Jonathan Green 2024: [00:00:00] Using Midjourney to create masterful art and accelerate your business to today's special epic guest, Rory Flynn. On the Artificial Intelligence podcast.
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Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you wanna make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you can come to the right place. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. You will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep.
Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.
Now, Rory, I'm really excited to have you here 'cause I'm a big fan of your work and I just wonder how you first [00:01:00] decided that Midjourney was going to be your platform and how you got passionate about AI art from the beginning.
I.
Rory Flynn: Yeah, man. Number one, appreciate you having me on. Thank you. The, there was definitely the inflection point I saw, I think some things on Twitter that really got my attention back in 2022. And it was, I think it was Peter Griffin as in 1980s. Like I. Sitcom and I was like, what the hell is this?
How is this possible? And then I saw, the Pope in a Balenciaga jacket and I'm like, all right, so this stuff can do things. I'm like, let me get on this. It started as a late night Twitter, like rabbit hole. And before I know it, I was like generating images till four in the morning. So I was like, this is really cool.
But you know how it really started to take off was when I needed to use it in my business. So that was something that, from a, keeping the story not too long here, I was working. With my partner and I, we had an email marketing agency and we had a lot of clients and we had a lot of demands and essentially like we just didn't have the capital to invest in employees.
Our margins were already tight to begin with, [00:02:00] so it was something that was based outta necessity and we're like, can we use this tool? Can this be a fix? Can, for something like as simple as email marketing. Where it's got a really like small lifespan, no one's going back in their promotional inbox and checking something from two weeks ago, right?
So it's something that we could test and it was smaller format too, so we didn't have to worry about the resolution at the time. So we just started utilizing that with our clients and being like, we can tell better stories with this, with a lack of assets and will it work? And it did.
So then that was, before you know it, start talking about that a little bit and it seemed there was some interest from a lot of people and we just kept amplifying it and blowing it out. To keep a really long story short, that's what's been going on,
Jonathan Green 2024: The reason I reached out to you is I love your approach to teaching art and what I really, my biggest pet peeve is the number of people who are putting out bad AI art.
It reminds me of when people first discovered clip art in the nineties and everyone was posting the these low resolution images, and now we have these amazing tool, but a lot of people will just write a really short prompt. [00:03:00] They all seem to be using Dolly three 'cause it has that dolly three wet look.
And it was, I can always tell it just has that look of I didn't, I wrote a really short prompt, like a tour prompt and I just posted to the first thing it made. Why do you think so much of that's happening and how is the market gonna correct?
Rory Flynn: Yeah, I think it's just it's the easy, quick and easy, right?
Like how quick and fast can we get this out? And, there's people that, from a quality standpoint I don't know if they've ever had to submit. Art for and deal with clients or deal with anything like that where the critiques always come back and it's always something, right?
I have been a designer in the past life and I, there's things that I submitted that I thought were magical and just got shredded, right? So there's always like this sort of perfectionist. Ideal that has to go into it because you're putting your name on it right now.
That's kinda how I approach everything with this. 'cause there's so many voices out there. Everyone's got a different, everyone's got a different theory, everyone's got a different process structure, whatnot. This process, what I do works for me, but it really is like getting, how do I get the highest [00:04:00] quality images so I don't have to go back and forth with clients or, people that I'm working with a million times.
I think it's, I think education is what is going to. Correct itself. As soon as people get more interested in the tools and really want to get like really high quality work out of it, they have a very strong vision and they want to know how to get there. Once you start breaking down the programs, they all somewhat work very similarly, a lot of the image generators.
So once you get to that point, you start playing around with it and a, I don't know, scientific fashion, but more so just, really diving into the intricacies of the tool. Then you realize you can do anything. And then once you get to that point, then you realize what do I want to do? And then from there it's just how do I, basically reverse engineer to get the, any sort of image, visual, concept that I wanna get to.
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's definitely gonna correct itself as people start to learn these tools a lot better.
