How to use AI Generated Images in Graphic Design - Teacher: Ian Reid

Hello, useful content creators. Today, we have a bit of a different episode. I talk with Ian Reed of Reed Designs, and we discuss how he has been using AI generated images in his design work. We talk about his AI tools of choice. We touch on how he deals with his commercial clients.

When it comes to AI generated images, whether or not graphic designers should charge the same as photographers for AI generated subjects. And the big mistakes ad agencies make when they are trying to use AI generated images in their client work. So fair warning, this is a conversation between two trainees.

So it gets really local, both in speech. and examples. And we mentioned a location in Trinidad and Tobago called the Bamboo Cathedral, a whole lot, which I eventually described badly in the podcast. So for my international listeners, you might want to look that up as well. All in all, it's a great discussion.

And if you listen carefully, you'll get some great insight into how graphic designers are using AI generated images and how you can use them. Let's make useful content.

Hello and welcome to Useful Content, and today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom. Ian Reid. Hi Ian.

Hey Juma, how's it going?

It's going well man. It's going well. It's good to have you on. Uh, you were one of the harder Pokemon to catch, um, because I've been inviting you on for a little while, but it's good to have you on. No, and you know, it just so happens that today is a holiday, so that makes it a little bit easier. You know, even though when you have your own business, you'd already get a chance to go on holiday.

Yeah, it's true. No holidays for us. That's, that's how it is.

Very much so. Very much so. okay, great. So, people may not know who you are. So could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content?

Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. What do I do when you're asking a bio? I started writing my bio as Failed marketer, failed graphic designer, failed art director, failed advertising. Uh, pretty much everything that I've done so far has a level of failure.

When I look back on it, uh, I started on my career as a graphic artist. Uh, so at the core, that's what I do. That's who I am. That's, I can't seem to eject that from my being. Uh, I've, I've been in business for so long. It's been almost 30 years. Since I've been doing graphic design since, since the beginning.

I am an advertising marketing person. That's because I worked with one of the largest ad agencies in the Caribbean. I was at McCann for almost 20 years. 

My work has always been specifically clients come to me and they say, Ian, we need a press ad. Ian, we need social media posts. Ian, we need, um, I need a book designed, or I need an annual report. And that's my core business. But within that, there is a growing change. There is a different, there is a, no longer am I bound to having to sit down and stare at a, at a blank screen and try to figure out, crap, I can't, um, I can't think of what to do.

I, I, I, what, What do I do? I'm reading this brief and it doesn't make head to tails of it. I, I can't, you know, I put it into chat GPT now, I say, here's the brief, tell me what to do.

right, right. So things have changed. 

that's the level that we're reaching, 

you that's the level that we're reaching. So I kind of see you as I refer to myself as this a lot too. I kind of see you as like the middle child of the Internet where you're old enough to have done these things physically. Um, but you're also old enough to have, um, experienced this, well, AI, which is over the last few years has become the, it thing.

Right. And, uh, and I know that, um, you've been using that extensively. So you say most of your work is, is based around actual design, like visuals for, for people. So it's not really, uh, have you done a lot of brand identity stuff, or it's just mainly graphic design?

well, I consider everything related to visuals. Brand identity is part of it. It's all, if we go back to the lovely Venn diagram idea, it's all in a circle. Once it's, once it's a visual representation of your brand. That's what I do. So, um, recently, just to, just to give you an idea, recently I made a conscious effort not to do logos. Let's talk about that a little bit as it relates to AI. Uh, about five, four or five years ago, I started seeing websites where you could basically design a logo from answering a few questions. So you do step by step, do a wizard and it gives you like 25 options of a logo. I mean, all look like crap, but then I began to realize I don't need to sit down and draw 50 logos and then try to come up with five different options to the client, which is what they were paying me for. So usually you charge five, 6, 000 to do a logo. You see, this is way back in 2015, five. 4, 000 here and give me a logo and I pay it for that because that is time to come up with that. And then I started seeing the ability to do this without having to go through all of this work. And then I realized clients are not going to pay me 5, 000 when they could just go onto this website and do it themselves. 

So Do you think the age of the iconic logo is over?

yes, I do. Uh, there was a trend the other day where all these, all these fashion brands are now. You know, black and white text that just says Gucci in myriad pro and everybody's healing it as the next greatest thing. But I mean, that, that's the, that's the evolution. That's where we've headed. And then we had Canva. And everybody was like, yeah, Canva, nobody want to take on Canva. Everybody's using Canva now.

