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Midjourney prompt: An female which is half human half robot --ar 7:4There is not amount of time in this life, where I would have had enough artistic skills to draw or paint or render the above header myself. I've got talents, but art is not one of them.
NOW I can type in a prompt and get images, videos, and content generated. It comes down to my own creativity.
This is magic.
I speak words and realities are created.
That header image was less than 1 minute of work.
The machine is here.
THIS is what the machine was for. It's suppose to aid us so we aren't looking at and updating spreadsheets all day. People were creating and updating spreadsheets in 1960 in businesses to keep track of inventory. How is it in 2023 that is still a major percentage of user's day-to-day activity is to update a spreadsheet, still? Where is the innovation? Why haven't we gotten past that?
Job security? Are we really going to be updating excel spreadsheets STILL 40 years from now? 100 years from now?
If you don't innovate, and let the machines do the leg work, you can't move on to more creative pursuits. But that also means that spreadsheet updater is going to have to either increase their skillset or fade into nothingness.
The world has to move on. No matter how much of the old guard tries to stifle innovation the world will move on pass you if you don't adapt and evolve.
The old guards put up fences to try to survive the onslaught of new tech, but weeds, trees, plants, and animals all get around the fences at some level.
You can't stop the inevitable. I go back to the phone book guys at the turn of century. They laughed at the internet. No one serious is going to buy anything online. Serious people aren't going to waste their life online.
Well here we are SEOing eCommerce products and uploading ADs to Instagram to generate billions in sales 2 decade later.
The phonebook guys are still waiting on customers to call them up on their phone. When was the last time you called a company for anything? Even my pizza gets delivered to my door without human interactions or contact.
I order products on Amazon, it's at my door step within days - sometimes the same day.
The Machine is supposed to make our lives easier. And now with the latest advent of A.I. - I don't like that term I don't think they are intelligent but that's another story, we can have the machine provide a more complete services.
Illustrators can now have the machine start off a image/video/content piece and then take it to the next level. Photoshop has started with "content-aware fill", but that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible.
In the future people sitting at home can create whole movies and worlds with characters interacting with each other by using commands. A lot of people will lose jobs, but so much more jobs will be created.
Before people had wheel loaders - there were shovels. Before the shoves people were digging by hand until someone came up with a better tool - the shovel.
The shovelers' jobs aren't around anymore at the level they were before the wheel loader, but there are no wheel loader jobs.
Forklifts put people out of jobs but created forklift operating jobs. The people getting clobbered need to become forklift operators and stop lifting with their backs.
That's how people evolve. If the shovelers wanted to picket, boycott, or try to stop whole industries from using wheel loaders - they could put a fight for a while, but the reasonable people will adapt because the wheel loader makes the job easier.
That's why I hate unions - a part of job security is stifling innovation. As technology advances you just don't need that many people standing around. Factories being automated means less and less people and more precision, obviously there will be gradual layoffs. That's a part of adapting and evolving - if you don't you die.
Let's use the machine to adapt with the future on the horizon.
Content
What even is content? It's information/data/ideas being absorbed by people. Some of it is a waste of time content like memes or some Instagram influencer talking about how her coffee run went. Most SEOs regular content as to be only text words. But content is video, images, interactive experiences, and text words.
Videos transmit information, data and ideas - currently the most stimulating way we absorb data.
Images transmit information, data, and ideas. So do interactive experiences and even text words.
NOW true content can be created by anyone for relatively cheap - compared to previous experience.
Before the iPhone walking around with an expensive camera to take photos was a luxury. Now anyone can pull out their phone and take high-quality photos and videos. The barrier to entry into the content field has been lowered. Are they perfect? No one gives fuck.
5-10 years ago how much would it cost me to create that female robot header above or any rendered images? $500, $1,000? $10,000? Now just a $10 monthly fee from MidJourney.
Illustrators can create backgrounds and have the machine do 80% of the grunt work. The machine is here to enhance your work. They are here to do the heavy lifting like the wheel loaders and forklift. It's a new tool in our toolbox that's meant to help us.
New Opportunities
I touched about some of the opportunities in the A.I. thread, however they are worth revisiting:
Writing agencies can now become TRUE content producers. And I don't mean just text words.
#1. They can offer translation services of older/popular content pieces into other languages to reach a larger audience. Once thing we used to do at SW is we had a couple of customers that would write to us using Hebrew within support tickets. We don't speak/write Hebrew, but with Google translate and now ChatGPT we could understand what they were asking and reply to them in English, which they translated on their side same as us.
So using A.I. to translate communicate reduces the languages barrier to getting new customer significantly. What I would do is look at the countries where clients are getting visitors from and find the most popular language in those countries and translate content into those languages. A great example of how sites split content is Apple's website. They've got every major language translated to get the most people to buy their stuff.
They have the canonicals setup perfectly, example French:
US English: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac
WordPress does similar:
French: https://wordpress.com/fr/
US English: https://wordpress.com/
They are using sub-pages to retain the domain juice within and in their code showing their other language versions:
Code:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.apple.com/fr/shop/buy-mac" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl-be" href="https://www.apple.com/be-nl/shop/buy-mac" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="https://www.apple.com/au/shop/buy-mac" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-es" href="https://www.apple.com/es/shop/buy-mac" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-hant-tw" href="https://www.apple.com/tw/shop/buy-mac" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ch" href="https://www.apple.com/ch-fr/shop/buy-mac" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="da-dk" href="https://www.apple.com/dk/shop/buy-mac" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac" />
..Apple is a serious operation, so you may want to just start off with 1 or 2 languages for you or your clients. A.I. makes translations easier since they also take into account tone (hopefully) and understand what's attempting to be conveyed.