Jonathan Green 2024: When you're thinking about posting image online, whether it's in a thumbnail or it can be on your, one of your social media feeds, what's the line you look for? 'cause some people go just good [00:05:00] enough.
Some people go pretty interesting. I'm always trying to create something that I would wanna look at anyways, or that I think is funny. Those are two of the things I look for. Do I like this or is it funny to me? So a lot of stuff I post. Is, I think when I show this to my kids, will it be funny, like I post a picture of me riding a dinosaur on the moon holding a laser rifle and I told my kids, I show the picture to my kids and I was like, yeah, this is my, before I met your mom, I was a bounty hunter.
And they go, what were you? And I like, it's funny to me. So that kind of drives what I create, but I feel like, oh, that a lot of people. Don't have, they're not thinking about what's the line I wanna be above. So where do you think people who are starting out should go? What's the line they should look for?
'cause I always say, are you pr? I always say this, are you proud of that image? Which maybe that's too high.
Rory Flynn: Uhhuh there's to me I think it was based on the medium, right? Like my medium was social media for this. So to me, what do I need to do to win on social media is I need stuff that stops your scroll.
Right now for stuff, for myself, I, it [00:06:00] looks totally different than what I put out into the commercial space, if you wanna call it that. But that was how it started was Okay. I'm, basically utilizing this as a tool. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm trying to create content and stand out, everyone's got this plain, carousel cover, which is text and like an image of themselves, or it's white and black background, like very symbol, right?
So I was like, let me throw up a picture of, some sort of. Alien with neon face paint because you haven't seen that on LinkedIn today Probably. So that's probably my line of demarcation there is, have you seen this today? Have you seen someone with, this intricate pattern, face, paint, or tattoos on their face?
Just because that to me stands out. It stops, makes you say, what is this about? And then people go in and read it. So that's for me. That was like the thought process behind trying to create this stuff a little bit more intricately. And it was just a way for me to, get people to stop the scroll and read my stuff.
'cause my copy wasn't great at the time when I started, but if I could stop you with the image, then maybe you'd read it. So it was that's how I look at it. Have you seen this today? And if it, if you have, then I'm [00:07:00] just gonna scrap it. And if you haven't or at least I hope you haven't, that's what's getting posted.
Jonathan Green 2024: A lot of people are, they think about AI as speed and Oh, AI can make an image fast, and that becomes the only thing they're looking at, which is if I just make an AI image, I can post 10 images today, as opposed to one really good one. When I make I really putting a lot of effort into growing my YouTube channel as well now, and thumbnails is such a.
War, it's all, the video doesn't matter. The thumbnail is everything. And most good creators will make 20 versions of their thumbnail and run massive tests, and they spend more time on the, they'll do 90% of the time on the thumbnail, 10% of the time on the video. When I discovered that I, so I might spend an hour making a video in four or five hours on the thumbnail, and people don't see that.
They just think, oh, that's the first image you generated. I wish the first image you generated was the best one. There's so much goes into it. Then you have to do three different variations that are different. Because maybe it's not gonna be the winner 'cause the audience will choose. [00:08:00] How do you when you're creating your trainings, or when you're teaching people to start creating art, help them to switch from the mindset of AI is fast, to also AI can be good.
Rory Flynn: So I think it's always, again like this is a perfect example with the YouTube thumbnails. If you're just using a black background with white text that's been done 10,000 times, that's not gonna generate anyone's interest, right? Like you have to get, it's almost like you have to keep getting weirder and crazier and more ex extreme.
Now, with the tools that we've had before ai, that wasn't really, you could only push it to a certain degree unless you are an exceptional designer. Now there's no limitations. So you can go as crazy as you want to. If you know what you're trying to do. Yeah, I'd say that, there, there is a speed factor, but you look at the way that, these prompts that everyone utilizes and, puts 'em out for a thousand prompts for midjourney, and if everyone's using 'em, everyone's stuff looks the same.
