How Midjourney changed my life - how to use Midjourney to create, with Drew Brucker

Hey, it's Navid here. And in this session, we are going to talk all about Midjourney. You're going to learn how to use it, how to create photorealistic images. And I'm here with an expert on this topic. His name is Drew Brucker. He's a cutting edge and award winning marketing leader.

He also happens to be the leading voice around AI Image Generation, and he's very well known for his work with Midjourney, and I've seen his work, it's pretty incredible, he's big on LinkedIn, so I'll make sure to link him up there in the description as well, but with that being said, warm welcome, Drew.

Man, such an honor to be here and be a part of this, this awesome group of people that are going to be Dropping some knowledge bombs on us. So, yeah, man, let's, let's jump into it. Yeah, I'm excited. Let's take, let's get into your presentation you prepared. I know you have some good stuff.

You're also going to share some screen and actually demonstrate Midjourney for everyone here. So we have a lot of good stuff coming. Yeah. So let me jump into this. Let me go ahead and share. And, we'll just kind of kick it off from here, right? So this session's all about Midjourney and really its effect on, on my life, you know, just as a creator.

And, you know, it's been quite, an interesting path just in, you know, really, I guess the last 10, 11 months of playing with this tool. And I think it's pretty fascinating. So, I think there's a lot of valuable lessons in here. I hope that you guys get a ton from this. I'm sure you will.

And, you know, first of all, let me just kind of introduce myself, outside of that great intro that you just did. But, you know, I'm a marketing executive. I spent, the last 8 or 9 years specifically in software as a service or B2B tech, startup space. So, a lot of I'm a CTO, I run a team of about 20 people.

I've been working with a lot of very fast paced, moving environments, small marketing teams. And I think really where I've sort of thrived in that is my curiosity and creativity to work with the resources that I've been given. So, that's a little bit who I am outside of this. And then I recently, as we get into it, just founded a company called Brainchild, which is, really getting into more of, the AI image generation, functionality and the services that I can offer behind that.

And then, just a little bit of background on me outside of that, I'm a photographer, a designer, just as a hobbyist, and I really enjoy sort of that aesthetic storytelling, capability that exists within those things. And so, you know, that's what we're going to dive into. I really want to just back up, right, of, like, where we started with this whole thing.

And, you know, I was looking back and thinking about when I first started playing around with Midjourney, it must have been in January, January or February of this year, right? And, at first, you know, I really didn't know what to expect. I just started seeing some things. in general about Midjourney and it getting a little bit of hyped up and so I decided to kind of play around with it, but you know, before that, right, I had spent quite a bit of time as a photographer and really, you know, I guess took my camera everywhere with me, whether it was going into the city, whether it was traveling, Whether it was taking photos of, you know, different scenes or street or landscapes or whatever it was, that was something that I derived,

you know, a really big desire for. I spent a lot of time with it. I spent a lot of time creating these stories, taking them into Photoshop, editing them, presenting them. Right? All of those things that go with it. then I had kids. Then I had, twin girls. and then all of a sudden, right, that traveling sort of disappeared a little bit.

Also, the time, you know, the hours that I had to edit, these photos, right, where often times I would spend an hour, two hours on one photo, that disappeared, right? And so some of those capabilities were taken away from me. And what really sort of, I guess, got me going again, With my camera sitting on the shelf was Midjourney because once I started playing around with it, I thought this is super cool that I can recreate these scenes from the comfort of my own home, from my desk, right?

It's not quite the same, right? Because photography itself is an experience, but I think what I think it does give me, right, is it gives me the ability to be flexible to my lifestyle. I didn't have to wake up at You know, dawn or show up to a particular location at sunset to get the right shot.

I didn't have to have all my camera gear with me. I didn't have to have my batteries charged. I didn't have to have approval, you know, to in my schedule to make these things happen. And so all of those things became super. I guess important elements of how I started to get into Midjourney at a, at a deeper level and start to tinker around with it.

And, you know, the fascinating part about Midjourney, is, you know, it's an, it's an AI text to image generation tool, but the quality of this tool compared to others is really what's fascinated me the most. Now, if we back up right all the way to, the beginning of Midjourney. It was very hard to create anything that was worth a damn, frankly.

you know, cause if we're looking at this screen here, we're talking about You know, the same prompt, right? The same words given to the tool. And these are the different outcomes that, were generated along the way. Right? And so you can see this quality get better, better, better, better, and better.

And all of this happened in 16 months time. So that alone is super, super fascinating, right? And that was sort of this game changing moment when I jumped in, which was between You know, I would say v4 and v5 where it was like, okay, I can create some things here and it's fun, but it's a little bit inconsistent.

I'm not sure about the quality, right? It was just more fun than anything else. Then though, it got to this part where it really took this jump in quality, right? And I love to, I guess, develop images that have that photorealism sense, right? And so I've got a couple images here and Now, you know, really, I guess the, the trick here is to show you kind of how realistic things have become in just a short amount of time.

And also to remember, it's only going to get better from here, right? And so I've got two different sets of photos here. I would love, you know, to take a guess in, in terms of your mind, in terms of which one you think is real, which one you think is AI generated. So on the left, on the right, we both have two shots.

Which one do you think is AI generated? Man, this is difficult, to be honest. It's really, really good. I'm not sure. I love also the photorealistic stuff, just as a side note, because I travel a lot, and I take a lot of photos and things like that on my travels, so Midjourney can help me recreate some of this stuff.