For quick references here are the most popular languages (by people speaking them): (https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world)
- English (1.45 billion)
- Mandarin (1.1 billion)
- Hindi (602 million)
- Spanish (548 million)
- French (280 million)
- Arabic (274 million)
- Portuguese (257 million)
- German (135 million)
- Japanese (125 million)
And here are the top economies of the world: (https://www.investopedia.com/insights/worlds-top-economies/)
- USA: $25.5 trillion
- China: $18.0 trillion
- Japan: $4.2 trillion
- German: $4.1 trillion
- India: $3.4 trillion
- UK: $3.1 trillion
- France: $2.8 trillion
- Russia: $2.2 trillion
- Canada: $2.1 trillion
- Italy: $2.0 trillion
Using some logic, for me getting German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish is important for my next project. Then go into the more difficult non-roman script languages like Mandarin and Japanese, then Hindi, and Arabic down the road. Most countries do speak english since it's the international business language so that can cover the non-roman script for a while.
#2. Next you can turn blog posts into videos or audio content with services like Voice Cloning From ElevenLabs. Voice cloning allows you to use A VOICE, yours - a voice actor or a famous person (might run into legal trouble), and have them say whatever you want.
I saw this implemented when I hear the actor that plays Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders say some motivational speech stuff but using motivational images on Instagram.
I knew that actor never said those words, but someone very clever used his voice and is getting followers and traction on the self-help industry.
So voice, not just your voice but others', can be used to create audio and video content and put up on social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and more for brand exposure.
#3. Taking voice cloning to the next level, why not just do straight people cloning with A.I. avatars from HeyGen. Content agencies can become REAL producers of content, since now you can use a couple of videos from a founder or spokesperson and then create videos having them say whatever script you want, no longer needing to pay more for the same actress. I think the founder might be a bit creeped out at first, but this greatly reduces the time barrier for creating new content.
#4. Another one from HeyGen is video translation. You can get past videos translated into other languages, and the spokespersons' mouth/lips and accent are adjusted to that language. I did an example with an old SERPWoo video:
She does NOT speak French.
I freaked out one of my business partners when I sent her a video of herself speaking french using HeyGen. Imagine seeing yourself speaking a different language in video that you know you don't know. It's a bit unsettling at first.
Expanding Your Brand
The content creation barrier to entry has been greatly reduced.
Now the thing to remember is, regardless of Google's position on A.I., these content pieces can go all over the internet, social media, and other online platforms as well as offline purposes. If you take each blogpost and translate them into a different language and create a video, that's 3 separate pieces of content that you can push into social platforms for added coverage (using tags of course for long-term exposure).
I talked about the GaryVee content model a lot, but now you don't need a massive team to pull it off. On-top there are A.I. services like Vidyo.ai that aid on creating clips from long-format content.
Additional Opportunities
#1. Sales. Something else to look on the horizon for is A.I. helping sales companies turn cold/dead leads into warm/hot leads.
When I used to work in a call center, we had the guys that warmed up leads, cold calling or the phone book, and then they handed them over to the closers. Well A.I. can now eliminates one of the most painful jobs I can recall.
#2. Text to video creation. You can probably create gifs or your own unique video with this tech. MidJourney does text to images. Well there is a tool called Gen-2 from RunWay which does text to video generation.
I haven't tested it, but type in text and a video comes out. That's next level.
#3. Adult - there is nothing like adult to fuel innovation. Did you know some of the first photograph ever take was of a naked woman? In fact a lot of the first innovations were adult related. One of the first video was also of a naked woman. Back in the early days of the internet Pop Ups were used by adult sites FIRST. When it comes to innovation, especially online, Adult is at the forefront. Before YouTube there were video porn services. The first online affiliate program was for adult content.
Anyways, forget the history lesson, there have been tools being used even before ChatGPT and MidJourney that use "face-swapping" to add another females image in a porn video. Similar there is Fooocus, which is an alternative for MidJourney without the restrictions that MidJourney has.
I haven't dug deep into the face-swapping stuff video, but most likely there is a github open source library they are using to create that content like Fooocus.
And yes things can get grayer and dark as we continue to explore content. Just blackmail alone now has new tools.
Little known fact: Since about 2007 there hasn't been any new photos, images, or videos of me on the internet. You can't find one for a reason. I knew back then this shit was coming. Things can go wrong for a lot of people, especially people with no resources to fight back.
Final Thoughts
We can either get clobbered and sit on the sidelines or leap into the future and try stuff, fail and keep failing until something succeeds. As with anything there are double edge swords to new technology. There are pitfalls and lost of potential problems.
The machine is here. It WILL destroy jobs. It will disrupt industries. It will create shockwaves for everyday people not ready. Low-level jobs will get erased. Low-skilled jobs have always gotten erased. If you find yourself in trouble that means you need to up your skills, because a robot took your job.
But that shouldn't stop any of us from taking advantage of the future that is HERE.
It's here. Regardless of whether you want it to be or not, it's here.
The question is, what are you going to do about it?
- CCarter (http://www.twitter.com/MakoCCarter)
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