Midjourney: Consistent Characters!
Like breaking the sound barrier
It’s the final week of the quarter and my motion graphics students will give final presentations tomorrow, so this much desired feature arrives just a moment to late. In addition to the regular AfterEffects assignments, I had an AI Filmmaking option and several students made experimental projects with tools like RunwayML and Pika Labs. While there is such a thing as ‘text to video’, most successful AI generated videos start as ‘image to video’ and the holy grail of AI image generation has always been consistent character generation. I’ve watched or read dozens of videos and articles about hacks and tricks to get character consistency, but it always remains imperfect and elusive. The very nature of AI generated images always includes a certain factor of randomness, so all these tricks fall a little short of the goal.
It’s no surprise that Midjourney is the first tool to crack this problem, since they have lead the way of most AI image advancements in the last year. This is THE FEATURE that my students pined for all quarter, that would have made their work so much easier. Right now it’s 5 AM and I’ve only been playing with for about 30 minutes, but I guarantee that this is a total game changer that will set Midjourney apart from all the other tools and by midday, all the YouTubers I watch will have a tutorial up.
So How Does it Work?
First of all it works best with images generated by Midjourney, as opposed to externally. After generating your image in Discord, you copy it’s URL, rewrite your prompt to include the URL, and add the suffix ‘- -cref’ for character reference. You’re effectively telling Midjourney to make another version of this character, and the results are amazing. I’ll continue to play with this during the day and have a longer post up on Medium tomorrow. You can also read more here
OpenAI Releases More SORA Videos
While these are probably cherry picked by the internal team, OpenAI has released a few more videos that show just how awesome their tool can be. You might have already seen them on Twitter or Tik-Tok, but don’t get your hopes up, they say SORA won’t be available to the Public anytime soon. If you’d like to see the ‘state of the art’ in AI video, check it out
Claude 3 is Allegedly the New King of the Mountain
Another week and another press release declaring that some chatbot is better than ChatGPT because it has this many tokens or surpasses this benchmark. However, the Google Gemini launch fiasco, demonstrated that even the mightiest and well funded tech giants can eagerly rush their products to market and hope that their headlines are correct. Claude 3 appears to be the real deal and I’ve read several articles this week that heap high praise on it’s capabilities. In the interests of brevity, here’s the best one
Why AI Will Never Replace Designers
Many of my students are filled with existential dread as I discuss this stuff, wondering why they are even going to school and if it’s too late. If you’re having similar thoughts, you might find some solace in this article by Randall Cumming. Check it out
Computers don’t understand the kind of human emotion and history that’s tied up in a brand. Only human designers understand that.Although AI can serve designers as a powerful tool, it will never replace them and their knowledge of what motivates humans to connect with brands.
The State of AI in Advertising
Coach has unveiled the ad campaign for its Spring collection that draws inspiration from AI, blurring the lines between reality and the virtual world. Starring rapper Lil Nas X alongside digital model Imma, the spot takes viewers on a journey through a lively pastel world with a giant chess board at the heart of it.
How IBM is Using Adobe Firefly
What happens when you have 20,000 employees with Adobe Creative Cloud accounts? If you work in a large corporate environment and you’d like to see what the future looks like, check it out
On a lighter note, here’s an image of me that one of my students made. I hope I can live up to this expectation and continue to be an AI superhero. Thank you so much for reading this newsletter and supporting my work. As always, send me a message, I could talk about this stuff for hours.
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