You don't stand out, you're not gonna get clicks, right? So same thing is like, how do I push this? How do I make this look different? How to, let me go scroll, [00:09:00] let me go type my, my main keywords into YouTube. Look at. Every single image there. How, what are they structured? What are their color schemes?
How do they look? Let me just do the one that stands out, like the opposite, right? Like how that's how I would go about it. But it's I think it's just a really, the quality to me is, how much creativity can you inject into an image without making it just crap Or how, how can you push it just a little bit further?
How do you add textures to it? How do you add different lighting styles to it to make that, that pop more? So it's, it's a little bit of design baked in with it, from a knowledge standpoint, but it can be super, if you're looking at a shelf of cereal boxes, right? This is how I like to think about it, right?
Go down cereal aisle. Cereal aisle in the grocery store. Everything's like flashy neon colors, like big illustrations, and there's just one black box in the middle there. It's like that one stands out because it looks different than everything else. So I think it's it's, again, it's serving the landscape of what you're trying to compete in and then, differentiating by utilizing the [00:10:00] tools not to just, make generic, watered down crap just to let's push it forward.
Long answer, but I think the really nuanced question.
Jonathan Green 2024: I think a lot of people, and this is a misconception out there, think that learning midjourney is like learning Photoshop, which means it's gonna take two years or four years in the past to learn how to edit a photo or learn how to edit a video, years of work.
Years of work. They need physical tools and all these other elements in a really powerful computer. So people have this misconception, and I don't think the AI companies have done much to disabuse people of this notion that the learning curve is. If I wanna get as good at mid at Midjourney as Rory, it's gonna take me six or 12 months before I can start making something that's any good.
What is the real learning curve like? How long do you think it takes people to start creating pretty good images?
Rory Flynn: I think right now it's a lot quicker because, granted there's a lot of people on the internet myself, a lot of other creators that have basically, shortened the learning curve because we've taken all the hits with zero direction.
We had to get in there and test and do a ton of different [00:11:00] things to see what worked. But now we've shortened it down for a lot of people. So I think going in there with some structure, number one, like understanding how the tools work, that made me. A lot better, like how this tool actually thinks, how it works.
'cause then it became way clearer how to get better results instead of just lemme just throw some words in there, see what happens. And then, okay, that didn't work. Lemme just scrap that prompt. Go do it again. It's like how does the whole si, how does the whole tool think? How does mid journey's brain think?
And then where can I break it? Like how far can I push it? So I think, starting basically understanding where the tool. You know how it lives, how it thinks, and then just some basic structures like knowing what makes up a good image. What is the basic building blocks of any image, any good visual.
Then you can just fill in the blanks, right? And then when you have the fill in the blanks, then you can interchange. I. Those blanks, right? So it's, for me, they're like visual building blocks. When you're creating prompts, you have your lighting, your composition, your subject, your emotions, things like that.
If you think about 'em in those, in those terms, and they're just basically like little Lego [00:12:00] blocks, you put one in, you switch one out then it's just easier to test too, to get what you want. 'cause then you start to realize, how mid journey or any of these image creators react to just individual words or individual terms.
'cause one word can make a total difference. If you put. For example, it mid journey, this word for me, whatever, just say you had a prompt, like woman with tattoos, right? Comes out fairly generic. If you put woman with intricate tattoos, like the word intricate changes the entire thing. Knowing that really helps, especially when you're trying to achieve something, work backwards from something.
Yeah, I think that's knowing the tool. Then also really understanding and having a little bit of structure to get started can help you get to the end result a lot quicker and get a lot more quality.
Jonathan Green 2024: I went through your entire program. I'm very impressed by what you do. I bought your program and what I love is that to learn everything you teach, it takes a single day.
So in eight hours, I can go through all your videos, all your demos, do my stuff alongside them. When I think about how long it takes to learn anything else, that's so much [00:13:00] shorter. If you wanna learn Photoshop, they're like, okay, you gotta go to college for four years, or you got at least two, two years. So there's a lot of this.
