This is a summary of my progress with AI image generators over the past months. From first try outs with creating new movie posters to very advanced prompting showing really cool results.
Alternative movie posters
Those are my first try-outs with AI image generators and also already over 1 year old. I used Dall-E for the generating (except the 2 alien pic – those came from Flux. Dall-E still has huge problems putting text 1:1 into the image, as you can clearly see. Flux is comparable great at this task.
Comic strips
Pixel Art
Advanced prompting results
This are the my best images and most advanced prompts I have been using in the past. Most images are generated with Dall-E 3 and Flux1.0. The more realistic looking image have been generated with flux, which as at the moment for me the reference when it comes to image generating. If you need not the super realistic look, Dall-E will also do. Plus: those 2 you can still be used for free.
Simple AI tools and the connection of them makes it very easy to create large amounts of content (here in the example text) for your blog, website etc. All tools I used here are free and easy to handle.
Step 1: ask chatgpt to create a list of popular items of any category you are interest in. In my example I asked it for the most popular DOS Games with some data of additional information:
Chatgpt will return you a handy table that you can easily further process. The data is nice, but we need some more text and therefore we are going to query chatgpt for each of the game for a summary. You can do this also in the normal prompt screen, but this would take very long. I am using for this a Google Sheet with the GTP for work plugin, that allows you to use the chatgpt als normal Google Sheet functions.
Step 2: Add some more content in a Google Sheet. When you copy/paste the table it will look something like this:
I already added another column Summary where then we want chatgpt to generate our text for each game. To do that we use a simple function:
After some time the request will be filled with a text comparably to mine:
You can add the details or specifics you want to have in your text. Quick hint on the prompt: chatgpt tends to just end longer texts in the middle of a sentence, so to trick it here tell in the prompt you want a 1.500 word summary and the only the first 750 words should be displayed. With this little tweak you will avoid having cut off texts.
As we are in a Google Sheet, the only thing we have to do now is to extend the function to all other rows below and let chatgpt produce the 100 texts. Having our complete texts we can go the next step and get the data into our wordpress Blog. Doing so we use zapier.
Step 3: Import the data als new content to your wordpress blog. Create a new transfer with your source “Google Sheets” and destination “WordPress Blog”.
In the next step choose the Google Sheet File from the dropdown:
Your WordPress also needs some preparation and you need to install the zapier plugin there, so that the app can communicate properly with the blog system:
Next we need to connect our WordPress blog and enter the credentials:
And then we can put everything together and tell zapier which data to use from the Sheet to create our new blog post (you can also create pages or attachments with images):
You can also use HTML in some fields like the Content to create more advanced entries. For the game example here we could create a little table at the top showing all the additional data we have. In the next step you can then review the full dataset and choose which one zapier should transfer.
Final result: the post in WordPress:
If you have chosen the full 100 dataset you will have 100 new posts in your blog. Some constraints from the zapier/Wordpress connection: As you can also see in the screenshot the plugin uses the old classic editor and not the new block editor. Also there are no links in the posts, which are to add in another step.
To fully automate the flow, create a new Zap from the transfer in zapier and let the process run each time a new row has been added to the Sheet. So all you have to do then, is add the row with the name of a new game and the chatgpt function will create your text and the zapier zap will import it automatically to your blog.
I really like Google products and how easy they work but trying to get USB tethering working on my Nexus 5 almost drove me crazy: no documentation or wrong one from google, old driver sets. So I am quite sure there are many people out there facing the same issue. So here is how I did it finally:
First of all stick to the official documentation you can find here. You need the driver file tetherxp.inf which is unfortunately not linked in the help file – I dunno why. When you google for the file on the web you will easily find it but it won’t work cause it’s outdated. The thing is that every device needs to be mentioned with the correct device id in the file. Most of the files you find are 2 or more years old, so no nexus 5 device id is included. I modified the tetherxp.inf file in order to make it work:
Rename the file to tetherxp.inf and follow the steps from the official documentation:
Follow the steps above to turn on USB tethering for your phone or tablet.
Download the following configuration file (tetherxp.inf) to your Windows XP computer. Typically, you can right click on the link and choose “Save As”. (If your browser adds “.html” to the file name, you’ll need to edit the name to remove the .html extension and replace it with “.inf” instead.)