And Canva now has AI in it. So game over. If I bought a quote from aliens, game over, man, game over. What the hell are we supposed to do now? What are we as a graphic artist supposed to do now? If. The client is coming back to me with a layout, Italian convent telling, asking me if this is okay. I'm like, can I charge you $3,500 for me to tell you if your layout is okay?

No, it does. That's not how it's gonna work, you know? 

But, um, that, that's, that's where, that's how we lead into. AI because it's a, it's a small progression over time of people saying I don't need the middle man anymore. That's a good thing. And it's also a bad thing. That's

Right. So let's talk about how you have been, um, let's say becoming the person who replaces the middleman by positioning yourself and educating yourself and upskilling with AI over the past few years. Cause I, I saw that you. We're tinkering with it when it first came out. And of course you were doing the Mid Journey thing.

Everybody did one or two of those. And now you are really into, I believe, a stable diffusion and, and getting all that correct and right. Cause we want to dive into how AI is affecting and impacting the business of graphic design. Um, so, so tell me, how have you been using AI? For your business now, what's the function of it, uh, and specifically in terms of image generation and then you'll, you'll just kind of tell me what difference has that made in your business to this point.

All

a good question. Uh, let me preface it before. Um, so my journey comes on the scene, but first Dali comes on the scene. So Dali and chart GPT and all these, uh, what they call large language models and image. image generators, um, appeared on the scene like a thief in the night. And there were a couple of commentators who said, no one expected this. Like no one expected the Spanish Inquisition Monty Python. No one expected the AI thing to just arrive. Um, people would normally, what happens is it has to gain traction. So to give you an example, Facebook didn't happen overnight in the sense that it took a long time for Facebook to achieve. The billion and something amount of people that are on it. AI just dropped and it got a billion people using it from the, from the get go. So no one expected this thing to reach critical mass like it did. So yeah, I started tinkering with this thing and it immediately hit me because I'd already, as I had stated before, I already knew what was happening with Canva.

I really knew what the business, what the, um, business plan was, what the long term goals of Canva was. And I saw AI coming in and I said, okay. You can't miss this boat. it's Like playing with fire now. We have to, we have to take this and, and learn how to harness it. And, and as I explained to one of my friends in the AI space, I said, Sherwin, we need to, we need to, we need to figure out how this becomes part of the, of the workflow. people were trying to do in the early days was they were trying to replace the workflow with this. We haven't reached there yet. It will come, but we haven't reached there yet. So I said, okay. I need to learn as much as I can without learning the programming language behind it first of all, what are the drawbacks?

What can't I do with this thing? And the first thing that hit me was you cannot use this For production level stuff, because the hands are all screwed up. Mid JD can't do hands and that was a big thing. All the AI detractors were like, I can't do hands, can't do hands. Six months later, nine months later, it doing hands.

And then we got video. So I'm like, all right, this, this is the, the, the growth exponential is now six. Well, nine, six, three, every month is a new model that's coming out. So mid journey, not paying for it. Don't see, I'm not going to be able to make back on my investment. I'm not going to go and generate all of a sudden mid journey images and sell them on the internet.

It's not going to work. I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do mid journey. And then we heard about stable diffusion, which dropped. Just around the same time. eventually I got on to what was called Invoke. 

Now, Invoke is also an open source with a paid component where you can use the open source. But what Invoke is, is it allows you to generate your own images locally on your own machine. You don't have to use a Google server.

You don't have to use a mid journey server. You don't have to use anything. You don't have to use a Discord account. Nothing like that. What you do is you set up the system on your machine, you have your processor and your video card, do the processing for you. That's great if your video card is a RTX and a huge beast of a machine.

I don't have that, so I spent a lot of time staring at the screen, watching this thing generate and not getting the results. And thinking to myself, well, maybe this is not the right thing for me. This is not where we need to go, whatever, whatever, whatever. But eventually I just kept at it. I kept doing it. I kept, you know, trying it out, you know, leaving it like a process, come back, do those kinds of things. And eventually learning that if I do the right kind of processes, the right kind of prompting, I will get The results that I'm looking for and sometimes it surprises me. I didn't think that it was going to do this. So somewhere in 2023, I think it was about September, you what happened was last year in the middle of everything. I had open heart surgery and I had to stop everything. So my gap in AI generation lasted about six months because I had to recuperate. But in September of 2023, I was getting back into it and doing stuff and finding all the advances that had been done. Since, since I wasn't involved with it, a client came to me and she said, Ian, we did a photo shoot and we hate it. And I said, okay,

Oh, my.

you need to show me what you're talking about. And she sent me this and I love my client, but again, it's obvious they tried to do it on the, I wouldn't use the word cheap. They tried to

do it on the cost effective and wasn't. She was right. It's not what you would use for, uh, a big brand is there because they are part of a big brand. And I said, all right, what do you want? And she's like, well, we need to take this person who's sitting down here and we need to put them in a store.

