By Brittany Fugate, CEO at Cenetric
There’s no two ways about it — we’ll be having some fun with this post. We’re going to look at AI image creation and how you can use it in your daily work. (And as a training ground to become more comfortable with AI in your business.)
What’s your AI use case?
Implementing AI in your day-to-day work isn’t something you should approach without setting a use case — a specific idea of how and why you’ll use it.
For instance, every week, Cenetric has a team meeting with a theme — anything to make a meeting more interesting, right? And as the leader, I try to up the entertainment value by making slides that follow that theme.
So my defined use case for AI in this example is to engage my team during meetings without spending a ton of time on it each week. I want maximum fun for the minimum time input.
With that in mind, today I’m going to show you how I do that with generative AI tools like Canva, Leonardo, and ChatGPT. When I prepare my slide decks, I only use one tool at a time, but for this post I want you to see how each one handles the prompts I give.
Tips for using AI tools to make presentation graphics
Tools like these are making it easier than ever for you to dream up any visual and see it almost instantly. And things are changing fast. A few weeks ago, OpenAI launched its GPT-4o model that delivers much better images, and people went crazy creating graphics of all kinds, from mockups of themselves as action figures to Studio Ghibli-style creations.
That means no more boring presentations! I’ll show you how these tools work — and how the quality of the information you provide can make a big difference.
Before we get started, a few tips:
- We don’t recommend using AI to do brand projects or customer-facing graphics (yet). Leave those to the pros.
- Check images carefully before using them. Even with recent advances, AI still does weird stuff sometimes, like replace text with symbols or depict settings incorrectly. (You’ll see what I mean in a second.) This is internal use stuff, but you still want it to look good.
The quality you put into AI is the quality you get out
Let’s start with a pretty basic prompt. Most people aren’t too creative or expansive with their first prompts because — let’s be honest — asking a bot to make you a pretty picture isn’t something most of us are used to at first, right?
A decent prompt
Cenetric employees fighting off hackers
Winner: ChatGPT
I gave this round to ChatGPT because it’s the most fun, and it was closer to looking like a comic-style version of our team. Certainly usable, especially for an internal weekly presentation.
ChatGPT did better than the others here because it asked me a question in response before it started. Neither of the other tools did that. It asked me about the employees I wanted to depict and the style I was looking for:
“Before I create the image, could you let me know what Cenetric employees typically look like or wear? Do you want the scene to be realistic, stylized like a comic, or more playful and symbolic (e.g., people with laptops battling shadowy hacker figures with glowing code)? Let me know your preferred vibe!”
My response: They wear casual clothes and are all types of people. Please stylize it like a comic. Fun/playful vibe.
Leonardo does offer settings before you generate an image, including a choice of AI model to use, the style of the image (I chose “Illustration”), the image size, and the number of options to present you with. It was pretty good too, but the feel of the image was a little too dark for my taste. I wanted my team to see themselves in it.
Canva relies on just the prompt and automatically generates four images. You can choose a style (I used “Concept Art”) and a shape. If you like one of the choices, you can ask it to generate four more like it to get some new options.
Some of the choices Canva gave me depicted our team fighting hackers in real life with knives, which is certainly not something we do here at Cenetric. 😉
A better prompt
Let’s give our original prompt a little more context and see what AI can do:
IT pros from Cenetric, a managed services provider, battling against hackers to protect a client company’s important systems
Winner: Leonardo
- It shows people working on laptops and does a fairly good job of conceptualizing the idea of “important systems.” It feels fairly relatable for my team.
- ChatGPT has a fun feel and reflects the makeup of my team better, but I took points off here because it never asked me about a size, giving me a rectangle image instead of the square the last prompt gave me. It also included the text of the prompt at the top of the image, which I cut off to make it fit here.
- Canva missed the mark because all the people seem to be men, and that doesn’t represent my team. They appear to all be the same bearded, glasses-wearing man, as a matter of fact.
An even better prompt
Let’s really juice up the prompt here and just tell it what I had in my head originally: my team as hacker-stopping superheroes:
IT pros from Cenetric, a managed services provider, in the form of superheroes, winning a fistfight against hackers to protect a client company’s important systems. It should be in old-fashioned comic book style with action words like “BAM” and “POW” in a comic book font around the action.
Winner: ChatGPT
- Although it put the text of the prompt at the top of the image this time too (again not shown here for space concerns), it followed the prompt the best, including the “BAM” and “POW.” It’s in a fun comic style as requested. Although the woman on the right does appear to be a hacker masquerading as a Cenetric superhero. (That’s not something you’ll have to worry about with real-life Cenetric!) I could prompt it again to fix that issue if I wanted to.
- Leonardo is a good second choice because I can see that there’s a superhero and a hacker fighting, but “BAM” and “POW” don’t appear as I prompted, and it’s not clear that a Cenetric employee is the superhero. Again, I could prompt Leonardo to address that by tweaking the prompt and asking again.
- Canva comes in third once again because “BAM” and “POW” are nowhere to be found, and it’s not clear who’s the hacker and who’s the Cenetric employee. Canva has a 280-character limit for prompts, and I lost the last few words in the process, so beware of that.
What you can learn from having fun with AI
It’s pretty evident that both the prompt and the tool made a big difference here. We’re not recommending any of these over the other for image creation because it all depends on your needs — and your budget.
I used the free version of each tool for these, so you technically don’t need to spend anything to make these kinds of images. But the free versions do have limits, so if you think you’ll use it regularly, it makes sense to upgrade.
Whether you’re using the free or paid versions, keep in mind when you’re working with AI:
- AI doesn’t “know” anything. It predicts what you want based on the info it’s trained on and your prompt. But it can adapt its output quickly if you refine your prompt or give follow-up prompts.
- AI isn’t a mind-reader. The more specific you are up-front, the better results you’ll get. If you have a ballpark idea of the outcome you want, tell the AI tool about it. For instance, when I specified superheroes in the last prompt, all three gave me results closer to what I was thinking about when I started.
- AI is a task-doer, not a strategist. Just like you shouldn’t ask an intern working for school credit to conceptualize and execute a brand design strategy for you, you shouldn’t ask AI tools to do it either. Save it for little things like we did here today.
- AI is frequently wrong. From telling people to put glue on pizza to make the cheese stick to misidentifying prime numbers, AI isn’t infallible. Make sure you’re checking its output at all times. You have an innate sense of context and emotion as a human — it doesn’t.
Start small with AI and grow into bigger projects
AI can be a powerful tool, but if you bite off more than you can chew, you might grow frustrated with it easily. Learning to use it for small, less consequential tasks like we did today is the way to start.
From there, you and your team can take what you’ve learned about what AI can and can’t do and apply it to other areas of your business. Next time, you might let it help you by taking notes in your meeting and highlighting the most important action items.
Let Cenetric help you get the most out of AI
There are lots of purpose-built AI solutions out there that are secure and designed specifically to help businesses like yours. And taking advantage of these solutions helps smaller companies like yours gain ground on large competitors by making mundane, repetitive tasks and projects faster and more valuable.
When you start small, you’ll be ready to graduate to these more sophisticated AI tools in no time. Want help implementing new software or technology (like AI tools) in your business? Cenetric has the experience and availability to support your team. Tell us about your project and we’ll be in touch to get started right away.
(Did you like this experiment? We’d like to share more with you about how you can safely let AI handle manual tasks in your growing business. Message me on LinkedIn to tell me what you thought of this post — or suggest what we should cover next.)