Good morning, it’s Monday October 2nd and there’s been an explosion of AI news lately. A lot of big things happened last week and a lot of major developments are scheduled for the coming months. The pro plan of Chat GPT can now accept both speech and image inputs as well as reply with a spoken voice output. Dalle-3 will launch as a part of ChatGPT either this week or next and it’s supposed to completely eliminate the the need for complex prompts. You just describe what you want in natural language…and voila! An image of Midjourney quality. And it can allegedly render text as well. However, MJ is supposed to make a huge leap in image quality later this month and add text and 3D by December. The tools keep getting more powerful every week.
How to Talk About AI Like an Insider
Even though I’ve been spending several hours a week reading about AI for the last four months, I learned several new terms in this glossary of AI Terminology. Did you want to find out what a “Stochastic Parrot” is? Check it out
Prompt Engineering as a Skill, not a Job Description
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll remember that I’ve made a few mentions that ‘prompt engineering is dead”. However, I think that refers to the job description, especially those that were offering salaries up to $335k. I don’t see any articles about that anymore. I did get a lot of value out of this article from Google, Prompt engineering and you: How to prepare for the work of the future. If you’re one of my current students, this will be what we’re discussing in class this week. If you’re a former student, I think it will be helpful in navigating the workplace.
How to Master Prompt Engineering
If the previous story piqued your curiosity and you’re starting to believe that ‘Prompting’ is going to be a keyword in your job description (akin to ‘breathing’ and ‘arriving on time’) and you’ve now made it a goal or something to get better at, you might get some value out of this guide from God Of Prompt. I have it bookmarked and I’m practicing with it every day. Check it out
META Brings AI to the Masses
At first I was going to say this was a “last ditch effort to stay relevant”, but this could be an important move for Meta and make AI accessible to a much larger population. If they get it right, we’ll be able to generate AI stickers in Messenger, create AI images in Instagram, and interact with virtual 3D avatars of our favorite celebs like Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner while chatting and getting advice from them. Note these avatars don’t have voice capabilities yet, they’re just animations that move in faux 3D space. Did you need another way to waste time on your phone? Check it out
10 Most In-demand AI Skills
I had never heard of cio.com, but I assume it’s for Chief Information Officers and those people probably have some sort of say in whose getting hired. No surprises here, knowing how to use ChatGPT is number1, followed by several programming skills. Good news for regular readers of this newsletter, Midjourney is #7 and Stable Diffusion is #10! Check it out
MidJourney Inspirational Roundup
Christie C. shows us how to make seamless tiled patterns for packaging
Andy Wood gives us the shivers with spooky, atmospheric posters
Michael King wants to sell you his 500 MJ prompts for $15; it’s worth it
Dirk Habenschaden makes exquisitely beautiful ink drops in water
Best Free Tool of the Week: Alpaca
Well it’s free for now while it’s in beta, I’m sure they’ll charge for it soon. Are you tired of just writing prompts and “hoping” it will look like the image in your head?
Alpaca is a Photoshop plugin that first looks at what you’ve drawn and then listens to your prompt. It’s like you’re the creative director with a rough sketch and you have an army of finishing elves to finish and polish your ideas. It also has out-painting, upscaling, and depth mapping. Check it out and you will need to begin with the installation instructions
That’s a wrap. Hopefully you’re getting some value out of this newsletter. If you have any requests or would like me to do a deep dive, just send me a message.