But they can't be any store. It has to be a local Trinidad looking store. So there are three things in that brief that are immediately the challenge. One, I have to take the person out of the original scene and put them into a new scene. Okay, Photoshop, no problem, could do that.

Been doing that for thousands of years. We can do that. Put you in a store with a store, quote unquote. If I put store into the AI and say, give me a store, it would give me, it would give me something it interprets as a store based on what the, the model has been trained to know what a store is. So the store could be something and usually it's something in Japan because the Japanese are the ones that are doing a lot more modeling in stable diffusion. So a store could be some sort of, you know, something on the side of the road with selling mobile phones or something. I said, okay, so we can't do that.

We have to be specific. If I put Trinidad store for the Spain, you'll get nothing. It will come up with something completely crazy because the model has not been trained on that. So you have to be, you have to cheat. Now you have to say, all right, I want it to look like X. I can't remember exactly what the prompt was that I use. But I said, let's, let's, let's see what it could come up with, with a clothing store. And I got something that was fairly workable. I said, all right, well, this is getting there, but it's not going to match the person sitting down. Now, Photoshop hadn't come out yet with its generator fill, 

um, thing that just started with Firefly. What I did was I literally drew the inside of a store, put stick figure, whatever symbols for, okay, this is a pot and this is a pan. And this is a, I'm going to put a fancy bowl here and whatever, put it on some shelves, put it into the exact same perspective that the girl is sitting down on because we have to match perspective. Match the shadow shading a little bit, put it into the invoke and tell it, look, take this image and give me a store and try, try, try, try, try a couple of days. It gave me something that was fairly reasonable in the sense that it looked. like something that this preparator who was packing shells would be using. So I put it all together and I sent it to the client. I said, well, I don't know if this looks any good because I didn't like, I didn't like the end process. I thought the, the end didn't really look that good.

What about the end? Didn't you like,

It still looked okay. So the reason why you can point out what AI looks like is because it still has this kind of uncanny valley, strange, Your brain is looking at this thing and thinking now this is not real. The items didn't look completely like a bowl wasn't finished or, or it, it looked kind of, it looked kind of, um, like strange. It wasn't, you're not sure what that material is. You know, it looked. It kind of looks like glass, but it's not, you know, so they had this kind of, you know, thing, but the client came back and said, but this is awesome.

I love this. Could you, could you just change this and fix this? And I said, sure. So we went and I, I, I made some little minor edits and Photoshop after, and she's like, that's perfect. I love this. Whether she used it or not is I don't know if she used it, but then she sent me another image with now an office.

And she said, could you do the same for this office? Because we shot it in our, um, in our cantina and we see people with plates and food and thing and this is supposed to be a a corporate office. I said, okay, no problem. And that was a little easier. Not that because the model understood what a corporate office is.

Everybody knows what a corporate office is. If you say corporate office in Trinidad, it's going to give you a corporate office, you know, so you don't have to stress with that. And she's like, perfect. So I got paid. And that was the first time I actually got paid for doing AI work. And I thought, well, okay, there's, there's something here. There's something we can do here. So came back, same client came back with another challenge. She said, we need to do, um, a wedding photography and we don't have any wedding photography.

Could you try something? I did. They didn't like it. The image wasn't exactly what they wanted and they went and stopped photography. They got an image and they gave it to me and I said, okay, cool. No problem. But again, I tried something. 

think I remember seeing you posting an image. Was that same wedding image, AI generated wedding image? Is that. Is it that same image?

Yeah.

Okay. All right. I remember that one.

Yeah. So, II realized that there there is a way to involve AI into your workflow. I mean, I haven't touched on using charge. I use charge a lot. Not just with my workflow but with the, I mean, I'm terrible at math. I'm a horrible math person. So when it comes down to it, like I'm doing a project right now, which requires calculation of a grid.

Hey, chat GPT. I have a grid that I need to work on. What does it work with the size? Okay, this is the good. I have the answer. I don't need to stress about this anymore. What is happening is what I'm what I'm what I'm noticing is, is that more and more I'm relying on AI to solve a problem.

I had a client come to me and tell me they want me to generate an image of Trinidadians at an Indian wedding making roti. And I told them flat out, nope. And they're like, why not? I said, because unless somebody in the Caribbean, and I've said this to Mark Lindersay and to others who have asked me to comment on these things, I said, if there is a Caribbean model that somebody generates, That's a, a model is like a six to eight gigabyte file that requires a huge amount of computing power. If you create a model using Caribbean images and classify them properly, you say, well, this is, this is the lighthouse in Port of Spain. This is RBC Bank in Port of Spain. This is a Trinidad Maxi. Then I could go in now and type in Trinidad Maxi and get what I, what I want. That's it. and generated within a street that looks like Port of Spain because it has that reference to deal with.