And I've also seen the same experience. It kind of has improved a lot. But I would say, just as a guess, I think the, depending on how you shot that, maybe If it's a slow shot or maybe the, the right, the right could be real if you have, I'm not sure to be honest, but I'll stick with the right.

But that's the whole point, right? It's very, very difficult to tell. So actually in this one, the photo on the left is real. The photo on the right is generated. And I think what you were trying to go with that too, is you were looking at the water and you're thinking, okay, this is a little bit smooth, right?

And I think that might be the giveaway on that one. Let's try, let's try one more. I'm curious to get your thought on this one. I would say maybe here it's on the right. Which one? The AI generators on the right, you said? No, I think that's one. The real one. Okay. So actually the one on the right is AI generated.

Wow. So again, right. So it's so good. I mean, it's impossible to see, to be honest. I mean. I mean, if I saw it like really close now, it's a little bit far away from me on the screen here, but yeah, I mean, it's pretty good. I mean, would you say it's like, would, would most people be able to tell?

Like, I mean, I don't think so. I think that's, that's really the point that I'm trying to drive home is I've actually run this test on, on LinkedIn as well. Right. And I sat, I think five, five of these in a row, side by side by side. Right. And had people guess, I would say. So, nine out of ten, you know, got them wrong, right?

So, really. And what about photographers? Really? I mean, I'm more a hobby like yourself, like I'm not, you know, I travel, I take photos, I have great gear, but I don't, you know, do it for a living. It's not something I plan to do really, but, but what do you say, like photographers, do they get it right?

Or do they get it wrong? That's, you know, that's a really interesting question because I think almost photographers Overthink it because we know how the process in post processing can help it. Yeah, maybe that's why I'm also, I'm not, as I said, I'm not professional, but I'm, I'm overthinking it because I've seen a lot of photos.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I think, you know, as a photographer, we might even overthink it because we know the different capabilities that exist within the camera, right? And, and even in the post processing editing software. Yeah. now I think the giveaway on this one, if we look on the right.

is the girl's hair is blowing in one direction, and then you've got sort of that, that grassy, grassy knoll or whatever it is on the right is kind of blowing in the other direction, right? Yeah, now I see, I see that now. That might be a little bit of a giveaway, right? But, you really have to look for it.

Yeah, you have to look for it. And it's the same, like, when you have, like, an iPhone photo next, because iPhone has gotten really good, for example, or smartphones in general, next to, like, a professional. so much for joining us today, and we'll see you in the next video. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Midjourney went from sort of being this fun tool, right, to getting to a point with the photorealism specifically that this now has utility in the business world, right, and so that was sort of an unlock for me and, you know, I was sort of looking inwardly In terms of what I was doing in my full time role, in terms of some of the challenges that we had, right, because, you know, as marketers, especially on a, on a smaller team, right, like things like budgets, things like headcount are challenges that we have that take place.

So, you know, I had a team of three other people. Fast paced environment, limited budget, limited resources, right? We're not going to hire an additional person just to be a designer. you know, like we're only given so many options in terms of the, the kind of images that we can work with, right?

Because you really can only do a few different things. You could go to a stock photography site. You could hire a professional photographer. Maybe you go. You know, to a designer or something like that, right? But either way, they come with their own challenges and drawbacks. And I think, you know, from a stock photography standpoint, it's very tough to stand out when you have other brands and other businesses using the same images as you, right?

So that's one of the drawbacks. Then you also have, you know, the fact that it just takes forever to dig through stock photography sites to find something that kind of It feels like your brand. Right? And then that's, Drew, that's a great point. And also it's a, it's a lot of people started using like Unsplash and things.

I don't think it's great what they are doing. For sure. It's amazing. I even published some of my stuff there. Agreed. Sometimes it gets to get access to my own photos easier when I upload it to my blog and things like that, because I like to use my own, own stuff a lot of times.

But, but here's the thing, like when you're using stock photos, that's actually Little bit bad for SEO and different things because Google just gonna pull as many stock photos, right? If everyone is using the same, you're not gonna show up for this photo basically. That's true. And it's gonna be, it's not, it's gonna not gonna be the best for your brand.

And it's not even on brand in many cases. It's just like, it looks bland, basically. So the way that I describe it is, it is like going. To like a thrift shop and you're or like a bargain bin and you're trying to find like a piece of clothing like a shirt or pants that fit perfectly and it just takes forever to get there and It may kind of fit, right?

And then even then you have maybe one or two things that kind of fit, but how do you match that across an entire sort of branded library, if you will? And so that's definitely a challenge. And then obviously we touched on it, but like the photographer designer piece of it is just a different expense altogether, right?

Yeah, so this is a, this is a little bit of a busy slide, but I think it's, it's absolutely worth it, right? Because this breaks down all of the sacrifices that take place within These three buckets, right? So we're talking about stock photography, photographers, and designers. It comes down to three different things, right?

Money, time, and compromise. So with all of these, they have major, major drawbacks. And so I spent some time really kind of like detailing these things out, right? So stock photography, we talked about a few of these things, but, you know, you've got sort of the may not match with your target audience.

Like maybe depending on. what industry you're in. There may not be good photos for that. The brand consistency across those images, you can't customize them, right? They only come in certain sizes, whether it's horizontal, like landscape or it's portrait, maybe square and that's it.

takes hours to dig through, right? Like if you've ever been responsible for anything from a brand or creative standpoint, you know how long that takes and how painful it is. And then on the photographer and side, right? A little bit more focused on. You know, the, the money and the time sacrifices that you make, right?