Connect your phone or tablet to your computer using a USB cable. When Windows XP’s New Hardware Wizard opens, select No, not at this time, then click Next.
Select Install from a list or specific location, then click Next. Click Browse to browse to the directory where you installed the configuration file you downloaded in Step 1, then click Next.
When Windows XP finishes installing the software for Android USB Ethernet/RNDIS, click Finish.
Ich mag Festivals total gerne und fahre seit Jahren auf dergleichen um für kleines Geld möglichst viel Musik zu erleben. Was mir aber gerade in diesem Jahr extrem aufgefallen ist, dass die Festival-Szene immer mehr zu einer Maturareise & Ballermann Szene abdriftet. Und man muss dazu sagen, dass ich nicht auf die klassischen Rock-Festivals fahre, wo Trichtersaufen etc. Standard ist, sondern auf (ehemals Underground) Festivals für elektronische Musik. Es scheint aber so, dass auch die nun schon von der pickeligen Youngster-Partymeute entdeckt worden sind und als Training für kommende Springbreak Europes oder ähnliche geistlose Besäufnisse genutzt werden.
Man kann versuchen dem ganzen aus dem Weg zu gehen – was bleibt einem anderes übrig, aber es hat sich hier definitiv kräftig was verändert. Für die Veranstalter ist es sicher toll, da die Veranstaltungen immer mehr Leute anziehen, nur verunstaltet diese neue Kollegen auch konsequent die Campingplätze, sorgen für schlechte Stimmung und benehmen sich einfach nur vollkommen daneben. Es scheint als ist Dubstep jetzt die Allerweltsmusik der 16 Jährigen und jeder ist sooo Underground wenn er sich Skrillex am Campingplatz ertönent aus Mamis Küchenradio zu einer Trichterladung voll XXX reinzieht. Das hat für mich nichts mit Underground, noch mit sonst einer Musikszene zu tun – das ist einfach nur unterstes Ballermann Niveau. Soll auch Leuten gefallen und ist ja alles legitim, aber warum finde ich solches Verhalten jetzt auch schon auf nicht-mainstream Musik Festivals?
Ich für meinen Teil überlege mir sehr gut, ob ich mir das alles nächstes Jahr nochmals antun will, denn ich rechnen kaum mit einer Verbesserung der Situation. Oder vielleicht fahre ich auch zu den Kollegen auf den Ballermann und verpass ihnen eine Ladung Underground 🙂
Aus welchem Grund Google eigentlich Android aufgebaut hat dürfte wohl schnell klar sein: Das eigene mobile Ökosystem hat nur den einzige Grund die eigenen Services an die Pole Position zu bringen. Dass jetzt auch mit der Übernahme der Mobility Sparte von Motorola auch bald eigene Geräte kommen werden kompletiert hier die Dominanz an der gesamten Wertschöpfungskette. Umso genialer ist der Schachzug von facebook die sich mit facebook Home direkt in die von Google mit sehr viel Mühe und Kapitaleinsatz aufgebaute Wertschöpfung setzen – und zwar an die erste Stelle.
facebook Home ist ein Launcher der den vorinstallierten Launcher von Android ersetzt. Seit Beginn von Android gibt es diese Apps und findige Leute, die sicher in der Minderzahle sind, haben sich damit auch schon ihr eigenes Custom Android gebaut. Dass aber facebook mit seiner Userbase sich diesem Thema annimmt hat schon eine ganz andere Bedeutung.
Die Home App war sicher mit einem sehr geringen Kapitaleinsatz zu entwickeln hat aber sehr nachhaltigen Effekt: facebook muss nicht die hintere Standard-Position innerhalb der Android Oberfläche für seine Apps in Kauf nehmen sondern positioniert sie eine logische Schicht höher. Der Launcher ist in Android so etwas wie die App #1 die jeder User sieht. Da jetzt facebook diesen Launcher kontrolliert gelangt es sehr tief in die Nutzergewohntheiten des Anwenders und kann diese nach eigenen Interesse beeinflussen. facebook schafft mit einer sehr kreativen Lösung sich direkt in die Aufmerksamkeitsspanne des Users zu setzen und dort seine Services bevorzugt zu positionieren.
