How AI Image Tools Are Redefining Weddings with Michael Pearson-Adams

In this episode of Wedding Empires, we embark on an enlightening journey into the world of AI image tools and their revolutionary impact on modern weddings. Join us as we engage in a captivating conversation with Michael Pearson-Adams, a leading expert in leveraging AI to reshape the wedding landscape.

Gain insights from our esteemed guest, Michael Pearson-Adams, as he draws from his extensive background and expertise to shed light on the transformative potential of AI in the wedding industry.

Discover the unparalleled capabilities of AI in revolutionizing wedding workflows and igniting creativity for wedding professionals. Michael and Jac delve into the transformative impact of AI image generation tools like Mid Journey, offering invaluable insights into streamlining processes and unlocking new possibilities.

Explore a diverse array of AI tools available to wedding planners, photographers, and decorators. From generating image prompts to creating stunning visuals quickly, AI tools offer indispensable assistance and inspiration at every stage of the wedding planning process.

Learn the importance of refining AI-generated images to align with specific design requirements. Michael demonstrates how AI can be harnessed to create personalized designs, including color palettes, mood boards, and tablescapes, tailored to each client's preferences.

Discover how AI tools like ChatGPT can personalize the wedding planning journey by generating questionnaires and gathering essential information from clients. Experience firsthand how AI enhances efficiency and customization, ensuring a seamless and tailored experience for couples as they plan their special day.

💼💡 This episode is brought to you by The Wedding Academy. Ready to take your wedding business to the next level? Explore exclusive resources and courses at The Wedding Academy 🌟✨ Start or grow your wedding empire today!

GUEST INFORMATION:

Website: www.mpacreatives.com

Instagram: @mpacreatives

Transcript

0:02

Welcome aboard the Wedding Empires podcast with yours truly, Jack Bowie, where we plunge into the depths of creativity, entrepreneurship, and the love-infused world of weddings. Each episode, we're going to unpack strategies, insights, and stories that empower you to craft the wedding business of your dreams. Welcome to the Wedding Empires podcast. Big Now we've known each other a very, very long time. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Uh, it's actually longer Jack. It's 30 nearly. Wow. Look, we could do a whole episode on how we met and how we know each other, but that's, that's a But that's another story for another time. Michael Pearson Adams also happens to be an absolute guru when it comes to anything to do with audio, music production, music production software, and he's always got the finger on the pulse when it comes to the latest technologies. He is the guy that introduced me to MySpace back in the day and kickstarted a whole interest in digital for me. But Michael, I think you can probably put it best. What do you So there's a few, because this is one of the reasons you and I get along is we tend to multitask. I've been a professional music producer for the last 30 years. I moved to the States to work with Creed, went from working with Creed to Shakira, Shakira to Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull. and spiraled and stayed there 20-odd years. I'm a fine art photographer, and I have my own art gallery in Florida, which we're about to close and move to Southeast Queensland. And I have a strategy and branding company, which is based here in Queensland, called The Studio. And I have staff in LA and Hong Kong as well. And what we do is we basically help work out what somebody or a company's signature story is, what makes them tick, what defines them, and then help direct them in the path that they want to go so that they can work out what the rest of their life is going to be. It's more than branding. It's definition of why you are who you are. so that you have a clearer idea of what road you want to take. All of that together is I'm just listening to you speak and I'm thinking, when can you book me in for a weekly session for one of those? I need that direction. Right. And part of it, though, is something that I've already been teaching you, which is this. It's learning how to talk into a camera or on stage. It's learning how to avoid filler words. It's learning how to be authentic. when you are talking to somebody that you do not know or a crowd or to camera. And that's all part of getting the message across of who you are and what defines you, what makes you tick and why you have something that other people want, which is Cool. Well, fun fact, Michael is also the producer of this podcast, so he did have hair before he started doing this podcast about two I was also six foot three. I was Cuban, I think. I don't know what He's a shadow of his former self because he's been doing... Everything's fine. He's been dealing with my stress and my get this out and edit this and blah, blah, blah. No, he's doing an incredible, incredible job and I'm feeling very lucky to work with you. I've got the best of the best. He hasn't got the bill yet. We are here today, though, because we want to talk about AI. This is something that you and I have these private, offline conversations about all the time, right? And when we do have these conversations around technology, and in particular AI, which is what we're going to talk about today, We're constantly testing out tools and there are so many things that are popping up at the moment that are fantastic for wedding professionals. I mean, most of us are kind of started dabbling with chatGBT and there's so much more that we could be doing with that than what we are. But also, I'm hearing these great things and seeing these great things with visual tools that are AI, where wedding stylists are able to concoct images and mock-ups and things like that from ideas, or even wedding professionals that are just starting out that don't necessarily have a portfolio of work are able to sort of produce images for their websites for the kind of work that they want to do. Within seconds. Within seconds. So when it came to thinking about who can teach us about this and explain it in a way that we can understand, Michael, you came to mind straight away. I'm watching. So I guess, how has your background in technology and creativity influenced your view on the potential of AI tools like Midjourney? Let's start with Midjourney, All right, so MidJourney is, I'm just going to move my screen here for a second. So this is a small teaser of MidJourney. MidJourney is an AI image generation tool, which is one of the first really good ones. However, there's another one right now called Leonardo that I can also show you. One of the things about MidJourney that makes it magical though is you can give it a really vague reference of what it is that you're looking for and then ask it to create the perfect image prompt. so that you can actually get something that's remotely close to what it is that you're after. Perfect example, I just typed into Google, wedding destinations, Queensland. I would like to preface this with that I am not a wedding professional. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I do know how to use AI and make it work effectively as my assistant. I took this picture here, which says, Whitsunday Wedding Venue Guide, but these trees look suspiciously unwhitsundays to me. Doesn't matter. I took that image link, as in I copied the image link. I asked Midjourney to come up with what it saw. I asked it to describe the image, and it gave me four very, very useful image prompts that I could use to start working out how to get an image like that. And once I got all those, I literally went in and I created them. This is the first four that it gave me. I'm going to just move my screen there for a second. I'm going to open this in another browser window. So this is the first image. It gave me logs, lights, trees. I do need to point out, this image is copyright free. You could use it. You could grab this two seconds after you've created it, and you could use it and say, this is a wedding that you're creating. We have another one with people in it. It looks like an Indian girl and a white dude from San Diego. And then we have a similar couple from the back. So Now for those of you following at home on your podcast, you're obviously not going to see what we're talking about. So I'm going to get Michael to use his very descriptive words, but you will also find a copy of this episode on YouTube. So just have a little search for Wedding Empires and you can see what the hell we're talking What we're talking about is I've created a prompt. So in this case, I asked Midjourney, describe a picture of this couple getting married in between some big redwoods that they claim, the photographer claims, was in the woods some days. And it creates a prompt around it. And it guesses by looking at all of the different parts. But it said, a couple in wedding attire embracing amidst tall trees, surrounded by an arch, adorned with fairy lights and candles on wooden tables, et cetera, et cetera. And then it goes on to give you guides on the explanations that you want to give AI, which is super important. Things like shot from a wide angle, soft natural lighting, romantic ambiance. Those things are important. So when you do get to look at the pictures, it'll give you three or four different scenarios and you can pick one of those. and then go and choose what it is you want to do next. Now, one of the things which I do want to point out with AI is it's not going to give you exactly what you want. Firstly, never. AI is never going to give you exactly what you want first time. It is not the perfect employee. It will, however, give you what you ask it when you give it very, very specific details to a point that you can fine tune and gain something that's incredibly usable on a constant basis. For example, I'm going to take this one here that has a nice bokeh. The couple is there. One of the things that you do have to be careful with in AI is AI is still not very good at hands. This guy seems to have four fingers and a thumb, and her arm is not dislocated. It sounds funny, but these are the kind of things that we do still have to watch out for. Everything else looks normal. So what I can do is I can take this picture right here, and I can go, OK, right, so I want to make that image bigger. So I'm going to say, OK, right, image three, zoom in on image three. And it will then give me a better idea of that image. Now I can go, you know what? Zoom out. Zoom out from that picture one and a half times. And it will go off, and it will start zooming out for me and creating space that Uh, and all of this ends up giving you the ability to take photos that aren't yours and not steal them, but use them for inspiration. Uh, another perfectly good, actually, you know what, Jack, you pick one. I'm scrolling. You're I liked that one up there with the barrel in white in No. Oh, this one. Yes, that one. 50 highly sought after wedding venues in Queensland. Let's just go to the website quickly. Okay, so let's take actually let's not go to the website because then I've lost the picture. So I can right click I can copy the image link. By the way, mid-journey's done. It's zoomed out for me. Now I have four images that are all zoomed out on that table. I have to say one of them or two of them look like it's snowing. I'm not sure if I like that, but these are all images that you could use. Let's show you how I did that. So I asked Midjourney to describe and now I'm going to select link and I'm going to give it the link of the photo that Jack just selected. I feel like a magician. This is my card. Does everybody see my card? Okay, I'm going to put my card back. Jack, is that the card that you took? Fantastic. So now what MidJourney is doing is it's giving me descriptions and what we call AI prompts that will give us images that are similar to this. Similar does not mean that they are correct. So I'm just going to go imagine all, and then I'm going to come back to this screen for a second with just the camera so we can talk while it's doing its thing because This is a bit like a cooking show. Here's one I prepared earlier on in the show that looks perfect, but I'm not going to let All right. So I've got a few questions. Can we jump into those? Because I was dying to ask you. So how do you think this is going to assist wedding planners, photographers and decorators when it comes to sort of streamlining their workflow, So many ways. Let's pick one of those first. Let's go with photographers. Actually, I'm going to step back a second. AI is not going to replace any of these jobs. AIs will become an incredible assistant and an incredible company employee, but it will not replace the human mind. One of the reasons why, in really summary, is this generative AI, any of this kind of generative AI, is based on scraping lots of different human experiences, human information, human images, text, music, the lot. It's not going to think for us. It's going to give us what we ask. Now, from a photographer's point of view, you can take an image that you have shot, and if you are not comfortable with passing those specific photos as an example of your work in a different venue to a potential client, you can go, listen, this is one that I shot, but let me take that example as an example of what it would look like if we shot it at this kind of venue, or this kind of venue, or let me take out the hut at the end and give you an idea of what that could look like. I use it all the time when I'm giving a client an idea of interior design for a large piece of art on their wall, I can put my piece of art into AI and I can say, give me a room that works with this art. And it will give me a room based on my wording, minimal, bohemian, turquoises, grays, lights, high ceilings. So it'll give you an idea, but you have to have an idea of what it is that you want. Before