So like a photographer, for example, you have to find one, you're going to pay a good amount. You've got to schedule the photographer, any models that you're shooting on site, you know, the locations in which you're going to do it. Are you flying somebody out, you know, to this location?

You got to factor that in. What shot types do you want? You know, and then you got to hope, right? Like that you got the images that you wanted and it's only going to last for. A certain amount of time, right? Like it's a, it's a finite resource. And so this really dives into that.

And I think that was really an inflection point. Hey, this is AI image generation is vastly important because it fills this huge gap between these these options because I view them as on opposite ends of the spectrum. So like now diving into a little bit more of the business impact, right?

Like taking this back into the workplace, right? Because I'm playing around with Midjourney. It's more of a hobbyist thing, right? And then we're going into the realization that, hey, this has actual utility in the business world. So, taking this to, to my job, we ended up having like a, a customer event that we were holding.

And, you know, I think one of the, the moments was really just trying to identify, hey, like, we need some very specific thematic imagery for this event and, you know, like taking this into something like ChatGPT to ideate in terms of like what we call this thing, which we landed on, Campfire.

How do we draw on visual interest and themes to really tie this whole thing together? And, you know, that was where Midjourney really came in to play because I was able to create that image on the right. In Midjourney, it had a very specific feel it had the brand colors right It had sort of like this personality to it And so everything that like is either underlying in pink or circled In pink was done really through AI, right?

So like we're talking this entire landing page on the left. You've got everything that was ideated and leveraged using an LLM like ChatGPT. And then on the right, you've got Midjourney, which comes into play. And the way this kind of played out was we had this customer only event.

And we created swag for the event. We had slides for the event. we had like coasters, candles, shirts, and we were able to put, you know, imagery that was thematic, created in Midjourney across all of those things tangibly in real life. And that was also one of those moments where it's like, okay, this is definitely, This is definitely in play, right?

Like, brands should be thinking about this, and this was back in, I think, May or June, so this was pretty early on, and so what, what I started to do is incorporate this into different use cases that we had for our own imagery, right? Like, I wanted to prove this theory out, you know?

So, you know, whether it was creating images for events, whether it was creating images of our ICP or our audience and what those people look like, what those scenes look like, what our brand colors look like associated with it, creating images for the website, for campaigns, for case studies, right?

Like, I was in an industry where these things were very hard to get great photos. And this solved that gap completely for us. And so this just gives you a little bit of a breath of what that looked like. Awesome. Is this, okay, this, sorry. Here's some other images of our particular audience, which was basically like live event.

So, like, you think of like a concert, a festival, a conference. There are people behind the scenes, right, that are operating the cameras, the audio. They built the staging, right? And so, typically, there are no photographers in these events to capture these people, and people barely notice them because they're dressed in black, right?

But I was able to create these people across diversity, across age ranges, right, and put them in these scenes in a matter of minutes. So that's just a little bit of background on those. And then really the next step here was to stretch this a little bit further. Right, and ultimately what I got to and where I landed on this was, hey, I could create an entire branded creative library using our colors, using our mood, using the diversity of our audience, the different scenes that they're in, right?

the personality of our images and infuse those into One central repository where we could use these images across everything that we did, right? So, whether that be thumbnails, swag, social media, you know, anything that you see on here. These are just a few examples, right? You know, Drew, you're like, this is like creating your own stock library, essentially, of branded photos.

You know, you have that. I mean, that's such a smart use case because you can actually have, you can, you can like spend some time to do this, like you're spending time on your branding, your brand identity, the guidelines and all this, but you're, this also goes into it to have imagery for your brand, right, to have it for blogs, thumbnails, whatever you are doing, right?

And if you can have that in like different style of images, yeah, you can tweak them and I'm sure we're going to show how you can, how you can do a lot of things, but then you have that in your, your drive folder or something, you have everything stored there and you can just pull it out when you need it.

That's exactly right? Because at the end of the day, this allows you To create different size images for whatever use case and in a way that's infinite, right? Because you could essentially identify a few different prompts after you've played with this that work really well for your brand, right?

They give you the colors they want, they give you the angles that you want, the ICP, right? Your audience, their age, things that you can plug and play. And really, you know, you could just spend a few hours building out hundreds of photos. And probably not have to touch it again for a long time, right?

Like in every image that you have could be unique. It's unique to you, and you're not going to see it on anybody else's website, right? So that's that was super important to kind of like point out. And then also, if you're a creator that's listening to this, these are you. More or less associations with, you know, the B2B world, but this obviously applies to you as a creator.

If you're doing something individually, if you're in B2C, right, like if you're in an agency, even, right, all of these things can, can overlap and have use cases. So then, you know, like thinking about this a little bit further, like, what does this mean in terms of the grand scheme of things, right?

And I think what it comes down to is. I'm, I'm a believer with, with AI in general that when we're given new tools, it creates new possibilities. And if you're a creator or somebody that's curious, which those things typically go hand in hand, you really need to spend time playing.

You know what I mean? You really need to give yourself the space, the freedom to dig into these things and uncover learnings and lessons along the way. And so, you know, just, just sort of recapping of why you should care about this particularly, whether it's Midjourney or whether it's another AI image tool.

Right, is it gives you back the money, time, and compromises. It solves that problem, which we touched on. It also gives you a competitive advantage because there are a lot of companies that are not doing this yet. They're just not. And I think it will come over time, right, but there's this nice gap in time where they're not.

And this allows you to scale those images. And like we just mentioned, right, like create a lot of these for different sizes and use cases, and it's going to give your team or you a lot of time back. obviously the enhanced creativity because you can, you can create any scene that you want, essentially, right?

