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100 Days of AI, Day 20: Using Midjourney for Stock Photos in Your Side Project

by NatarajApril 12th, 2024

Too Long; Didn't Read

Before generative AI, finding stock photos for your side projects was hard, expensive and time consuming. With tools like Midjounrey, however, it's cheap, faster and better.

featured image - 100 Days of AI, Day 20: Using Midjourney for Stock Photos in Your Side Project

Hey everyone! I’m Nataraj, and just like you, I’ve been fascinated with the recent progress of artificial intelligence. Realizing that I needed to stay abreast with all the developments happening, I decided to embark on a personal journey of learning, thus 100 days of AI was born! With this series, I will be learning about LLMs and share ideas, experiments, opinions, trends & learnings through my blog posts. You can follow along the journey on HackerNoon here or my personal website here. In today’s article, we’ll be looking at how to leverage midjounrey in the process if developing your own projects.

Sam Altman recently said in an interview that in a post chat-gpt world, there is a real possibility that we will see a unicorn with a team of 1. Which means there will be a one person company which will be valued at a billion dollars. If you ask me the same question my bet right now is on the short term. Gen AI presents a long tail opportunity for teams of 2-3 full stack developers to create something that could generate millions of dollars in revenue. The common thread between what Sam said and what I think is – AI is a super power for full stack developers.

And one company is a great example for this – Midjourney.

What is Midjourney:

Midjourney is an AI image generation company started by David Holz. Midjourney is accessible via discord server (https://discord.gg/midjourney) and the most common to use it is by typing /imagine and describing what type of image you want to create. For example I typed – /imagine swimming in the clouds, beside a rainbow, cinematic. And here is the output I got. Yes it is pretty great.

Midjourney is not alone in going text to image generation. Google has imagen, OpenAI has DALL-E and there are other projects like Craiyon. The crazy part about midjourney is that its team has only 11 people. The team is self funded and never raised venture money and here is the kicker. Midjounrey might eventually be more valuable than Discord itself where it is currently hosted.

How I Used Mid Journey for my side project

I am currently working on a project called Checks I Wrote. Its a webapp and a community for early stage investors to share their recent deals with other investors. The scale of the website will never be beyond 1000s of users and its main purpose is to cultivate a trusted community of investors. If you are interested in joining sign up for the waitlist here. As I was building the site, I realized I could use AI for generating text where ever I needed it but also generate images that I need to make the website look more polished. Previously for such use case I would spend a lot of time searching stock photo websites or making images my self in tools like Canva.

Creating Images using Midjourney:

For my project I needed an image on the welcome home page of investors. Without a tool like Midjourney, I would have probably searched for a picture in stock image websites that I can use royalty free and would include a group of people, hopefully looking like investors. But now that I have access to Midjourney, this what I got.

Of course like every prompt Midjourney gave me 4 options but this was the one I liked the most. Now it’s on my home page as shown below. Pretty neat right?

I used similar prompts to generate four more images to add to the section that the user will see once they login. Here’s how it would look like to the user.

All the four images shown in the above screenshots are generated using Midjourney. If I didn’t mention that fact, 90% of users will never know this. Also these images are also so much better than what you would find in stock image websites today. And its actually faster to generate these images than search for them in stock websites. Doing this experiment, it’s clear that stock image websites and their business model is clearly disrupted. And they will have to find ways to adapt.

AI PRODUCT IDEA ALERT 1: Auto generate blog headers in website platforms like WordPress. A WordPress plugin to do this might be a good business.

AI PRODUCT IDEA ALERT 2: Use Midjourney to create high quality product pictures in ecommerce. A lot of apps have been already rolled out and Shopify already started rolling some of these features for store owners. But there are other places this can be applied.

That’s it for Day 16 of 100 Days of AI.

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