you can go, it's not Google, where you just type in, give me world class something. You have to have an idea of what you want. And that's why AI won't replace any of these jobs. Color palettes, mood boards, ideas for photographer ideas, print ideas, wedding venue ideas, all of these things can come up within 10 seconds while you're on a call, and then send Can you do something like, say you're on a call with a client and they say, I really like mauve and I really like lemon, but I can't imagine how it could work together and look good in this space. Uh, yeah. Uh, how could, uh, firstly, okay, so let's move back to... Firstly, how do you spell Mauve? It's exactly. So I'm going to, so I'm going to ask, I'm going to do two things here. So I'm going to go to chat GBT and I'm going to say, I need to create a mid journey prompts that gives me a room design. A tablescape for a wedding where the main colors are mauve. I think it's M-A-U-V-E. Yes. And lemon. Lemon. Isn't that, Jack, isn't that yellow? No. Okay, whatever. Lemon, or yellow. Now, here's the important part. Everybody who's listening, you've heard what I've typed. If you're watching, then you're watching it. So I don't need to explain this. The next thing is what when most people make a mistake, they hit enter, I'm not going to hit enter, I'm going to type, ask me Any questions you have, so we get the best response. The first thing I do is I ask AI to help me get the results. And look, ChatGPT came straight back and said, OK, theme of file. Are you envisaging something modern? Well, you're waiting. So one, modern. But minimal. I'm planning my own wedding now. Two, centerpieces. What sort of pencil centerpiece do you want, Jack? Flowers? Candles? What? Flowers. Three, tableware. Any specific tableware details, Jack? Come on, get Additional decor elements. Aside from the main colors, are there any other elements or accents you'd like included? Gold. Gold. And six, is Maybe in Positano Okay. So because I asked those specific questions, the result that I get back is very way more defined than what it could be. I want to give an example here and I'm going to take that exact prompt and I'm going to copy it and I'm going to put it in a new window and I'm going to take out the last line and now it's automatically giving me a prompt that isn't as detailed in a few ways solely because it doesn't know exactly what I want. So it's guessing. Now, in this case, let's go back. And let's go back to my first one, create. And now I can take that prompt, and I can move over to... I'm on a Mac or a PC. I'm on a PC. I can move over to MidJourney, and I can give you two things. So I'm going to do this in two different AIs to give you an idea of something. So first, there's my prompt in MidJourney. I'm now going to change the aspect ratio and say I would like it to be 1080p, 16.9, like the size of a screen. And I'm going to ask it to be not too creative with its flair, but in a reserved way. You can control all of these things with Midjourney. You can actually tell it how much of a reference you want in different areas. So I'm going to go 300, and then I'm going to go Enter. Now I'm going to go over to Lonado. image generation, and I'm going to change that there. I'm going to just highlight that in there, and I'm going to send it off. So now we have two different image generators coming up with hopefully something that will give us something close to what we're after. And give it about a minute or two, and we can come Okay. So outside of like the visual side of things, how do you see, from an outsider's perspective, just knowing about all the technology and what it's capable of, how do you see AI assisting in personalizing the So easy. It's so easy that people complicate it by considering AI in the same respect that they're looking at the way you converse or the lack of way you converse with search engines like Bing or Google. One of the biggest things that people miss with AI is that you have the ability to ask AI for the best way to ask AI how to do something. Meaning, One of the best things you can do is say, this is my role. This is what I do. My end result is expected to be something like this. Ask me any questions that will help you give me the best prompt or the best results. And then you have a conversation with AI. If you ask any AI, give me such and such, it will give it to you very happily. But it's not going to give you the best results because you're not engaging and it's not really engaging. But what you're not doing is giving it If you're in the business of making dreams come true, listen up because the Wedding Academy is your ticket to success. Running a wedding business isn't always a walk down the aisle. It takes skill, savvy, and a whole lot of know-how. That's where the Wedding Academy swoops in to save the day. Imagine easy-to-follow certificate courses taught by industry pros covering everything from wedding styling to floral design to even marketing and business for any kind of wedding business. All Wedding Academy courses are 100% online, self-paced, and come with ongoing training and support to keep you up to date. And here's the cherry on top. I've wrangled up an exclusive deal. Just punch in the code PODCAST when you enroll and bam, you'll score a sweet 5% off any course. Ready to take your wedding business to the next level? Then head on over to the Wedding Academy today at WeddingAcademyGlobal.com. Don't forget to plug in that code PODCAST to check out with your special discount. So I can imagine that it would be useful to say, for example, I'm a wedding stylist and my aim is to get enough, draw enough information out of my customers to get an understanding of what they want and create it. Wow, that looks incredible. So you could use something like chat GPT and say, I'm building a questionnaire. The end result that I want is, you know, some prompts for mid-journey. What are the kind of questions that I need to ask this couple, right? You can, you could use those two together to build the questionnaire. The questionnaire will spit out all the