If you've become good enough with this or you experiment enough, right, you can create any scene that you want, which also goes hand in hand with like virality, right? Because if you want to create something that's absurd or funny, or has a little bit of personality. this is going to do that.

A stock photographer, or a stock photograph is not going to go viral, right? It's just not. And then also, like, you're augmenting the human creators on your team. So, what I mean by that is, you could have designers, and I'm not saying graphic designers are obsolete, they're not.

I know people that work with, within agencies that Their designers are using Midjourney to give them a lot of time and control back. Things that were very manual processes that took them a lot of time, right? They're now able to increase their output and accelerate now that they have the help of something like Midjourney.

And then lastly, right, the future proofing of your business or you is you're setting yourself up to learn the greatest tools and technologies, which is unlocking your creative possibilities that exist within it. You know, you know, something really crucial, I think for me, when I would bring on team members today, like before, of course, you, you just want a great designer, but I think now I would like them to be familiar with these AI tools, especially like image AI, because really that's so powerful.

Like imagine they, I mean, they can design something. It's like, like we're going into mid year and we're creating a photo, but they can customize this as well in Photoshop. So, because, you know, with the ethical implications and things like that, you It's, it's, it's good to, you know, add maybe some touches to it if you can.

You can use it straight out of Midjourney, of course, but, you know, I think with, with a, who owns the copyright is also interesting there because I think Photoshop or with their generative AI features, they, they, they basically protect you if you have a lawsuit or something. I don't know how it is with Midjourney.

I think there's some back and forth on this front, but I think for sure you need to do something more with it. Photo after you have actually generated from a journey, in case you want to use it for like a big production, for a blog post, probably doesn't matter as much. Right. But for other stuff it probably matters.

If Nike would use something like that, they would for sure do a lot of other work with it. Well, you kind, you kind of hit it like it. It's pretty much just that, right? If you're going to use this commercially or for financial gain, like maybe you're taking a little bit of a different approach to this, and so what we mean by that is something like you just mentioned, right?

Like adding your own touch to it in Photoshop, or, you know, maybe just to like be totally safe, you know, some people will use, director or photographer names or film names or something like that inside of Midjourney's prompting. I would just say maybe, you know, use other words that are synonymous to describe that instead of like people's names just to protect yourself a hundred percent.

I think what Midjourney said is basically, hey, any image you create is your image. Now, we are very far ahead of what legal is going to come in the background and do, right? So as of right now, I could create an image, you could use it, and there's nothing I could do about it because as of right now, anything that's created with AI is not able to be copyrighted unless, right, it is uniquely yours.

And you've put some sort of human element or touch on to it. Yeah, it needs to be more than a filter though. It needs to be something more. Yeah. Not just a filter, you throw on an image, you know, that's pretty easy. But like, it needs to be something more. You edit something, you tweak something with it, maybe completely redo it, but you have the same look and feel, but it's something that's maybe unique to your brand or something like that, that that's exactly right.

So, you know, that's a, that's a, I'm glad you brought up that point because I'm, I'm sure people have questions about that. It comes up quite a bit. You know, so here's sort of like this, this turning point for me was. You know, I had been posting on LinkedIn for a while. That's pretty much where I do most of my posting.

I have a pretty good following there and historically, I post a lot of B2B marketing things. Things are a little bit more aligned to leadership. you know, kind of like giving a little bit of a public, I guess, peek into some of the things that we were doing at my previous company and how we were thinking through things.

And then I started to, like, kind of share. what I was doing with Midjourney a little bit, you know, because I thought, you know, this was still so early on, I hadn't seen a lot of people posting, at least in my network, about actual use cases with AI and, like, actually seeing something, right?

Sure, ChatGPT came up. Sure, this came up or that came up. But, like, no one had really Done anything that I had saw. And I ended up putting on like a lunch and learn at my work where I was just kind of showcasing how I was using both like ChatGPT and Midjourney currently, and really just trying to share with the rest of the company, like how we were starting to leverage those things.

So I threw this post out there, right. And just kind of like, let my network know what was interesting is that, you know. I saw in the comments that a lot of people were interested in learning more about this. And I think, you know, that spoke to me because this felt a little bit more aligned to something that I was passionate about.

I had already shared previous photos like me being a photographer. And so I thought, hey, what if I do more of this, right? And I sort of leaned in, if you will. And, you know, I was starting to create so many images and I was starting to collect so many things that I got to this point where I sat down.

I was like, you know what, I'm going to create Like a Midjourney guide, because I recognized there was sort of a little bit of this gap, between people that knew what Midjourney was, but people that hadn't even played with it, or didn't even know what was possible using it. And so I created this guide and put it out to my network, and, It made a lot of noise, right?

Like, it made a lot of noise because there really wasn't anything like that that was posted on LinkedIn at this time. People didn't really know what was going on or what it could achieve. I was expecting a lot of things to happen. I got three purchases in the first, I think, three days, right?

So I was like, okay. You know, well, you know, I tried, right? I spent a lot of time putting this guide together and, here's where we're at. But then something like something crazy really happened, you know, I kept showing up and sort of providing more and more value behind what Midjourney is.

And I also realized this gap. This educational gap was a lot wider than I thought. And so I started like really filling in the blanks of, hey, here's how you use this feature within this, you know, and kind of almost taking a little bit more of a beginner approach to what I was teaching, right?

