Learn how AI Apps can help you create amazing Social Media content
Our Instagram training has been helping influencers up their game for over 5 years now. In this post we’ll look at how to use AI for content creation – and the AI Apps that can help you generate the stories, images and videos that really represent you online.
Text content: everything from Instagram reels ideas to blogs, facebook ads and website copy.
Imagery: How creative do you want to get?
Video: online apps that can present, voice, and design professional quality clips.
DIY AI for Social Media
You’ve probably heard enough about AI by now. How it’s going to change everything. How you can’t trust what you see or hear anymore, because AI can recreate people’s faces and voices and make you believe it’s real. How all creative folk will be on the scrapheap by the end of the year, the machines are taking over, and the end is generally nigh.
And certainly, if you’re any way involved or active on social media, well, maybe you should be concerned. Because when it comes to creating content – content that actually wins hearts and minds – AI apps are getting pretty clever. And there are a lot of them out there. In this post we’ll look at some of the more popular ones – from beginner-friendly to almost-pro.
Why should I care?
You already know that great content is the best way to connect with customers and promote you, your brand, or your business. But creating it can be time-consuming and difficult. Over the last year or so, a whole raft of AI apps have appeared, which can help you create social media content quickly and easily.
Imagine if you could…
- Create your own viral-worthy content
- … that is human-like and realistic,
- …is targeted for specific demographics,
- … is timely and relevant,
- … that is search engine optimised,
- … that is accessible to everyone.
With AI in your toolkit you can create an endless supply of fresh, new content to keep your followers engaged and attract new ones. It can be a game-changer; allowing you to focus on the creative aspects of social media marketing while leaving the grunt work to the machines.
How to get started.
Artificial intelligence has revolutionized the way we create content, and getting started with an AI-based content creation process might seem daunting at first. But don’t worry, it’s not as complex as it may appear. We’ll make some suggestion here, but remember, this is brand new and ever-evolving technology. The key to success with AI-based content creation is to remain curious and keep learning.
Text Generators
1. ChatGPT
The one that everyone has heard of. And also, the simplest to use. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT with zero fanfare in November 2022, they weren’t prepared for what happened next. According to some estimates, it’s the fastest-growing internet service ever, reaching 100 million users in January just two months after launch. It has a simple Google-like interface which makes it easily accessible to beginners and the speed of response makes it feel more of a conversation than a machine.
With such a massive take-up (and $10 billion from Microsoft) OpenAI have brought out the next, even smarter upgrade. GPT4 is now available to developers – though not yet to the general public. It promises to be even smarter, able to solve some of the more complex problems, like what should I have for lunch? Thanks to Sudarshan on Twitter for this example.
2. Jasper
Once you’ve got your head around the basics, you might want to try something more sophisticated. Social media content needs a consistent voice, and Jasper can be trained on your style of writing so you consistently generate content that’s on-brand across your team.
Jasper Brand Voice takes into account three pillars of identity:
- Knowledge: The products and services you offer, industry you’re a part of and market you’re selling to.
- Tone: What your brand sounds like and how you portray your voice to your target audience.
- Style: The verbiage, grammar, formality and punctuation rules of your brand that will look and feel cohesive across all medium and written interactions.
With dozens of templates – from Amazon product descriptions to Zoom transcript editors – this will quickly become an indispensable feature of office life.
One watch out though, the business model is based on the number of words you generate. The more Jasper writes for you, the more you pay. $24 dollars a month with a ceiling of 20,000 words – spit out 100,000 words that month and suddenly you’re paying $82. And Jasper sure can ramble on, which means you can end up producing a lot of words but very little meaning. It takes some practice to fine-tune Tone of Voice, for example, and that means more words, and that means more money. This is a high powered engine, so go easy on the pedals…
3. Writesonic
At the Intermediate level, Writesonic is a good option. It too has a broad range of templates, ready to use. Like ChatGPT it delivers fast, articulate outputs, and the interface is simpler and easier to use than Jasper. The same company has just brought our Chatsonic, which (at the Premium level) is compatible with GPT4 which means you can throw complicated conundrums at it, like “What can I make with these ingredients?” and writing poems. People are finding that these tools are more than just ways to make the working day less tedious – but can be fun and creative as well.
Image Generators
All these AI apps are based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Essentially, engineers have a found a way to build computers that function more like the human brain and less like mechanical machines. In a similar way to our brains, LLMs are quick to learn, and because we’ve all spent the last 20 years flooding the internet with hundreds of millions of pictures and captions, we’ve given the LLMs an almost inexhaustible supply of content to learn from. So let’s give it a try and see what we can make.
1. DALL-E2
OpenAI’s other product, the weirdly named DALL-E2, can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It’s easy to use, but the results can be difficult to control . That makes it a fun tool to get familiar with Text-to-Image apps. Because the AI is trained to understand natural language you ask it to produce what you’re imagining by describing it. It can be very short, say: ‘A horse in a space suit.’ The AI responds with this:
Or the prompts can be longer and more detailed: ‘piebald horse in a space suit, grainy photo, antique, sepia, a red carnation behind his ear, galaxy and stars in background’ which gives us these alternatives:
At first sight this all seems too easy. But as the developers at OpenAI remind us: “DALL.E knows a lot about everything, so the deeper your knowledge of the requisite jargon, the more detailed the results.” In other words without your expert knowledge of your specialist subject matter, and the language to describe it, the AI won’t know what you want to make. Very usefully, they also provide a manual.