Feeling, and I want that to be the first to be expressed to people that even though it sounds like we're talking is really hard, the process you're talking about, of figuring out how mid journey works. It's one week of playing around with it. Yeah. One day you can start to get things that are interesting and within a week you can start to get things that are amazing.
A lot of. What happens is when people, we create differently than we receive. So people will look at my art and go, this isn't good enough. Only this is good enough. When they're making their own stuff, the bar is much lower. And that's really the critical part here, is to think, what's that line gonna be?
And I love how yours is. Will people notice this? Will this get the click? What are people responding to? And I try to use it minus, of course an internal line is it something I'm proud of or something I'm excited to show people? Do I wanna show this to my wife and kids like, 'cause they're very. My wife does not know what my job is.
I ask her all the time what do you think I do? So if I can make something that's interesting enough for her to look at it and wanna play around with it, then I'm having a success. That is one of the things I love about art generation, is that work can be fun [00:14:00] again. And there's this thing that a lot of people do where they don't treat it like a business.
So a lot of people will sometimes go, oh, is there a cheaper alternative? And I go, it's $8 a month. Like how cheap do you need it to be? 'cause there's diminishing returns, there are free AI image generators, but you are gonna get a free quality result. Yeah. There are just like, there are free stock photo sites and paid stock photo sites and there is a really big difference in the quality of the images.
So how do you create that mindset when you're talking to people and you're trying to show people that this is a useful tool of this is worth an investment? 'cause a lot of people go, I wanna buy a program, but I don't want to have to buy a second thing. I'm like, this is how to use, this is the tool that I use.
There's no alternative. I'm a huge mid journey fan. It's definitely been the core of my business. I use some other specialized tool for small tasks, but 90% of the time, I'm mid inside, mid journey. So how do you approach it from that business mindset of this is a business tool, which means learning this tool is an investment.
Creating better images [00:15:00] investment. Because the better my images are, the more customers I'll drive, so the business will grow. So to me, it's all connected, but a lot of people. Try to shortcut the wrong parts of the business. I feel like that's where a lot of entrepreneurs and small businesses make mistakes, whether they're doing commercials or trying to get into TikTok or trying to create like images for their brand.
Rory Flynn: Yeah, I think this is a really good question 'cause I. Again, people don't see the value until they actually start to utilize it in their day to day. Now, the way I've been going about it and talking about it for a long time is I think there's a misconception too, with everything that Midjourney or any of these image generators do, is that there needs to be a finished product, right?
Like it needs to come out, it needs to be polished, it needs to go on billboard, right? There's way more use cases. Then just that. My, my whole goal in talking about this to people is to find not only the use cases for finished product, but also like internal and operations, right? So like I look at things like advertising agencies, right?
They have to do storyboards. Storyboards take a long time. They have to be illustrated, they go through a lot of revisions and typically, something [00:16:00] like that if you can. Get that process down in mid journey, that can be done in two hours, right? And it can be high quality and it can be really good.
Now that's an amplifier to your business, right? Same theory goes as okay, let's, working with a product photographer for our brand. The product photography sort of process can be long. It's expensive and oftentimes you don't get a ton of assets out of it. At the end of the day, maybe you get a hundred, 200.
But even going through and finding a photographer and then having to understand their vision and working through the revisions after they take the photos, the edits, things like that, you're able to provide them. Basically, here's what I wanna do with my images. Here's the clear direction that I've created in Mid Journey.
This is how I want it to look. This is the lighting, these are the colors, these are the positioning. They can just go and execute. They don't have to ideate either. So we can outsource a little bit of decision making there. Now again, same thing with. Something like email marketing, like you can run templates on midjourney.
You don't have to use the templates verbatim. It's here's a, basically an idea. I need to switch up some of the basically some of the [00:17:00] contextual pieces, some of the. Text blocks and some of the image holders and things like that. So you can get a start, go edit it out in Photoshop or Figma, add your own text, add your own images, and you have a new template.