Like, hey, this is how you get into Midjourney. Here's how you create your first, you know, image using a prompt. Here's what everything means. Here are the features, yada, yada, yada. And that was when things sort of changed a little bit, right? So I started creating sort of these assets on the side.

of this bigger offering, right? So that, that Midjourney guide that I had, I think it was priced at like 60 bucks, right? I had three purchases. I'm thinking, okay, like, cool. I mean, I wasn't really doing it for the money, but I just wanted to sort of see if the need was there.

And, you know, when I started creating these things, you know, these other smaller cheat sheets, tutorials, you know, walkthroughs, that was when I You know, the post and the, and the audience really started to take off and widen. And it got a little bit more interesting. And so in the next 60 days after that, that was really when things started to really ramp up, right?

So I ended up getting 172 purchases of those guides. You know, I gained six, 6, 000 new followers in 60 days. And then, you know, just lots of fire stoked, which basically is just saying. I sparked a lot of good conversations through education and value with the content that I was providing.

Are there other people posting about Midjourney on LinkedIn? Yes. But guess what? They're doing. They're just showing you the photos they created. Cool. We can all create photos in Midjourney. We could all probably create pretty good photos in Midjourney, if we've played around with it long enough.

But the difference was I was really here to help educate, guide, and provide value with some of the things that I was doing, and people really leaned into that. Just a little bit of an elaboration of, like, the other resources that I created. So, I threw all of these things into my Gumroad page, right?

So, the guide, but also these little cheat sheets, tutorials, walkthroughs. And, you know, looking at that now, it's incredible because, you know, 92 different countries have downloaded a resource that I've created. And I just think that's absolutely fascinating because you can kind of go through this list of countries of origin.

And it's incredible that something like this that I created in my home can reach the masses in that capacity. And so, you know, this, Some of these resources were also downloaded by art directors, creative directors, marketers from some really top notch companies, right? So, like, Google, Meta, Ogilvy, McCann, TikTok, right?

Like, these are very big names, whether it's in the tech space or whether it's in the ad space. Advertising space. So that stuck out to me. And then just the, the number of unique customers that downloaded an asset, almost 2000, you know, just kind of blew my mind about the possibilities that existed from creating something so small and something that was, you know, so much for tuning in and I'll see you in the next video.

All of a sudden, I was getting additional requests for podcasts talking about AI, right? Speaking engagements talking about Midjourney, partnerships talking about AI, right? And so, like, creating all of this noise allowed for, and, and I guess in general, right, expanding my surface area for luck, if you will, led to all of these different things that, that happened.

And, you know, partnerships, for example, let me just give you a little bit of a taste for that. I mean, brands will reach out now. And say, hey, look, can we collaborate? Is this a tool that you would use? And if so, can you post about it? In exchange, we're going to give you four or five hundred bucks, right?

Like, those were things that weren't happening before this, right? And, some of these deeper conversations or experiences that I've been, blessed to be a part of weren't happening before. And it's really fascinating when you think about how quickly I was able to learn these things and dive into them.

And then move all the way to the other end of. Being an expert, right? do I know a lot about this stuff? Yes. Am I an expert? It depends on who I'm talking to or who I'm in a room with, but like, I think that's the opportunity here is with ai, things are moving so quickly. And you have the ability to take the reins, right, and be at the forefront of all this.

And so ultimately, right, like, let's bring this a little bit full circle. Where did this lead to? I've recently just stood up my own business, BreakingAway, where I'm helping brands create these branded libraries or these infinite on brand images at scale, right? Because I think that is a true problem being solved, right?

Like, we talked about all those sacrifices that are being made right now. And, In the economy, in the business landscape that we're in, budgets have been pulled back, right? Marketing has been pulled back. And so teams are trying to be smarter, wiser with some of the decisions that they're making.

And then also, you know, in general, I think AI is going to get to a level with the image customization. That we can get very personalized with the images that we're creating. And so I think this is really an opportunity for me to bring this vision to these companies, agencies, individuals that are serious about it, and start to dive into that problem deeper and give them something that they can have where their problem is solved essentially forever, right?

You don't have to search for stock, you don't have to hire anybody, you can do it from here and we're going to give you something that scales. So You know, just to wrap this up, like, lessons I've learned along this way, have been abundant. You know, I think one, I mentioned this earlier, but I've been posting on LinkedIn for a while, really had pretty good success, right?

I grew to, I think, I don't know, over 10,000 followers, you know, in about a year's time, over a year, and had some really good relationships. But when I leaned into something that was different, something that no one else was talking about, something that I was really not. preaching, but I was educating.

That was when that dial switched, right? And people really started to associate Drew with Midjourney, right? I was known as the Midjourney guy. And so that was sort of all these things that, that unlocked after that was people thought of me when they thought of AI image generation and the opportunities that came with that to grow and stand out in a space where there isn't a lot of competition.

So that, that was key. I think also lessons learned along the way. Right, is no matter how busy you are, and I was extremely busy, I was a marketing leader that sat on the leadership team, I managed a team, I have kids at home, right, like there's not a lot of time in between, you still have to find the time to do the things that speak to you.

Right? Whether that's in your full time job or not, you have to do that. And then with AI specifically, experiment, play, right? This is fun. We haven't seen anything like this in our lifetime. Maybe since dial up internet, depending on how old you are. And even then, a lot of us were kids.

We didn't know how massive that moment in time was. And we weren't experienced enough to truly appreciate it. Whereas now We're grown, things are changing, things are changing rapidly, and you have the ability to sort of take the reins and the leverage to be at the forefront of this and teach other people and, really make yourself a valuable commodity, in, in today's, you know, environment, whether you're looking for a full time job or you're just trying to be quicker and more efficient with your work, like we talked about so so many uses cases, right?