information that you need to input into mid-journey to create the images and, and the Yes, and you can actually go one more because if you're paying for ChatGPT Pro, then you can actually save yourself a few steps. There's a couple of ways that you can do that. The first way is in ChatGBT, you have this ability to create custom instructions. Custom instructions means that ChatGBT not only knows what it is that you do, how you do it, and what experience you have, it also has full details on how you want to be communicated with. meaning that I can start any chat here and say even something like, give me a summary for LinkedIn page on what it is I do and love doing. And chatGBT will go off and it will give me a summary on everything that it is that I do. How? Because it knows what I do. It knows who I am and it converses with me every day. So that's one. You're saving yourself a lot of time with custom instructions. The second one is you have the ability to create what we call GBTs. So I have explored GBTs. Here we go. And GBTs, you can create. So you could go on here and you could say, okay, right. So create, I want to create a GBT that is my assistant for my wedding planning and event company. chat GPT will then come across and ask you all the questions that you can answer that will help you create a permanent GPT that will be there for you. So Wow, let's call this one. Eventually, no, let's call it darling. Don't panic. And GBT will go off and it will rename it and then it will ask it for, it will have a conversation with you and then you can test it. But this becomes a permanent bot for you to use as your assistant and give you the kind of help that you need on a daily basis without you constantly That's great. Okay. I need a broadcast assistant. I need the wedding academy assistant. I need a flight attendant assistant. Well, let's see. Let's see, Jack. I'm CEO of MPA Creatives. I'm CEO of The Studio in Brisbane. I have a company that's got four permanent staff. I've got an art gallery that has five permanent staff all in another country. I'm also senior director of training and development for one of the largest audio software companies in the world. And I'm a senior product manager. If I didn't have AI to help me with some of those things on a daily basis, I wouldn't get any sleep. But look at me. Nobody I don't get much sleep. You're absolutely right. But the point is that I would get way less if I wasn't using AI in a smart way. One of the best things that you can do with AI, even when it comes to doing generative and visual stuff like mid-journey, or with ChatGBT, which also does visuals, is tell it who you are and what you want and never have to tell it Yeah, I love that. I love that. So I guess I've got a question for you. What ethical considerations do you advise that wedding professionals keep in mind when incorporating AI Number one, there is no copyright currently on anything that is AI generated. You can create an image with Mid Journey or Leonardo or Dali 3 or any of the others that are out there. It is not yours. You can use it, you created it, but if somebody else shows up with it on their page, there's not a lot you can do about that unless there is a certain amount of personalization that you've then done to that specific image in Photoshop or anything else. However, Photoshop, which now also has AI built into it, will watermark any photograph or graphic that you do in Photoshop that uses AI so that it also states not all of the imagery in this image is real and therefore it can't be completely copyrighted. So you have to be aware of that. The other part of it is making sure that you are aware with AI and you as a professional in the industry that you love and work in, you know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're asking AI about, then how are you going to proof check it and make sure that it's correct? AI, whether you're dealing with text or images, has a tendency to do what we call AI hallucinations. It will look convincing, it will sound convincing, but if you look carefully, there might be six knuckles. Really, these things... Can we turn that into a quote? Yeah, you should have that on the page. It's like, catch up with me and Michael talking about six knuckles. If you're going to, especially with wedding planning, you're dealing with somebody's once-in-a-lifetime, potentially most memorable event in their life, hopefully. If you create something that they will look at emotionally on a constant basis, even if it's just the planner to hand to them they going to want to hold on to it and if they suddenly look at it and realize again that the chick has a foot that's on backwards under her dress and she has three fingers on one hand and one of her eyes is looking up and head. It's, it sounds funny, but these are the things that our eyes don't notice straight away, because we assume that an image of a person that looks generally correct is going to be generally correct. I want to give you an example, if I may. So let's go to Leonardo for a second. So by the way, so this is what I beg your pardon? It's Right, it's got actual lemons and they're actually growing off the flowers, so... Now, there is actually something that you could do here if you wanted to, say for example... Can you say, like, when I said lemons, I meant the colour bozo? You can't really do that to AI. But what you can do is you can say, okay, very strongly. And then I can go down and I can add the commands. This is called a command prompt, no lemons. And then it will go off and hopefully give you no lemons in the next one. Now if we go over to Leonardo, this is Now, maybe, maybe. So the especially this one here up on the right hand side, so which is, I mean, that's, let me get my camera out of the way for Yeah, that's something. The wine glasses aren't perfect. They're slightly different height. And again, these are the little things that you guys as planners would know. If you look at this wine glass, you can see that the wine glasses are imperfect. And if you look at these two wine glasses on the left, You'll