Google betreibt mit seinen Bemühungen das selbe Interesse, jedoch zu einem vergleichbar höheren Preis. Sicher sitzt Google am längeren Ast und kann alle Launchers aus dem OS werfen. Aber bis diese Maßnahme bei den Endkunden ist, dauert. Laut Infos spricht facebook auch schon mit Apple um eine Integration zu fördern – die haben sich ja schon vor einiger Zeit entschlossen Twitter tiefer ins System zu integrieren. Die Idee mit den Launcher finde ich genial und wird sicher bald Nachahmer finden: zb. MNOs können sich wieder mehr ins Licht rücken.
Was already a big hype in 2012 but will go even bigger in 2013 cause people think they can sell their crappy services much better when they try to “motivate” their users with badges or other game like mechanism. Just ask yourself: What was the most addictive game you ever played: Probably Tetris or Super Mario or one of the Call of Duty games? Do you see any badges or competition in these games? No – because their basic mechanism was the factor that makes the game addictive. The cool story or just the way you put bricks together was the key. When we add gamification to any other existing service or tool we want to give extra motivation to the users. Good point, but why not fixing the main issue in making a service useful, fun to use that you don’t need this “tricks”? You see gamifacation mechanisms in Google, amazon, facebook, Dropbox, etc? No, because the services are working as they are built. Foursquare may be the most popular example where you can earn badges. But is this the main reason to check in at a specific place? No, the main motivation is the narcissism to show off to your friends at which cool places you have been – no badges or rankings needed here.
Big data
Since big companies invented data warehouses or business intelligence they are collection huge amounts of data. Nothing really new, this happens since the 90s. But now someone asks “Hu, we collected lots of data during all the years, what do with this stuff?”. This is where big data and big data analysis comes into the game. We collected all this data over the years and now we realize “ups, we can’t process this huge amount of data with our current techniques”. But why now? Why this analysis have not evolved parallel to collecting the data? I can’t give an answer for that cause it is absurd for me to collect something that i can’t use in a valuable way. Big data is the excuse for something that should have happened all over the time we collected data.
Browser Games
Very popular last year and seeing a large amount of investments. Things changed dramatically in this field and also the market is going towards a consolidation. Big industry players like Bigpoint and Zynga are shrinking down their game portfolio to drop operating costs. 2013 we’ll see the peak of online browser gaming and from this point on a constant decrease in players and revenues. Also in-game purchases and virtual-goods-trading will decrease. Players become bored of building farms and moving towards serious games with attractive multiplayer functions.
Social TV
Social TV is another movement trying to make more out of TV as it actually is: a lean-back entertainment box in your living room. It might be true that there is a lot of social media buzz related to TV shows and series going on. But this buzz is good as it works and need not to be bundled and put into a social tv app. Also the potential is 1:1 related to the content. Means, no engaging content no social (tv) activity. As a mater of fact there is only little tv content that have this potential: casting shows, ongoing tv series, quiz shows, etc. The main problem is that TV is not social. Social Media is social and these are just TV Inputs generated into that channels. This trend will no mather in 2013 because no TV station will get the problem solved to make TV more social – because it is not solvable (at the moment).
iPad magazines
Digital magazines, mostly for iPads, were one of the biggest promises for the struggling print industry. With the closing down of Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” we have the prove that it can’t be turned in to a success story even with huge resources and money spendings. Digital magazines are far away from being a mainstream product but exactly this is a requirement to turn them via reach into money. The main issue is probably that reader devices will need sufficient more years to be spread in the market and also user experience must be improved significant. And the most important point is, that digital newspapers or magazines are not the solution to save the struggling print industry. It’s maybe a way of media consumption we will experience in 10 or something years but at the moment printed and online/web are the most common consumption ways. Here are the issues that must be solved.
Mobile
Since I could imagine every year there was a prediction that 20xx will be the year of mobile. And guess what, it wasn’t until now. And guess again, 2013 will also not be the year of mobile. Why? Because we are in the middle of a constant evolution moving towards a past PC area where mobile devices are the majority of “computers”. All other related buzz words like “mobile first” or even “mobile marketing” go along with this steady development but there will be no year of mobile at all.
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