So it's oh, we can use it for logos. Oh, we can use it for icons. It's just like thinking about, there's no real like end to it. You can go go really far, but like where are the use cases? How is it gonna help you actually, not just I need this banger of an image, but also how can I trim.
Two hours off of my day. That's how I'm looking at it and how I'm trying to tell people about it. 'cause it's just, once you start to see all of it, you find uses for it. It just becomes, if I start to think what can Midjourney do for me today? It's oh, there's probably 10 things that it can do for me today.
So that's again, I could probably talk about that for eight hours if you let me there. But it's a, to me it's just one of the most versatile things that I've ever had access to.
Jonathan Green 2024: So the thing when I think about the real value of what ChatGPT has brought to the market is leveling the playing field.
For a long time. 'cause I've been in [00:18:00] the writing space, a ghost writer for a long time, and you pay, the first question they ask you is, are you a native English speaker? Now anyone from any country in the world could run their text through chat GBT, and it looks like native English. You never think, oh, this is someone a foreigner, right?
It create, it solves that problem. It creates an equalization, and I feel like when used correctly, when you approach it correctly, so I see Midjourney as. It. It allows me to compete because when I'm creating YouTube thumbnail, there are some people whose YouTube thumbnail photo shoots are 10, 20, $40,000.
They're on location. They're out. They're at the Great Wall of China, which means they flew everyone there. They've got two photographers, they've got lighting, they've got other actors, and they take. You're doing a full photo shoot because they take 20 different pictures. Then there's post-production.
My friend used to be a photographer for Italian Vogue, which is the fanciest of the Vogues. After you would take a picture of a beautiful model, he would then Photoshop it for a minimum 15 hours and. When I learned that, I was like, wait, aren't these already the most beautiful people in the world?
Yeah. Like you have to do so much Photoshopping, all of that. [00:19:00] Now you can do in a 32nd image generation with an ai, you can compete anyone, no matter how small their company is, can create images with beautiful models, beautiful people, beautiful locations, real or unreal places, things that used to be impossible.
And I, my feeling for the small business owners, this is your chance right now to have a tool that's very affordable compared to what my stock photo cost used to be, $135 a month. Now I'm paying. So to me, I'm saving ton, totally switching to this new platforms, so much more affordable. That's really why I think one of the most beautiful things is, and that's the big opportunity, is that.
These tools give you a chance to compete with people that have much bigger resources. And now you have this ability to create competitive images. To create competitive things. Because like in the past, it's so hard for me to figure out what's the hex code for glowing? What's the hex code for neon blue?
Like those have always been really hard for me to accomplish, like certain colors. But now you can describe the image. Someone last week said to me, [00:20:00] I don't know how many artistic bones in my body. I know if I like it or I don't like it. I go, that's the only skill you need now. Yeah. Literally you describe it to Midjourney, you go, I like it, or I don't run the prompt again.
And that's what I think is really the beautiful thing is the leveling of the playing field, which means anybody with no technical knowledge. 'cause you don't need to learn a bunch of coding or complicated promptings. There's really simple structure. It can create amazing images.
Rory Flynn: Yeah, it's a hundred percent.
I think we, like you said before, we've just raised the floor, like the average is now just higher. Than it was from an image standpoint. Or from a visual standpoint. 'cause also, someone like me, right? Like I am not a professional designer by any means shape or form. Like I was forced into it for a previous role that I needed to just get somewhat good at it to put, visual presentations together.
And you get a tool like this where I never had the opportunity to go to college for design and learn for four years and learn Photoshop, illustrator, premier, things like that. But because I was working in it, I knew a lot of the terminology. I knew what I was trying to get to. It's just like you don't have the same sort of workflow, in [00:21:00] Photoshop if you haven't been like completely trained.
So now I just have a tool that can get me there quicker and then I can use Photoshop to help me on some of the other things. But yeah, it's really like you, I use the analogy fairly often, right? It's I think, in the hands of. Your average person, right? You give the average person like an F1 car and say, go win.