And this is why, not to jump to something else, but this is why the AI detractors are saying that, well, AI has stolen images. Yes. And also no. What it's doing is just taking images that are generally in the public domain and training the, the, the model to say, well, this is what a maxi looks like. This is what a, uh, a doubles vendor looks like.

This is what, uh, Uh, a roti looks like. If we have that model and you call it, let's call it Caribbean version one. If somebody creates that model and has it for, for use, then you're going to start seeing more authentic AI imagery. Um, that, that, that you could then go and say, I want to see somebody at an Indian wedding making roti with children standing around so that they could, um, See the progress, you know, you can't do that right now.

There's There's no way that you can do that right now. So that's that's that's where we are with that But again, if you tell me ian, look I need uh, I need to put I need Like the last one I did was I needed people walking in the bamboo cathedral 

I have kids walking in the bamboo cathedral that's not going to work for for this This particular project i'm gonna have to take the kids out You and put people in and whether you're using photoshop generator fill or you're using stable diffusion or even using mid journey that's possible

I have some questions about that. I saw that, that image you created as for a popular bank in Trinidad and Tobago. Um, and I saw what you did. I saw, and you explained the process of how you had this image from the Bamboo Cathedral for those who, who may be listening outside of Trinidad and Tobago, who may not know it's, uh, Like a semi forested area with a path in it and there is that's tall bamboo that comes and meets in the center of this path.

Very picturesque, very nice. It's very popular. You can google it if you don't know what it is. And so they wanted a couple walking together in Bamboo Cotija. And I saw you said what you had this image with the kids and you explained that whole process. And of course they, at the scale that they were doing it at, it was for printed stuff.

It was fine and they were okay with it. Even though obviously I could see clearly

could.

see that there are issues

You can see, you can see the issues, right? But it's good enough, right? So it's 60 percent there, whatever you want to call it. I had a thought when I saw that image. The thought I had was, um, yes, it was done for convenience, but you essentially are functioning in the role of, let's call it a photographer, right?

Because they would have had to call out a photographer to go on location, to set this shot up, gotten models. There's a series of things that would have had to happen and, uh, for that to take place. So let's just forget the models for the time being. Let's just suppose you turn up there as a photographer.

You take the picture. Are you then now charging as if you are paying yourself as a photographer, as well as a graphic designer, or does everything get rolled into one? What is the approach when you're doing. Gen images that could be done by a human being taking pictures.

yeah that's a good question you certainly cannot charge you cannot charge right now coming back to when we where we started we're talking about logos it's the same philosophy If I go, if I tell a client, you want a logo that's 5, 000, the client is going to come back to me. Like if I'm off my rocker. Are you insane?

You can't, you can't do that. And in fact, one of my clients, um, came back to me and said, you know, why are you, I had to do an update for our website. Why are you charging me a thousand dollars to do this? When, before you charged me five, I'm like, because it's more work. There's more things to do. You see?

Yes, but you're just sitting in front of your computer. You know, you're not, you're not doing anything.

You're not, you're not actually writing 

People,

do, people actually say that

Yeah, we did. I

had a person comment and he said, but you, you, um, you, you're just sitting in front of the computer. I mean, they didn't say they could do it themselves.

They would never get that far in their insanity. But what they would say is, is that. is that they don't know what the value is. And, and I always remember at McCann, uh, the general manager saying, well, crap. Yeah. And Why would any client come and work for us?

Because we provide value. And I think to myself, Yeah, okay. But at the same time, they want something specific. So if it is that they said, look, we need a bamboo cathedral with somebody walking in it. And I call up my friend, Anthony Scully. He says, Scully, how much you would charge for us to go up to the bamboo cathedral, shoot two models. Um, and he would come back and tell me 10, 15, 000, 20, 000, whatever it is. I don't know what Anthony would charge. Um, and, and the client would go, are you insane? My budget is whatever it is. I'm paying you to do this layout for the. For the, for the press add. And I say, yeah, but I mean they're like, no, we can't do that.

So come up and that's, that's when they go to stock, they say, well, can't we find it in stock? So even if we go to ai, we already still have stock. Say, well, yeah, but you're not gonna find Babu Cathedral in stock. And that leads a whole other question is because I had another client of mine, a friend of mine, who's also client. And he said, he said, why don't we have local stock photography? Why can't I go on and go to a library and just pay for an image? I said, because photographers are not going to make any money doing that.

