Dolly that's, you know, already integrated into chat GPT directly.

But the problem with something like that is there aren't all these controls that you have available to you to really dial into the customization of that image. And, and then the image itself sort of has a very Dolly esque look to it.

Right.

It's not photorealism the way that you can achieve that in a tool like Mid Journey.

And so for me, somebody that's really focused on, you know, creating assets that are high quality, have a photorealistic take, especially working with, you know, brands that are trying to really deliver high quality visuals, then it's not really a choice, it's the preferred method.

And so if you want to access Midjourney specifically, you want to go to midjourney.com now, there was sort of this real hurdle that existed with, you know, Mid Journey's infancy, which was if you signed up, you had to sign up through Discord prompt in Discord and everything kind of ran at a very.

Oh, that's how I know it. Is that not the case anymore?

That. So you can still do that. But now Mid Journey is rolling out their website, which has sort of been in this alpha mode to everybody here.

I would say in the next couple weeks, they've already lowered the bar To I think if you've created a hundred images or more, you can now access the site. And the site's just so much cleaner. You have everything as a slider. You know, everything's a little bit more of a click, drag and drop.

You don't have to sort of know all the intangibles of like the code related prompts and parameters that you had to use with Mid Journey where it's backslash this, dash, dash that, which is one of the hangups, right? So you think about the fact that people don't have to get in mid journey anymore or discord anymore.

You don't have to learn this secondary language, so to speak. And I think the learning curve flattens a little bit.

How. Okay, million dollar question, or maybe not million dollar, how much does it cost to use?

Yeah, like a basic plan, like if you're doing it monthly is like as little as 10 bucks a month. Now you can sign up yearly on any of their plans, right. And get a little bit of a discount. I think if you're taking it seriously in some capacity.

It's, it's around 30 bucks a month if you're just on a monthly plan.

Okay, so $30 a month doesn't sound like a lot of money, but who do I need to be to make that worth it to me?

Meaning that what person or what type of company is generating these photorealistic images and a lot of them to make it worthwhile to me to be paying that money. Like who do you see that really gets the value out of Mid Journey?

Yeah, great question. So I, I think if you've got any role in the creative process whatsoever, this is worth it.

If you, if you work, you know, for an employer full time and you're not self employed, this, this is even more worth it, right? Because you could probably expense it.

I mean the, the truth of the matter is that the opportunity that I recognized was I don't want to use stock photography anymore. And I also don't have this huge budget to go out and hire a professional photographer, right. So there's this huge void in the middle.

How do I fill that? And so, you know, I'm not saying that you need to use AI imagery for everything, right? This is not a full spectrum idea.

What I'm saying is there are plenty of low risk use cases you can start implementing right now.

Right.

So you think about anything from, right. The photorealism options, right. Where you don't have to settle for images that other companies are using that you've seen before.

And then you could also dial in specifically to your audience. Right.

So I could create an image that's of a, you know, Latino 56 year old male with I don't know, a bald head and he's got a tattoo on his right arm and that's my icp.

Right.

Like you're gonna find that on stock. No.

Right.

Are you gonna hire a photographer? No, because you're gonna have to fly somebody out, reserve a location, you know, hire models, whatever it is. Right.

There are just so many things that come with both sides. This is a nice medium. So I think if you're looking for practical and relatively easy thing to learn, this is your spot.

Right.

And there are a lot of things that you already are responsible for. So I would say the best way is to just start dipping your toe in the water.

Maybe this is something you play around with in some free time, maybe late at night, whatever your schedule allows and start to understand its application and role in your particular business.

Yeah. And you know, you bring up stock photos, I think that's really important thing to bring up because stock photography in my opinion is expensive.

Right.

I don't care which tools that you use, they charge like a boatload, whatever.

And if you look at what your company is spending on that and then you look at what it costs to use like Mid Journey, I think it's kind of like a no brainer. But let me. Let's talk about where it's all going. So I get it. Everybody should check out Mid Journey. It's bananas.

It's totally different, all this stuff. But since you're like living in this space, I'm curious what your opinion is.

So if you look at something like Sora, and for those of everybody out there, sora is the OpenAI, the people behind ChatGPT.

It's not out for public use yet, but it is their AI video creation tool that you can make movies of like a minute long that look probably very similar to what Midjourney does. Very photorealistic stuff. And it looks like you're watching a major motion picture. Right.

So what is your feeling about things like Sora and what's going to be going on two, three, five years from now in terms of image generation, video generation, leveraging AI.

Oh man. All I can say is that it's going to be wild.

Right.

Like anything that we're thinking about right now and the way things are done in that particular space with video is going to be completely disrupted in five years. What does that look like? How much I think that's a lot of that still is tbd, right?

Because a lot of the regulations that we need in place haven't really happened yet. Those are kind of lagging behind I think also.

Right.

Like, especially when we're talking about things like video, it really has to be crisp, you know, for that to make sense. I think like same something like CGI is maybe a good analogy or metaphor because it's like, could CGI do everything? Probably. Does it? Should it?

You know? No.

Right.

Like so, so you have to make sort of a decision about, hey, where is this line in the sand where this makes the most sense for us now?

I think like with the video specifically in some of these tools, it's a little bit frustrating and annoying that you get these nice trailers and drops about a release.

Right.

And you kind of get real excited, but then you can't use it.

Right.

And when didn't Sora make that announcement? It was like months ago.

Right.

We still don't have access.

Right.

And so that part of it's a little bit frustrating. And I think there's sort of that race, right, to show VCs or funding, like, hey, we're doing all this cool stuff now.

Here's the other part about Mid Journey I really like, again, not getting paid a dollar for this.

Right.

They're not VC funded.