Yeah, that's sort of what's brought me full circle and you know, kind of got me to, to where we're, where we're talking today. Yeah. Awesome. I love this. I love how you're educating so much on, on LinkedIn. I've seen your content, but I think what would be cool to do for this session now, if people know more how this can actually help them, why don't we show people something we can create in Midjourney?

Sure. Yeah. Let's bring that up. Yeah. Let's, let's do this. Maybe something photorealistic or something that would actually be. I mean, a lot of people are showing this AI type of photos. I think what you are really good at and what we have seen throughout this presentation, I couldn't even guess the right one.

I think we should, like, create something like that that could actually be used for, you know, let's say a personal brand or, you know, a creator. Maybe you have a YouTube channel, blog, whatever that is, and actually utilize these images. I think that would be cool. Yeah, and you know what?

Like, I want to I want to also show you a few different ways that you can go about this, right? Because I think it's important to know, like, if you are in Midjourney, there are a couple different ways to create. You do not have to start with an empty box at the bottom here, coming up with prompts from scratch.

You don't. There, there are other options, right? Like this is one way to do it. It's a, it's a, it's a powerful way to do it. Right. like, also when you first go into Midjourney, you're putting in, you're put into this channel with other people. Right? And there's sort of like these other rooms where people are creating art in real time.

And you can see what other people are doing as well. Right? Like, and I think especially early on, it's very interesting to see the keywords, you know, the, parameters, which is something like this, which basically just indicates like the dimensions of this image is it's very helpful to see all the different options that are available to you.

Right? So there's power in that. There's also power in, you know, in Midjourney, right? You've got something like this explore page where you can kind of see, like, you can get a taste of other things that are out there, right? And not only that, like, if I click into something like this, I can see exactly what that prompt was, right?

So I can say, okay, like, maybe I don't want a Pokeball, but maybe I want something on a white background and I want it to kind of have this look. So maybe I swap out this for something else. You know what I mean? And so I think that's part of it as well. So for example, like, let's just do this.

And I'm going to go over to my channel just to make this a little bit. So I could take this and then let's just say, why don't we say like a magic 8 ball on a white background, Behance style. So we can, we can basically use that prompt that we found as sort of like a baseline. Build on top of it.

Right? Like, is there anything else that we want to include with that? Maybe, like, we could say, just to be sure, we could say black Magic 8 ball and white background. maybe we want this to be in a certain dimension. So why don't we just say 16 by 9, which is a landscape, and then let's just hit submit and see what happens.

Right? So, what's going to happen if you haven't been in here is essentially once you put in this prompt Midjourney is going to analyze it, and then it's going to start to recreate this image for you, and it's going to give you A grid that ends up looking like this, where you've got a series of four things.

You've got four different options, if you will, and then you basically have these other options below it. So essentially what this, how this plays out is this is 1, 2, 3, and 4. So image 1, 2, 3 and 4. And you see this U and this V underneath. So U stands for upscale. So if I like a particular image, I could say, Hey, look, like I really like number one, I'm going to hit U1 and basically what it's going to do is give me something like this, right?

Where it's how much does it upscale it to? Like, is that, that's probably not good for print still, right? You still have to upscale it further. Yes. Yeah. So that's a great point. Like this is probably like Upscale is just the way that you would basically put it into your library as like a single standalone image and say, I like this image, right?

Now, if you want to use this on, I would say something like a, like a website, you could probably get away with just using that or, potentially just upscaling it a little bit, maybe sharpening it, something like that. Where do you do that after, after this? What's your process, if I can ask?

My, my process would be. Like, I use a tool called Pixelmator Pro, which is just like a Mac app. It is paid, like a, it's a, it's like a one time lifetime thing. I think it's like 50 bucks, but it does a really, really good job and it's quick. so I can kind of get to that, that better resolution to your point of if I actually wanted to like print this or hang this up or something like that.

So there's that. But for a blog or social media, for this stuff, it's, you just use it straight out of the box. You can probably use it straight out of the box. if you really wanted to, to be safe, like Midjourney's added this as a recent feature where you can upscale these right here as well.

Okay. Right? So like, if like 2x is going to be perfect for, for something like you probably rarely would use something like 4x, you know, maybe for something like you print. And that doesn't degrade the quality or anything like that. It's still the same? You know, yes and no, like I think when you get into like 4X it does smooth it over a bit, which I think is why you might want to use something like a Pixelmator Pro or like a Gigapixel AI or a third party tool because there are a few That are able to maintain that quality just a little bit better than Midjourney right now.

But, but I know Midjourney is improving this upscaler over time as well. So it's something. Midjourney, I mean, I've heard that they are coming with their own app at some point as well. So you don't need to use Discord, which, which will be a great. That's amazing in that case. I mean, yeah, Discord is amazing.

Discord is great. But I mean, I, they, it would be awesome that they have their own app. So there you can just log in there and have all your creations, you know, it's easier to kind of access everything. Well, they started to do that with this. So this is actually phase one of their new site here.

It used to look a little bit different. and now what you can do, right, is like everything loads here a little bit quicker and snappier. and so this is part one. Here's part two. See where it says coming soon, where you're going to be able to essentially prompt within the website.

Okay. And to your point. Potentially get away from Discord. I think the question is, without getting too deep into this, Midjourney is really known for their community aspect. Right? And I think with Discord, you basically get a lot of that built in. And they're going to have to come up with a way to either end the website, totally maintain that level of community and, I guess, camaraderie, or they're going to have to kind of leave Discord in, or like Lean into it to some regard, to keep it.