So I said, 

that. We tried that already. Multiple people have 

not going to work. So, so it comes back to, okay, if I go and I tell the client. Okay, to do this, this AI image, it took me two days, three days to do based on processing power. You see, because I have to wait for the computer to do the processing. What I'm doing is I'm charging you for electricity and I'm charging you for equipment. I'm not charging you on location. I'm not charging you on talent. I'm not charging you on because I can't. I can't buy good. I can't do those things. I'm not charging you on on photographic expertise, if you want to call it that, but you are charging for my time to, to be able to prompt this thing properly, to use the software properly, to do the, to do the job. So just like you would come to me and say, Ian, I need you to do me a logo. I needed you to do me a press or whatever.

I will give you a cost for doing that based on my expertise, the amount of time it will take me to do. And what is the components required? So AI is just falling into that line item of what the graphic designer is going to do to put it into the layout. So I could have gone to stock images if there was a picture of somebody walking in Bamboo Cathedral, I would have told them that's 300 whatever it is I charge to do stock, to pay for stock imagery. And, um, they would say, okay, cool. I would say, all right, well, I can't find it in stock. I did an AI image, give me a thousand for it because I'm doing whatever it is to generate it. It costs electricity, it has equipment, whatever it is. So I can't, you can't compare the two you're following. You can't say, well, if I, if I got Anthony Scully or Mark Lyndersay or somebody to go and shoot Bamboo Cathedral, I can't charge the same amount by rights, by, by right to the client to do an AI image, but. I should because the technology is very new. It is. It's cutting edge. It requires a lot of trial and error to get it right as much as you can. But, but I mean, the AI, as you can see, you said 60 percent there, the photographer would have got it to 70, 80%. And then I still have to take it, color correct it, clean it up, take off, take off blemishes or whatever it is, you know, fix the fold in the woman. One of the comments was, please, please remove the, the, the, the front of the woman's top, put the woman's top back on. I have to, I have to do those things. Even if it was photography, you still have to do Photoshop work. So there are a lot of things to consider when charging clients. I don't think it's right for me or anybody should be charging a 10, image.

It's just the math, not math in, in that case. But at the same time, you don't want to be doing it for free. So

you always come back to the client's budget. What is your budget? Ian, all I have is 3, 000. All right, this is what you could get for 3, 000. I'm not giving you no 000. You can't get no Bamboo Cathedral, um, image for 3, 000.

Let's put it that way. Come up with something else. Let's think of something else because that's not within your budget. And that's why I always tell clients, don't come to me and say, you want me to do it? And then turn around when I do the costing and say, well, that, that, um, that's not in my budget. 

That's basically what I'm saying, that, that, that it would be nice to make millions of dollars from AI, but as the end user of AI, you're not going to make a lot of money.

That's the reality of the situation. And then I could talk about that a little bit, but 

the Well, okay. 

Well, I have a question. I have a 

question though, because I don't want, I don't want to start to get away from us. So we spoke about the money part of it, which you covered and you talked about how it might work. Right. We spoke about the money, money part of it. Um, But another thing comes up, another, what's the word?

Another issue turns up, which is what about the expertise part of it? So in the image that you generated for this client of the couple walking in the Bamboo Cathedral, so that you were talking about whether you had to hire a photographer, you hire Anthony Scully or whoever else you decide to hire, you are hiring him for his expertise, his equipment, his expertise, his time, his whatever, whatever.

Um, but you as a graphic designer has to know what looks good. 

​

Absolutely. 

what works, what looks good. Cause because the image that you you're putting the models into this AI generated image into has a particular set of lighting. It has a feel to it, you know, and I said that there were shadows on the ground.

I'm sure you put those shadows in and all those, they would put the air generated all that. So, so that's what I'm saying. So you have to know that it's supposed to look like that. It's supposed to come to a point where it looks. Um, uh, a very specific way. And, and so what about that expertise part of it, the part of it, where people are paying for that as well, not just the generation of the image, but it does work in itself, but then about the expertise part, like a graphic designer who is not experienced enough to know, this is what I have to tell the AI in order to generate this specific type of image lit this way from this look good.

Absolutely. And that, that comes back to the point that I made in the the introduction. You can't, the, the AI is never going to replace people say, oh, AI is gonna replace. Well, okay. I wouldn't say never. I never say never, because I never thought we'd be real where we are now, as it stands, you still need three components to do this AI thing properly.