They do weekly office hour calls with, with users where any, any user can join and they basically lay out, hey, this is what our team's focused on this week right now. Here's the projected release dates, here's what we're striving for in the future. Mid Journey is also going to go through 3D and video.

3D is probably going to happen before the end of this year. And the way that like Mid Journey has said this several times, anything that you've seen with 3D and video, this is going to be completely different.

We're not interested in trying to copy or produce something that you already expect.

And they've also said, hey, look, the reason we haven't put out anything video wise to showcase is because we think all the video that's been shown so far is kind of crap.

Right?

So we're not going to put something out there that we feel is like half baked. So I think you have like this competing perspective, right?

And understandably so between a company like Mid Journey and these, these other companies because one is a little bit more tied to just, you know, I guess their vision a little bit more holistically and organically, whereas the other is, you know, kind of Coupling and holding hands with anybody else that's supporting them, stakeholders, etc.

Wow, that's super cool. That's exciting to see where I don't even know what's going to happen.

All right, let's get into the last segment of this podcast, which is always Chaos, it's called, since you didn't ask. And it takes us off the how do we make an image for my SaaS company?

And I'm curious, how does Drew, who knows a lot about AI, how do you use AI in your real life? Are you going on there and saying, listen, I got ketchup, some eggs in my fridge, some cheese. Like, what recipe should I make?

Like, I want to know literally, how are you using AI in your life? Because you're using it. I know.

Yeah. So AI outside of image generation, right?

Yes. Outside of all this nerdy stuff we just talked about.

And, like, everything I. I'm like, I just pulled up, you know, my chat GPT right now. I'm just kind of looking at some of these things. Everything, like, anything from, like, my personal life to professional stuff.

Right.

So how do you use it in your personal life? What, like, what do you do?

Like, hey, man, like, I. I work in the basement. I've got some, you know, spiders and daddy long legs that show up every once in a while. How do I. How do I get rid of these things?

My basement from home remedies, right? Like, what do I need to do? That's. That's literally.

What does it say back to you? You're screwed. Like, move.

Yeah, yeah. So, like, just stuff like that, right? Like, anything that I can think of.

If I've got something that I would typically, in the past two, three years ago, gone to Google for do it in chat gbt. Now legal documentation, this has come up a couple times, but, like, can anybody read those things?

If you're not a lawyer, they can be quite difficult. So I think if you know how to sort of prompt and get what you want out of it, it's great for something like that.

I've also built a, you know, like a custom GPT specifically for something like what I'm doing with Mid Journey.

So, for example, I can take any image, drop it into my custom GPT, and it basically spits out this very detailed and specific description of what the image is. And the way that I've described that is like, hey, I want you to describe this image to me as if I cannot see, right? Visually impaired, I'm blind.

Whatever it is, give it to me as if you're painting this picture for me. Exactly. You know, replicate, and then I get this nice little moldable prompts that I can just copy and paste in some circumstances.

So, like, that's part of my workflow. If I've got something that I'm trying to not replicate one for one, but maybe build off of or take pieces from, it's great for that.

Right.

And so, you know, that's a great example of, like, you don't need to know, like, everything there is about creating a prompt from scratch. In that case, like, you can just find other creative ways to use it. And I think that's really the superpower I've gained from using it so often.

AI, I mean, just at large is the more you use it, the more you come up with different use cases of how you can use it, right?

Oh, yeah.

I think you start to kind of figure those out almost to a point of, should I outsource this, or should I do my own creative thinking? Because I also don't want to atrophy my brain.

Right.

Like, well, first of all, you said.

Something that I think I'm going to start doing, which I don't know why it didn't dawn on me, which is for legal documents. People send me legal documents. Instead of sending my attorney, I'll just be like, hey, ChatGPT, this is my side of the equation here.

Is this in my best interest? If not, what should I be thinking about? That is a great use. It's much better than the ones going on in my house right now, which is ridiculous.

So I have teenage kids, and ever since Chat GPT had the thing where you can upload an image or take a picture, they have me stand and they take a picture of me and they say, chat GPT, act like a fashion consultant and tell this person why their outfit is horrible and be, oh, man, that's.

That's an amazing me.

Like, every time I'm like, why do I go through this?

Like, hey, as a. As a dad, man, that's like the pinnacle right there. I love that.

Oh, it's terrible. I get shredded by AI. All right, listen, this has been awesome, Drew, how does everybody follow you? Consume your content? What do they do?

Share it all right, now we're going to put it in the show notes as well.

Yeah, I mean, it really just depends on. On what level you want to dive in with me.

Right.

Like, I do most of my posting on LinkedIn. I've recently just started to re engage on X.

Like, I really want to make a valid effort there just because LinkedIn, the reach is has sort of, you know, they just keep messing with it. So those are like the two social channels you can find me on. Also on Instagram, but you know, my gum Road specifically.

So that's a place where you can grab any of my product assets, my digital products that I've created around Mid Journey.

So for example, if you're trying to learn it, I've got all of these PDFs, tutorials, cheat sheets that basically take you from, hey, I've never done this to hey, like, I could probably run some sort of business model off of this, right? Yeah, that's, that's where you can find me most of the time.

Yeah. All right, we're gonna put that all in the show notes. And I really.

Everybody check out his gumroad because his content, that's how I got to know Drew is through reading all of his content, checking all out and the guy knows what he's talking about and ask him questions. He's really nice in terms of just being very forthcoming with information. Drop him DMs on LinkedIn for sure about Mid Journey or anything else.

And Drew, man, this has been awesome. Thanks for being here.

Been great, man. Always good to see you.

All right, we did it. All right, talk to you all soon.

You did it.

You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

Subscribe to make sure you get the.

Latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five star review if this wasn't the worst.

Podcast of all time.

Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100% free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Daymond, John, Martha Stewart and me. Guruvents.com Check it out.