Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "A good image is better than a long speech."
The time is ten past tomorrow and Stability AI is a marketing AI company that's been making waves over the past 12 months.
A few days ago, they launched Stable Diffusion Reimagine, an image-to-image AI designed to generate new pictures inspired by user-uploaded images.
Visual marketing is crucial for businesses, and having access to unique images can give you a competitive edge.
With Stable Diffusion Reimagine, you can now generate multiple variations of a single image without limits.
Note that this isn't done by searching the internet for similar images; Reimagine generates completely new, unique, never-been-created-before images, based on the source image you give it.
This means you can easily create a variety of visuals to use in your marketing campaigns, social media posts, or even product designs without needing the expertise of a graphic designer. By leveraging this AI tool, you can save both time and money while exploring new creative possibilities for your business.
I believe we are on the cusp of saying goodbye to the hassle of hiring graphic designers, at least for routine projects.
After playing around with the tool for an hour or so, it's easy to see the appeal.
The platform simplifies the image generation process and eliminates the need for complex prompts. Just upload an image, and the algorithm works its magic, creating endless variations for you to choose from.
This opens up a whole new world of creative possibilities, from generating diverse options in the brainstorming process for clients, to providing graphic designers with a wealth of alternative images for use throughout projects like ebooks and website design.
According to Stability AI, Reimagine utilized the source image (upper-left corner) as inspiration to create the other displayed images. Credit: Stability AI.
While Stable Diffusion Reimagine is undeniably promising, it's worth noting that the generated outputs are not always flawless. You will encounter odd proportions or less realistic-looking images.
For example, when I fed the tool a stock image of a kitchen, it gave me 3 variations which at first glance looked great. However, on closer inspection, one image had two microwaves (one in a very odd place), another image had a tap on the bench but no sink underneath the tap, and the final image had 2 x two-legged bar stools :)
To their credit though, Stability AI openly acknowledges these limitations and encourages users to embrace both the impressive and the imperfect results for now.
As AI technology continues to advance at a break-neck pace, we should expect models trained on narrower datasets, resulting in more accurate and visually appealing images. In the example I gave above, that might mean the creation of a version of this tool that only generates kitchen interiors, which would be better at producing accurate and visually appealing kitchen images.
In the meantime, I think marketing teams can harness Reimagine as a source of inspiration, then make manual adjustments or refinements to the output images as needed.
Stable Diffusion Reimagine undoubtedly offers marketing teams a powerful and revolutionary opportunity to experiment with AI-powered image generation for marketing operations.
While the technology is not perfect yet, it opens the door to new creative possibilities and will help New Zealand businesses (big and small) save time and money.
The advancements being made by Stability AI are astounding in their pace, so I expect both Reimagine to get exponentially better, and other powerful and accurate AI tools to hit the market that will revolutionize the way small businesses approach visual marketing.
For now though; give Stable Diffusion Reimagine a try. You'll be amazed by the possibilities and also gain a first-mover advantage over your competition.