And let me just say, I have seen big agencies, I'm not gonna mention the agency, but I've seen a big agency do some work for a communications brand for Carnival. And I don't know if it is because they were under the gun, and they needed to do something very quickly. But they went and they generated some visuals there in mid journey. And obviously all the hands were screwed up. And it just, it just takes, it just takes a little bit of time to just take your initial image. Okay. That looks good. This guy's smiling. She's smiling. She's smiling too. We have a nice crowd. We have nice lighting. Everything looks good. All right. Oh my God. Look at the hands.

What are we going to do? All right. Take it into in paint. And in the case of stable diffuser, take it into in paint and you kind of have to guide the process a little bit. You actually have to draw the hands in a little bit. You have to have some artistic skill. Draw the hands in a little bit and tell the the AI, Okay, that's a hand because it doesn't, it still doesn't really know what a hand is.

It's getting there. It's okay. There's a hand holding a bottle. It has four fingers here and a thumb poking out here. Okay. I could take the four fingers. Let me just add the thumb in Photoshop. Good. But they didn't, they just threw this AI image out there. I don't know why they just, and they did a whole bunch of them and all.

And we saw one, one person's face was totally distorted. He looks like he was in, in, in one of these horror movies. But yeah, the point is you have to be able to look at this image from the point of view of an artist. and say, look, um, I have worked with photographers. I have, I understand the photography.

I've worked with models. I've worked with people. That is not somebody's teeth. That is not how teeth is supposed to look. So how are we going to fix them? Right? In the case of the Bamboo Cathedral thing, I, I was going to take it to the step further and fix all the, the coloring and all that. The guy's like, no, no, no, no, no. We need it right now. It looks fine for what it is. Go ahead. I'm like, all right, cool. I, I don't have a, I don't have a issue with it to the point of, uh, that it didn't look presentable, but it could have gone to the next step. It could have been that I could have sat down there in Photoshop. And really went through it and blended things more and whatever. I could have done all that, but again, the client wasn't paying for that time. They're not going to pay me to do that. You know, in the sense of if they're happy with it at this stage and everybody's happy with this, I mean, that communication client could have been happy with everybody's fingers looking like they were tentacles.

I don't know. So, so the expertise part of it right now, we are in the say, okay, so way back in 1787 on 18, whenever photography derby type or whatever it is, when photography started, nobody understood photography that five people knew what to do. That's where we are now with AI. We have a five people who know exactly what the AI is going to produce.

If you tell it. If I say I would like a, I would like a guy swimming in the ocean with a shark chasing him and he's happy, but I need to consider what model would be able to give me a good looking shark and a person. I may have to do the shark separately. I have to know what settings to put. What they call the, the, the CFC, the clip, the clip setting. I need to know what the, um, the other settings are within this thing to get the level of detail that I'm looking for. This isn't a fire and forget situation. This isn't like, uh, I'm Joe Blue. Oh, here's, here's, um, here's a thing. There's a website called Lexia. com. You could go in Lexia, pay a little 10 us and get a whole set of credits and you could create all kinds of images. Yeah, okay. Those are images that you like, but as for commercial reasons, what other people would like, what other people would be seeing, sells the brand, whatever it is, you might have to take that a little further. You might have to go a little further with it.

Let's talk about, she mentioned something here. So, so far we talked about the, the money, how much it costs. We talked about the expertise and let's talk about the LA. I realized that we're forming a trifecta. I didn't expect this to happen. We're forming a trifecta of what it takes to like use AI that is not.

the actual skill, right? That's not the actual prompting or the design or whatever. It's because we were kind of touching on the business of how you do this, right? So the last part of it that I think is important, and you said it just now, which is the time it actually takes to do it. Uh, and so it's not as if, uh, you describe a scenario just now where maybe they, they, um, could have done better if they had the time and they had refined it over or maybe they just.

Put through it into Photoshop where somebody was an expert because there are many Photoshop experts.

And he also described in your case where you were generating this image for this client, uh, that they said it's good enough. It's good enough. We need it now type of thing, which is, as always the case,

as always, is it from, from the beginning of time with graphic design and any artistic pursuit.

The clients always want it now, right? So, so then how do you account now? And how do you charge? Because people may have this concept in their head, their heads where, oh, it is gen, AI is just generated. It's instant 

type of thing. How do you now account for that and tell people, well, Hey, this thing, you know, Takes time and it's not just like I'm just saying one thing and it gets it done.

