102: Midjourney + Behavioral Economics
[During] Mondays and Tuesdays are busy
For anyone new here—Hello! Welcome! I write about Creativity, and for the next few months through the lens of two courses I’m teaching in the Creative Entrepreneurship program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. On Monday evenings it’s AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs, and on Tuesday afternoons it’s Persuasion & Marketing. All this to say today’s “During” post is split in two, to cover both days. Onward!
[Apologies for not sending a “Before” post on Sunday. I honestly had nothing worthwhile to send.]
The Midjourney conundrum
[Monday]
In a November 2022 interview with Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, Midjourney founder David Holz said,
“One of the biggest risks in the world I think is a collapse in belief, a belief in ourselves, a belief in the future. And part of that I think comes from a lack of imagination, a lack of imagination of what we can be, lack of imagination of what the future can be. And so this imagination thing I think is an important pillar of something that we need in the world.”
I have found Midjourney illuminating, maddening, essential, and sometimes a giant waste of time. But I do think it all boils down to time on target. The more time you spend using the tool, the more you understand how to benefit from its strengths faster. Anyone new to MJ will be flummoxed often. In the AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs class we continued our generative AI visual journey with a unique focus on this one platform. I think MJ warrants a specific focus for a few reasons:
Larger orgs with thousands of AI-dedicated employees like Google, OpenAI and clearly Microsoft have revenue-generating mindsets when it comes to GenAI. Which hugely influences how their UX/interface and coding functions. They’ve all said as much. MJ also clearly needs to make money, but positions itself as a “research lab” of (apparently just) 11 or so employees. Read The Verge’s interview with Holz for perspective. Also consider paying Stratechery for access to Ben Thompson’s lengthy podcast interview with Holz. This “independent” “lab” focus seems unique.
From its beginning just 21? 26? months ago, MJ has offered more robust tooling than its competitive set (i.e. --v, --ar, --s, --sw, --c, --sref, --w, et al). I applaud OpenAI’s and Google Gemini’s now multi-modal approach to using their visual engines. But if you want more granular control, you basically have MJ and Adobe’s Firefly, and MJ’s output is more often “better.” (We could discuss aesthetics for days but that’s for the classroom, not a newsletter.) In addition, I’m attracted to MJ’s dialogue around the purpose of generative visual tools. For example, from the Stratechery interview:
“I love it when a piece of AI doesn’t have a good cost function. Meaning that in general, if you have a really good way to measure whether or not something is working, it’s actually pretty easy to solve it in AI. But the things that are hardest and most interesting are the things where it’s like, ‘Is that a good dog photo? I don’t know.’ It’s really interesting now. It’s like, ‘What is a good image? What do people want out of an image? What do they expect? How do they speak? How do the words of what they’re trying to come up with affect the thing that they actually want?’ There’s this almost very philosophical and vague problem to solve. And I really love that.”
Finally, MJ’s decision to run its interface through Discord. Of course, now they’re beginning to test a bespoke web interface. But choosing to leverage Discord’s feature set as the means to access and operate MJ was as much about cost-to-build as the insight around community. In short, maybe people prefer to create together, versus in isolation. I still think there’s a TV show in screen casting MJ’s 20 General channels and commenting on prompt intention, and the specifics of granular control. As we noted in class, the best way to learn MJ is together. But their diverse range of showcases, tutorials, FAQs, and chats inside Discord are both a revelation and relief. Seriously—if you want to gain advantage from MJ, spend a few hours exploring the Chat, Feedback, Forums and Showcases.
We also watched excerpts from this Skills Factory video to understand MJ prompting basics, then this Glibatree video to unravel how version 6 has created a significant shift in prompting structure and philosophy. We also watched excerpts from this Future Tech Pilot video to do a deep dive into the more obscure commands.
But what do I create?
I still think one of the major challenges visual GenAI faces was hinted at by Holz in that earlier interview. In short, “what is this tool for? What do I create?” In general, these are tools we humans have never imagined using before. We have thousands of years’ experience using writing tools, and paint. Decades using photography tools. A few decades using code to create.
Suddenly, we have tools which can create…anything? Most humans have told themselves, taught themselves, I AM NOT CREATIVE (see Seth Godin’s entire opus). Now here are tools to unlock that and no wonder humans are both confused by, and massively unimpressed by, and angry about them.
Where to begin is the primary question.
To that end, here are three assignments we tackled in class. Give them a try yourself. Each is designed to elicit different aspects of prompting and mindset within Midjourney. And as I say in class, don’t settle with your first outcome. Try dozens of times. And learn from those outcomes.
Design packaging labels for a new bottled vitamin tea called TEA-RIFFIC!
Create three images… Thor, a Ladybug, and [Your favorite relative] …all in the same style (This one will require using the “{}” brackets and likely the --sref command)
Create a series of images based on your favorite poem taking place in an era that isn’t this one
Please share your results!
Hear me out: Behavioral Economics is the ying to Creativity’s yang
[Tuesday]
It’s funny, but when we began the Persuasion & Marketing course I asked the class for their general impressions of the word “persuasion.” How did it make them feel? What do they make of people who work to persuade?
The sentiments were generally negative.
And yet, as Daniel Pink has written, “We’re all in sales now.”
And yet, nature has been persuading itself and us humans since the beginning. I propose persuasion is inherently human.
And now here we are, four sessions in, at Behavioral Economics. I chose this topics as a means of wrapping up three sessions covering the history of persuasion and setting us up for a transition into Marketing.
So Behavioral Economics, is, from my standpoint, the best way of explaining how marketing, and to some extent, persuasion WORKS. But in scientific and rational terms. And we need this definition because humans have proven they often just can’t accept the creative or artistic explanation of how the world and people function. As Rory Sutherland has written, magic is no longer a good enough excuse.
So the chart above (and keen readers will recognize I used it last week for a slightly different but related subject) is my meager attempt at suggesting a balance between rational/scientific explanations of the function of marketing in contrast with a purely creative/magic explanation. And the best I’ve been able to distill the purpose of marketing (and its subsets like Advertising, or Design, or even PR) is to cause the reaction:
“I hadn’t thought of it that way before.”
From the highest levels of pure brand positioning to the lowest mechanics of retail operations, everything is rooted in:
You got my attention (hence “I”)
A recognition of context (“hadn’t”)
A willingness to engage (“thought of it”)
A willingness to consider (“that way”)
An epiphany (“before”)
We’re going to dive deeply into Godin’s This Is Marketing later in the course, and discern why all marketing is about change, and therefore, about humans. But at this point in our continuum, I wanted to ground our comprehension in as much rationality as possible. Because those same humans still struggle to give Creativity its due.
So we watched Richard Thaler discuss his history and interpretation of the field. And I also asked the class to watch this brief and amusing introduction to the topic, as well as Dan Ariely’s TED Talk.
And now they’re going to write in their journals about all of the above, answering questions such as:
What do you see as the roots of Persuasion? How and why is it useful for humanity?
How might human history be different if we didn’t have Persuasion?
How does Persuasion change because of the advent of technlogies? How does the world change as a result?
Compare rational efficiency vs irrational behaviors—how is Persuasion both a Creative and Economic endeavor?
Next week the Persuasion course is going to focus on role and process-creation; how Persuasion becomes an industry and career. And the AI course will segue into generative text-to-motion. (Hello, Sora!)
AI+Creativity update
✏️ Wharton's Ethan Mollick asked his MBA students to create their own GPTs. I have a similar task later in our AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs course. It’s a great excuse to think. And his Four Questions are also worth reading and ruminating on with your organization.