notice that, well, left or right, I don't know what's showing on your screen right now, but it looks like they're kind of nearly blended into one. These are the little details that you need to look at with AI to make sure that you, and then looking at the forks, the forks are on meth or something. There's a fork down here and there's like a spork down here. Again, in case you didn't hear me earlier, make sure you watch this episode on YouTube so you can get what the Okay. So now, earlier on, one of the things that, for a quick plug, for this new program we've just launched here for personal brands, I created this image in AI, right? So this image on my website, cheap plug. is created by AI. Now, I do want to point out that... Let's go back down. There we go. Coffee. There's... Okay. Now, one of the ones that I created was of a girl taking the stage etc. Now, all of that is great until you start zooming in and taking a look at the terrifying look of the faces on the people in the crowd. some of them kind of look nearly like they're out of kind of like a horror movie. This is and it gets walking dead vibes. But no, it gets worse because it's so if I go let me show you a better one. Let me look at this one. It's like some of these people don't even have faces. Now this is the But, here's the thing people, you can miss all of that if you just take a look at the fact that this guy's shirt, his backpack, his hair, all of that is perfect. It's just the fact that he's kind of in a room that really should terrify him. But having said that, you can also create things that are literally as creative as this, where the only thing that's maybe wrong here is he has an eyelash that's a bit long. But that is it. You can use AI to create some truly amazing images for your websites, etc. This is the one that I finally used, by the way. So this one here. And this, it took me a couple of iterations, but It's amazing and I'm super grateful that I have these kind of tools to make this Yeah, it's amazing. It's beautiful. I've got a secret to tell everybody about my cover of my podcast. Go on. It's AI. It's not a photo shoot. You don't want to tell them really what I said to you, do you? Because I picked it straight away. Because I've known you for, you know, 60 years. I'm going to give you a clap next time I see you. It is AI. It is AI. The program that I used, you know what, I'm not going to tell you the program I used. I'm going to save it for another episode. But it is AI and I did punch in about 30 photos of myself and gave it instructions on what I wanted and it spat out my So, Michael, I have a last question for you. Yes, ma'am. For newcomers who are impressed by all this but don't My advice is start with the free image generators. Start with ChatGPT. ChatGPT now does free. You can start with ChatGPT, and you can create using, let me just move screens. So you can go into here and say, create a picture that is an ideal destination beach. wedding venue. Ask me questions if you have any that will help. And then chat GPT will go off and it will literally say, OK, right. So are you envisioning? So OK, so let's go. I'm going to do this really quickly. So sunrise, magentas, blues, lights, shades. Should there be any specific features? White chairs, wreaths, no people. I like people. Secluded beach, yes. And no dinosaurs. Okay. So, now, sometimes I like giving ChatGBT things like that where it goes, wait, what? What was that last thing? And it will create an image that you can use. Now, I will tell you one thing about ChatGBT with its imagery, which is DALI 3, it's a hell of a lot better at creating images that have words in them. Most AI is really bad at lettering. Anyway, so here you have a couple of different ideas. Now, DALI will give you, which is ChatGPT, same company, it will give you ideas that you can act upon and then fine-tune. They may not seem perfect to you at the time, but it gives you visuals that you can use. Say, for example, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this as long as you aren't going back to the client and saying, I shot this. Always be truthful about this. Say, OK, here's a mock-up for you. Is this kind of where you're going? You can use these as such quick mood boards. It really is. I mean, that And yeah, it's giving them the visual, you know, and it's that alone to be, you know, for them to go, no, you're not hitting it. That's not on the mark. That's super helpful, right? We're on the right path or we're not. Michael, thank you so much for your time. I'm sure we're going to catch up more and more because we've always got stuff that we're geeking on about together. And so much of it is going to be helpful for anyone who's got any sort of wedding business. If you'd like to find out more about Michael and what he does, check out GenuineGrowthPath.com. You can also find him on Instagram or TikTok. The username MPA, as in Michael Pearson Adams, NPA Creatives is his username. And if you didn't catch the visuals, I'm sorry for you. But you can go on YouTube and you can see the I have one more thing, Jack. Oh, yes. So I asked, I asked ChatGBT if it could add the dinosaur back that Right. So now you're really going to have to look this up on YouTube because I It's like if you have, if you're a wedding planner and you have a client that says specifically that they have an in-law that they want in the wedding, but you have, this is kind of like nearly a bonding moment where they ask for stupid stuff. Give them stupid stuff. Thank you, darling. I will see you soon. And yes, I've told you all how to get in contact with Michael. And we'll have you back and we'll talk more about AI and plenty of the things. This episode of Wedding Empires is brought to you by The Wedding Academy, where you can start and grow your wedding business. We offer certificate courses, group coaching programs, and a whole heap of templates and worksheets and things to help you get started and grow your wedding business. For more information, visit WeddingAcademyGlobal.com. And don't forget to use your 5% discount code PODCAST