How do you account for that for your business?

it all comes back to being a graphic artist and educating people on what a graphic artist profession is, what a graphic designer is, what, what is the role of an ad agency, for example, you know, it would go that far. The first thing in your mind, okay, so you're a medium sized business, small business, I'll exclude, exclude small business really, because you're not really, you, you're going to be doing things on your own anyway, because you're not, you're not going to have that kind of fun, but fun, fun. The medium large business. You can't come and tell me as somebody had told me they want to do Google ads by themselves. I said, all right, good luck. Never happened because you just don't have the time. As a medium owner, business owner, you're dealing with stock. You're dealing with, with, with employee problems and you know, all kinds of things.

You have a lot of things on your plate. You don't have time to sit on, figure out, how am I going to do this? This, this special ad that I need to do for social media is one o'clock in the morning. Let me just go in Canva and do something. Okay, but what is that saying? You see, it's really saying that you don't, you don't have much respect for your own brand because this is how other people perceive you. You don't have much respect for your brand if it is that you're just throwing something together at the last minute. So you pay people like me to do it. But at the same time, the thing is, is that you can't just go. So the best example is, can anybody tell me? Throw it out to the community. Can anybody tell me that they could build a table by themselves? From scratch. Get wood, cut it, put it together, and sand it and paint it. Right? I don't think a lot of people, people could probably make an approximation of a table. If they get a word, they could probably cut it into the, the table might be a little wonky, but they get a table.

What the problem is, is what they're cutting it with.

No, the point I'm making is you, I'm not saying you can't get a table, but what kind of table would you get? 

You will obviously put a table that, that you would be like, this is functional. This is okay to put in my, in the back here, where I'm doing painting or whatever, and it could take licking and mashup and whatever. But I'm not going to put it in the living room. Unless you put it in the living room to say, well, this is art. There it is. You see my art, my sculpture, it's a table, whatever. This is the same thing with AI. You go in any AI and you go in and tell it, Hey, show me a woman smiling, holding a mobile phone because my brand is talking about um, extra minutes for the weekend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That you're just going to take phone, woman, um, happy, whatever it is you described it as, and ignore the rest. And you're going to get something that you didn't think that you're going to get. And you're going to be like, but this AI thing not giving me what I want. And you keep going, because technically it's free, if you want to call it that. And you keep going, and you keep going, and you keep going. Added to that, when you start Googling things, and you start searching things.

Well, I want to see a Trinidadian eating a snow cone. You're going to get a really bad looking AI image that somebody puts up on their website that, that doesn't look really nice, but it communicates the story to me. It is a table, it's doing what it needs to do. Here it is, is this kind of strange looking image of a person with some sort of ice looking thing. The thing is, if you want to get it, to where it needs to be. You're gonna have to do the work. So the AI is kind of like the start, maybe reaching the middle, but you need to get to the next, well, good description, the next 40%. You need to go and sit down now and really work at it. So, the point is, there are people who say, we don't charge by, you don't charge by the hour. I call BS on that, because you have to know how much time you're gonna spend on this. If the computer is going to be crunching this thing for three hours, that's three hours that you can actually use your computer, for example. Or, I bought a computer just to, I bought a machine just to do this. It cost me 20, 000.

I have to make back on this investment. So I have to pay, charge a client 4, 000 or 5, 000 per image or whatever, to make back whatever it is, the equipment. So these are the things that we need to think about when we're talking about, well, we could just do it in AI. Well, yeah, you could, but if, but you know, it, it, it requires, it requires some level of thought and, and some level of commitment. to get it right. Now, the whole other, the whole other side of the equation is we've had people saying, um, yeah, well, yeah, I will never make it look as good as I would. Dude, don't kid yourself. Within the space of three months, we went from, and we use this, this example a lot in the, in the industry. We went from, uh, if you search up Will Smith eating

spaghetti 

Spaghetti. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I know that example 

to what we have now, what's the name of this thing now?

I've forgotten 

the name. Zora, Zora. And

Spora is still not open source. It's not open for everybody yet. But when it gets there, what, what, what are you going to do? You're a videographer. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? When a client could just say, well, let me go inside here and just put in, I want X, Y, Z and whatever, whatever. Yeah, you could. But in the case of a local context, if you're trying to be localized, You're gonna hit a wall. So I'm, again, I throw this out to the community of all the AI people. Make a model. I can't do it. I don't have the processing power. Make a model. Let's make a model for the Caribbean. Let's make a model for Trinidad.

Let's make a, let's, let's, let's do something that we can then say this is so, so clients could then go and, and, and, um, pay for it. Now, this is the other thing I wanted to talk about is the fact that you may be making a pittance from AI. But the real people who are making the money from AI is NVIDIA.

Right? Yes.