2. MidJourney
If you fancy trying something a little more sophisticated, you could be ready for MidJourney. This AI lets you make images with an extraordinary degree of precision and detail. But it is a bit like that clever but awkward friend that struggles socially. To use Midjourney you also need to register with the social gaming app Discord. The interface and the image generation happens on a server you create there, but any images you make appear on Midjourney which is where you need to pay for the usage (About $10 a month). Still with me? Well, it’s fiddly to set up, but super-fun when you manage it.
Midjourney works with text prompts, just like DALL-E2. And in the same way, the more specific you are, the crazier it gets. Recently, an AI image of Pope Francis in a stylish white puffa coat appeared, causing something of a confused stir. You may remember it.
Taking a stab at describing that image to Midjourney gives us these alternatives, which are pretty close. The AI always likes to offer a few variations, which means you can pick your favourite and start to develop it further.
But if we let our imagination wander, and add a few random details, the outputs become genuinely strange…
The AI struggles to figure out how to incorporate the Pope, Putin and Rudolf the Red-nosed reindeer. It’s never seen one. But because it can synthesise different sources, it’s prepared to take a guess: it knows what ‘Red’ is and remembers what a reindeer looks like. Putting them together it offers four suggestions. Number four is probably the winner. It’s just too scary to look at!
Video Generators
Making Videos is a little bit more fiddly. But it’s amazing what you can create very simply and quickly. There are plenty of simple video editing tools online, such as iMovie, OpenShot and Filmora. But they’re mostly just that – for editing video you’ve already shot or sourced. Generative AI tools like Synthesia and Pictory allow you to make original material: create avatars and make them speak, build animations and titles and include assets from all across the Cloud.
1. Synthesia
Whereas the Image AI tools use a Text-to-Image process to create original visuals, Synthesia uses Text-to-Speech algorithms to generate talking avatars. You can test your script through multiple ethnically diverse faces, young and old, with over 120 languages, accents and tones. If you want to get more creative, you can add ‘micro gestures’ like nods and eyebrow movement. It’s undeniably bizarre, but a lot of fun.
For $1000 a year you can even commission your own custom avatar to be, literally, the face of your brand. A spokes-avatar to represent you in the virtual world. The degree of similitude to ‘organic’ actors (like you and me) is not that close. Movement is very limited. But as a way of creating polished communications quickly, it’s pretty good. And like all the AI tools we’ve looked at, it offers a fast way to kick off the creative process and overcome the dreaded ‘blank canvas’.
2. Pictory
- If you’ve ever uploaded pictures to create a book online, this App won’t give you any problems. You can add images and video, then add music, voiceovers, and titles very quickly. All you need now are some ideas!
There used to be a billboard outside the British Library in London with a quote by Stephen Fry: “An original idea? How hard can that be? There must be hundreds of them in the library!”
Artificial Intelligence is your library card to all the ideas that reside in the Cloud internet. So, let’s go back to the top and ask a text generator to give us “5 Instagram fashion reels that will go viral”.
3. Runway
This is where we start to get into the Intermediate class. Runway has all the advantages of a drag-n-drop app, but with plenty of added tricks up its sleeve. As always, pictures speak a thousand words, so here are some of the video-y things that Runway lets you do with the content you already have, or can shoot easily on your phone.
Make of that what you will. Me, I’m making things already. And what I can make is only really restricted by my imagination. But is this really a ngood thing? Should we worry? Isn’t this all just … a little bit scary?
But… isn’t it all a bit scary?
Some people fear that these technologies pose a threat to human creativity. Others fear that Artificial Intelligence poses a threat to humanity itself. They may be right. But one, probably unique, characteristic of humans is our insatiable appetite to invent, and we’re in the process of inventing this. So far as they can, the developers have tried to fit ‘guardrails’ to limit the potential for mischief. So there is a long list of ‘prohibited’ words which cannot be said in prompts – you can probably guess what some of them are. That means people are prevented from creating content which might be construed violent or sexually explicit.
One more thing; legally, you have the right to use what you make however you like. But you have no protection from other people using it as well, and if anything goes wrong and you get sued, well, that’s your problem (read the small print). The legal status of the whole industry is, to understate it, pretty fluid. It’s even been suggested that concepts of intellectual property and copyright are outdated relics from the 19th century; as ready to be swept away by changing times as surely as the horse by the internal combustion engine.
And as for the Ethics, well, it’s also worth remembering that anything you make on these Apps joins the information in the Cloud that the AI learns from. You are a teacher as much as a customer, creator or consumer. Whether AI is a monster or an angel very much depends on what we do with it. All of us. So get creative!
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