Please stop using AI to generate horrible illustration and stock images for your LinkedIn slop posts. Instead, use it for “envisioning”.
Envisioning is the ability to take ideas in your head (visions) and produce visuals (images or videos) of those ideas, before they actually exist in real life.
This has never been something that normal people could do. The closest we have had to it are architectural visualisations, where an architecture firm would either produce an “artist’s impression” of a potential future building, or use 3D rendering software to create a photorealistic version of that building. And maybe for some categories of industrial design. But this was a highly specialised capability (3D modelling, rendering, compositing, animating) and never something that normies could do.
Up until now that is. Because AI, and specifically state of the art image generation models, are enabling this for normal people and OpenAI have put it in a consumer mobile app. Open ChatGPT, snap or select photo, describe changes to the image, voila.
A friend of mine just sent me this: “my gardener sent me today a ChatGPT-edited photo of what my backyard will look like after re-mulching … wow”
Most people sit with ideas in their heads that they cannot effectively explain, pitch or share to someone else (eg a client, partner, etc) because they cannot close the imagination gap in the other person’s mind. They cannot see what you have clearly visualised in your head.
Envisioning with AI changes that and I think it is going to have a big impact on many parts of the economy because a lot of those ideas are good but hard to explain, and so they do not happen.
In the case of my friend, he is much more likely to proceed with the mulching project now that he has foreseen what the result will be. That generates more income for the gardener and mulch supplier and it adds to the value of his home.
Extrapolate this out across the economy.
We ran a workshop on this at the Hub this week with Darcy Smith, as part of our public Tokenizer workshop series. Darcy shared advanced techniques which blend human imagination and creativity with the capabilities of the latest ChatGPT image generation model.
In the workshop, participants sketched out ideas on paper then used a progress prompting technique to visualise the idea in fidelity and build out detail.
As Darcy taught us in the workshop: “AI can turn the future we struggle to articulate into something others can see, understand, and imagine alongside us.”
The public workshops are offered for free by Noosa Council as part of the Hub’s Tokenizer program, thanks to support from the Queensland Government’s Regional Enabler Program.