That's very interesting. I don't know if you, do you know Wirestock? No, I don't. That's, I mean, if you can pull it up, but it's, it's also, you, you can also do some image, image creation. Of course, Midjourney is more advanced, but they have a Discord channel too, but you can also prompt within the website.

So I guess, I mean. Of course, Midjourney has a bigger community, but I'm just thinking you can maybe have it so you can have both aspects. Some people might like the Discord thing. It's already working pretty well, I assume. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can have the website just for better search and, you know, people can access it, create their folders, things like that.

It's easier to create, like you can have your brand library even there in that case, like with all your images. Totally, I think the organization's definitely a key piece, the community's a key piece. That's the same with ChatGPT, it's horrible, you cannot search. I think that needs to come.

That's why a lot of other companies are doing really well, because they have workflows, they have search, they have, you know, you know, building on top of it. So I think it's still, still an opportunity for that. And I hope Midjourney also gets integrated to other tools. Like, imagine having that in, Google Slides or something like that, like really useful things that are like has mass adoption already and Midjourney is like coming into that and you can just prompt within different tools.

That's a, that's a really great point. Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that, but that, that is absolutely key. Yeah, my, my one, one speaker on the summit, or it's a good friend of mine, John Schumacher, actually built something like that. I don't know if it's a hundred percent, you know, working a hundred percent, but it's like within slides is just kind of pulling images from Midjourney, I think, or some image AI, which is pretty cool.

But I would hope that that's coming like natively, you know, so it would be, it would be nice. I think a lot's going to, you know, I mean, the, the pace too is, is incredible. And then I think we're going to get to a point too where we're really talking about something like 3D world creation, meaning like I could create this image, right?

And then I have the ability to almost like click inside of it. And have it be a 3D virtual world that I can almost capture different angles of, let's just call this Napoleon, I could capture different angles of this, maybe it's from behind, maybe it's from above, right? And you've almost created your own scene that you can jump into.

It's like having your high quality 3D, like just bringing it to the real world, right? Having your 3D, you know, 3D camera, like an Insta360 almost, but like a high quality one. I mean, the options are full. are fascinating, right? you know, just jumping back to this, we created this prompt too, right?

Like, just to show you. you know, how this sort of transpires. So this is going to give you the grid, you know, I really like the way number one looks for example. So we'll upscale that. And then the other piece of this is, actually, let me turn on fast mode, so this speeds up with the image generation.

Um. And, like, the other option that you have with V means variation. So it's, it's a strong variation of maybe one of the images that you see. So, for example, like, you might use that if you say, Hey, I kind of like the look of this, but maybe I want it to be a little bit different.

You know what I mean? So, like, let's just say V2. So this is going to create, you know, a brand new grid based on that image. And then lastly, right, you see this sort of refresh or what's called a reroll button here. And this basically says, hey, look, like out of these four images, I want to see more, right?

Like maybe I didn't get what I wanted, or maybe I really did get what I wanted, and I want to see what else comes, right? So I can click this, and it's going to generate four new options for me. Right, so, like, these all can take you down different pathways as well, which I think is extremely exciting as a creator, because, right, like, I upscaled this image, now I have even more options.

I can vary this, Right? Like, strongly or subtly, I can do what's called a vary region, which is basically, you know, what Photoshop does with, the in painting, right? I can select a piece of this to have it change out. So, like, let's just say I didn't like a particular piece of this ornament.

I could basically, you know, lasso that or square that and it's gonna basically give me new options to fill that in. Upscaling we talked about. I can zoom out. I can do what's called, like, a, a custom zoom, which means Hey, like this is a landscape photo, but I want something that I can post on Instagram, right?

Which is like a four by five. Well, I can go in here and I can basically change my aspect ratio to four five and get that. Right? So, like, all these things come into play, and that's where I think the fun in something like this tool comes is because you can just go down so many rabbit holes, and as a creator, or an artist, or whatever you are, you've got that sort of imaginative bone in your body.

This is a ton of fun to play with. Yeah. No, this is amazing. I wanted to try something, something else here, if you don't mind, have you found that it's good at, for example, you might have a photo that you like, because let's say you can't travel. You mentioned you have kids, you cannot travel as much anymore.

Maybe you have a photo of yourself that you really like from a photo shoot or you travel to some amazing place and you want to kind of replicate that or maybe put it in on a different location. Can you make it like, If you have an image of you in the photo, could you make that actually look great in Midjourney as well?

Or you're only doing like brand new things. Like for example, you have an image, like you have a face, you can like upload, I want something like this. Is it good at doing that? Like to actually see, okay, this is Drew's face or this is Navid's face and actually be able to do that in a good way.

So here's, here's where I think it's like, it's a little bit of a loop around, which, which is why it took me a minute to think about this. Because I think the way I would do it is What is the scene that you want? Right? Like, so like, I went to Greece, right? Like, let's just say I want it and I'm in a picture in Greece, but I want to recreate that to your point., You know, I think the best way to do it almost to be to create the scene with a person in it that I would sort of describe as myself.

And then I have what's called, like, there's a, there's a feature that you can basically put in here called Insight Face Swap, which you can see right here. And I could swap my face in for someone else's face. Yeah, because it's, it's not going to do a great job to, for example, say, hey, create Drew, like.

Just out of the, that's not going to work that well, I think, but the scene, I think it does really good with, like, as we saw with the examples in, in the, your presentation, that's really amazing. do you think about the prompts? Usually it's like that. I mean, I heard like, for example, with Dall E3, which is not as, I don't think it's as good as Midjourney, but you can do it.