Go win at Monaco, right? Or you give someone a, you give a professional race car driver, an F1 car and say, go win at Monaco. You know who's gonna win? Still gonna be the person you know, who has the skills, right? But now that person has an F1 car. So it's it is to me, really like you, you can, you're only as good really as you want to be on this, and that sounds so cheesy.
But really, if you want to be good and you want to get good, you can get there. You just have to put in, a little bit of effort, or you can just generate whatever you need. And it doesn't have to be award-winning style stuff. So I think it's, again, small business, it is the biggest opportunity for them.
We've never had access to this level of technology. We've never had access to this level of creation. And you look at something like. [00:22:00] Midjourney to $120 at the baseline level per year. Can you find $120 worth of ROI? I'm pretty sure, between hiring a designer for some certain things or just even small projects what cost $120 anymore?
Like even if you wanted to do a, an ad layout or a, social campaign, you can create social assets. Think about all the a things we just have to put out in general every day between social. Advertising, YouTube content, whatever it there's $120 worth of value there to start with.
Shifting that mindset too, as well, going back to your previous question is important.
Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah, and that's what I wanna end on. 'cause this is the really important point, which is that I. Levels the playing field. So I've always struggled with Instagram. 'cause Instagram to me is a platform for beautiful people.
Ah that's just what it is. It's men with six pack and bikini women. And that's who does really well in there. 'cause it's very visual and it means I cannot compete there because I'm a regular looking person. And I always see everyone who teaches Instagram is always beautiful. I go, that's not [00:23:00] replicable because only beautiful people can do what you're doing.
Now. With ai, we can create beautiful images. One of my friends, she follows all these channels, which are just people creating AI images of different artwork and different ideas. And that's a way to create something that's really interesting and to compete to these new arenas where we couldn't compete before.
Whether it's against larger brands with big marketing budgets, or even just against beautiful people. There's all these new ways to enter new markets and to be competitive and to create things that are fun and interesting. And I think that's the most important thing is that. It's a fun process.
It's interesting and you get a really quick turnaround when in the past when I've had to hire a logo designer. Takes weeks. There's a, every time you ask for a vision, they get mad at you and it's, then you finally go, okay, go back. One revision. I don't wanna fight you anymore. I'll just take the one from yesterday.
And they're like, why didn't you tell me that yesterday? And you go, I didn't love it yesterday, but I just don't wanna fight you anymore. Now all of just getting away from that stress is like reason. I'm happy to use these tools, like just no more frustrations, but. I love your [00:24:00] approach to ai. I love the way you're teaching.
I know people I follow on LinkedIn. I definitely want. People to follow you on LinkedIn and you have a new program out there called midjourney Mastery. We have a link to that's gonna be in the show notes. People can check that out@artificialintelligencepod.com slash rory. I'm a big fan. I'm gonna put links in the show notes and the YouTube video if you want to learn.
Guys, the. Technical approach. A step-by-step methodical approach where it teaches each piece one on top of the other. And you can learn it all in a single day. Become a high level user. You learn what all the magic words mean, there's not that many of them. And a really cool approach to prompting that's easy to remember.
I encourage you to check it out. We're so excited to have you here today. Rory. Thank you so much for being here. This has been an amazing episode.
Rory Flynn: Yeah, man, I appreciate you for reaching out and having me on. This was really cool. Hopefully we can do it again sometime, but yeah, man, really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. Thank you everyone for listening. Learning a little bit more about Merge Midjourney on today's episode, the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
Thanks for listening to today's episode starting with [00:25:00] ai. It can be Scary. ChatGPT Profits is not only a bestseller, but also the Missing Instruction Manual to make Mastering Chat, GBTA Breeze bypass the hard stuff and get straight to success with chat g profits. As always, I would love for you to support the show by paying full price on Amazon, but you can get it absolutely free for a limited time@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift.
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