Is, is mid June, well not even mid June, because they're all basing, they all, the hardware to provide these magical images, that's Amazon AWS, that's, um, the server, the Rackspace, the cloud services, the, um, the NVIDIA. Uh, processing. All of those things are where the money's at. That's where the money's at. Whoever hold those things, they are going to make the money. Everything else is, you could call it open source, you could call it freemium, you could call it whatever. At the end of the day, you make it a little five US, they make it five million in one day. Because at some point in time there's going to be a point where you will need the greatest processing power, most processing power, and you can't do that in your home. You're not gonna do that on somebody else's system somewhere.

Yeah. See that's, that's an interesting, I heard about that. And the NVIDIA is making a, in Nvidia went from GRA graphics cards to a, a crypto, uh, powered to, um, they went through a few iterations, . So I basically, it's the same cards. They just upgrading them and calling them different things. So if video is really making a killing, I, I, but I wanna, there's so much.

Things we could talk about and there's lots of stuff you're generating a lot of thoughts in my head. No 

Mm, mm, mm, 

to ask you questions,

but let me ask one more thing before we close off. Can we come approaching an hour? So let me ask one last thing before we close off. Um, do you think that the public, the general public perceives any company in a bad light?

When they recognize that they're using AI generated images as opposed to real people, do you think that's something that happens in the mind of the public or they don't care?

Well you'll have to ask the public. You'll have to ask them, do you like this image over this image? Just get a feel. Again, there are two schools of thought. The graphic artists say, the graphic designers in the community say, but this looks like crap. Why would anybody like this? But the post has like 500 shares or whatever. So, so it's how you measure the metric. Is the metric, the success of it by how many people commented positively on a piece of content that was put out generated by EI. Yeah, okay. Then, then it worked. So, so if, for example, the big communications company with the twisted tentacle looking hands and the two warped faces, nobody seemed to care because it's just another piece of content that this particular company is putting out. But if you were to launch a product, It's new. You're not, you're not in this space before and you launch a new product and you use AI exclusively. I think a lot of people would think, well, this is not feeling genuine. You, you, you smell the BS from the distance. You know, you say not to show what I really think that this is, you're using, you're not using real things.

So I'm not feeling like you're really real, which is why when you have all these tons, a hundred people saying, Oh, well, you could automatically generate content for your disruptors or whatever. That's not real stuff, you know people The other flip side of it is, you know, all these instagram and um influencers who are ai You know doing the butt pose in their bikinis getting 10 000 likes because does They they like those people like those kind of things. They don't care whether it's real or not but you see when it comes to something like milk or or Or food or something where it is genuine. You tell me that's a generated roti image. So you could not just go and make a roti and take a photo. What you're not real. So it, it, there are definitely different parts in the spectrum.

I don't want to call it range. I want to call it a spectrum where it can fall. If, if you, uh, If you're trying to be genuine AI in the beginning or AI may not be where you need to be

But at the same time if you're a small business And you're selling clothes and you could generate a model With something that looks like your clothes on it and look fairly good.

I I don't see the problem I don't think anybody would see the problem,

right, right. Uh, Ian, this has been a really great conversation, a very interesting, and it went into places I didn't expect it to go. Um, I dunno, maybe there'll be another time when we talk more specifically about some of the other thoughts I've been having, but today I think we have to bring it to an end there.

But before we go, could you please tell the people where they can find you online? They may be interested in having some AI generated images by Reid, Reid Designs. Um , where can they find you online?

but my website is redesigns at pro but That's read Designs dot p but it's not, I've been updating it. I've been very Slack, um, you could find. But I do most of my stuff on Instagram, so read designs dot p on Instagram. I also have all of my AI related things. I kind of silo it into AI related, uh, have a, a little, what I call journey, a journal, uh, of, of ai, the journey of AI from the beginning when I started right up to now. Uh, it's called the ironic mnemonic, so I don't know if I could, I could send you that as a spelling, but it's the, it's on my, on my redesigns at PRO page on Instagram. I always talk about the ironic mnemonic, so you could always find it a link from there, 

but um, that's, that's, and also on LinkedIn, uh, Ian redesigns, Ian redesigns,

Nice. So we'll, we'll take those things. We'll put them in the show notes. Thanks again, Ian, for, for being here with us today. And thank you students for joining us on the Useful Content Podcast, Useful Content Classroom. Dismissed.

And we're clear. We are clear. We are clear. We are clear. See how easy that was? Very, very painless. You could have talked for two, three hours.

I know it's just time. I have time today.

All it is, you know, in an arrival day, um, and they have roti loaded up somewhere. So.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I didn't buy any routine. Oh, well.

Well, well, I generate some.

Yeah, maybe. Well, thanks a lot. I really, really appreciate it.