I think, I think it's like easier to get into it. Midjourney is more advanced. I would say you have to like set up this score and then it's like the prompting, maybe it's a little more advanced. But what, what would you say is? Like, the main thing when it comes to it, like that, because a lot of people might make some mistakes when they're getting started.

Yeah. Like, I mean, Midjourney is definitely better quality. We've seen like side by side comparisons with Midjourney, Firefly. Dall E, I think the advantage of Dall E right now, right, is it's a part of the multi modal, functionality within, you know, OpenAI's system, right? So when you're in ChatGPT, Dall E's now infused right in it.

Before you had to even, Originally, right, go to Dall E's own website, then you had sort of the plug in feature, which you had to start a new chat to use Dall E's, that function, and then now you've got it natively built into that same chat, so you don't even have to do that, so I'd say the accessibility of Dall E is extremely Impactful and probably useful for a lot of people.

I think if I'm talking about artists or creators or people that really like to create, I think Midjourney is the tool, especially right now because I would almost compare it as like a, a really. Top notch tool in your tool belt. That people like us are going to care about, whereas like maybe you don't design or anything like that.

And you're just looking for something that kind of works, right? Like Dall E's going to be good enough for now. And it's all the same bing, right? You know, Microsoft, basically they're. So, so yeah, it's more accessible, but yeah, you're not, I've, I've played around with it and compared it side by side.

You're not getting like the, the photorealistic stuff is way better in, in Yeah, let's, let's wrap this one up. the final question here, what's your number one piece of advice for creators who want to get into this world and start implementing AI in their business? Oh. That's a loaded question.

That's a loaded question. I think loaded. I mean, I don't wanna like dumb it down too much, but I really do think it's pretty simple in the standpoint of AI's moving so fast. There are so many facets of AI that like, maybe there's one particular piece that catches your attention.

So like, let's just use the example of me in Midjourney. That was where I focused a lot of my attention. Like, yes, I use chChatGPT, I use LLMs, I'm using other stuff, but like, I poured a lot into Midjourney. Right, and so maybe there are certain pieces that speak to you, and it doesn't take long to become, I guess, known for, hey, look, like, you know a lot about this tool.

And guess what? There are so many other things happening that a lot of people don't know much about this tool, right? So there's a space to educate and lead. And so I think that that's part of it. If it's, you're thinking about it in sort of the larger capacity of your business, you can use AI for a lot of things, right?

But I think it's knowing how. When and why to use it, that's valuable, right? Because there's certain things that you just could use for AI that you may not just want to. Maybe you enjoy doing this piece of it. Maybe it's, something that I guess is a little bit more necessary to have that human touch, but where are the elements that you want?

And the only way to know that is to test and experiment. And if you're leading a team like I was, encourage individuals. To block their calendars or find time to play, to experiment. Hey, could this replace this process for doing it? Well, we're not going to know unless we try, right?

And so we have to validate those things. And as a marketer, as a creator, we're always encouraged to experiment. And AI is no different. Yeah, a hundred percent. And what do you think about the future of specifically image AI or AI in general? But, you know, since you're in the world of Midjourney and things like that.

Just interested to hear your take on it. Yeah. You know, we got a little bit into like that 3D piece of it, which is, basically through this technology, which is called like Gaussian splattering. so AI can recreate scenes, basically throwing up all these little. Dots at you to form shapes in environments, right?

So you, so you get to this point where you could essentially go into a scene, into a world, create your own world, right? Maybe capture endless amounts of angles within this scene. And so I think that's crazy when you really think about something like that. I also saw something this morning that I hadn't heard before, which is like, I think it's also gonna get to the point of.

You know, there's so much information about Drew, or you, on the web, right? How could image generation and personalization come together? So if it knows that I like to do photography, right? Like, maybe all of a sudden I'm seeing things that Have photography elements or ads and things that, like, really speak to me deeply or look like me, right, start to appear in the ads, right?

So, like, I think there's, like, some closeness and personalization gaps that are going to close as well. That's fascinating. then lastly, I would just say you've got text, you've got images, you've got video, you know, like, Runway is sort of like that program similar to Midjourney.

That is going to change the game. And people like, like myself or others that have Midjourney images can take those into something like Runway, even though they're static images, and start to create motion with the AI that's built into the tool, right? So you think about the democratization of creating video at scale.

We're already seeing people create trailers in many, many movies and scenes. Where is this going to be a year from now? Is this going to compete with Hollywood, like you had to go from this pedigree and be trained to do this, to direct a movie to, versus somebody that maybe inherently has some of those skills that can be recreated from their home.

So, I don't know how that's going to play out, but I think it's fascinating to think about. Totally. And I think Runway is a huge opportunity as well, the same as Midjourney. I think there's so much to come in this space. But Drew, thanks so much for coming on here. I've shared so much value.

I'm sure everyone watching, listening into this, they're as blown away as I am what you can do with this. So where can people connect more with you? Yeah, the best place to connect with me is probably on LinkedIn. So Drew Brucker on LinkedIn. obviously, I think, like, my details might even be on the site for this, but, please reach out to me, and if you have any questions, like, I'm available to answer anything that you have questions about.

I do trainings, I do all this stuff, and I just, I have a lot of fun educating and coaching people on this stuff, so, happy to chat. Awesome. If you have any questions or takeaways for this session, leave it in the comments below. Be sure to subscribe to the channel, like the video, and I'll see you in the next one.

Ciao for now. Peace.