Recently, I was writing a post about the state of B2B content marketing strategy. In the post, I compared Sherlock Holmes’ use of deductive reasoning to how B2B shoppers find solutions. The draft felt wordy, and I wanted to break it up with visuals related to the private investigator analogy.
Enter generative AI for content creation. Or, in this case, how to use something other than AI for content creation. Like, maybe a professional designer:)
Read on to learn about a mini adventure into the world of AI-generated content creation.
How to use (or not use) AI to create blog images
In my search for “the best content creation tools,” I stumbled upon Adobe Express (Beta). It offers an easy-to-use generative AI tool that converts text to images. I created an account and tried my luck at creating AI-generated photos of my favorite private investigators.
Wouldn’t an image of Sherlock Holmes arm-wrestling Magnum PI be funny?
Author thinking out loud and sharing here as a quote
Here’s the prompt and image results:
Create an image of Sherlock Holmes wearing a private investigator hat and holding a pipe wrestling Tom Selleck, aka Magnum PI, on the beach overlooking the ocean. 
OK, AI-generated images have a ways to go, but how incredible (and weird) are these images?
I am trying to decide which is my favorite. I think it’s the guy picking at a tiny top hat atop his hand. He’s carefully exerting himself, as if the hat is a scab about to break free. If you look closely, you’ll see what appears to be a miniature bird inside the pipe bowl, preparing for flight.
None of the photos convey what I visualized, but they check the box for entertainment value. So, mission accomplished.
Fyi – After playing with Adobe Express (Beta), it will be one of my go-to content marketing tools moving forward. Not only does it offer the ability to generate images from text, but it also has other cool tools I used to write this piece.
For example, my use case was to resize the AI-generated images for the WordPress gallery you see above. The original images were about 2 MB each, so I wanted to resize them dramatically for web.
Here’s my process:
- Use Adobe’s text-to-image tool to generate sample images from my text prompt.
- After generating samples, resize top favorite images to 300×300 pixels using Adobe’s resize image tool.
- Reformat the images as JPEG to reduce the file size for web. The loss in quality is less important to me than a fast-loading page.
- Upload the images to the WordPress media folder and give them alt tags.
Go further into the rabbit hole, Tim!
If you’re like me, you want more and are asking yourself, “What would it look like if our favorite P.I. sidekicks arm-wrestled?”
Have a look.
Create a photo of a skinny and pale-skinned Dr. John Watson, the sidekick to Sherlock Holmes, wrestling a large, muscular, brown-skinned Theodore "T.C." Calvin, the sidekick to Magnum PI, on a beach. A helicopter is parked in the distance because T.C. was a pilot. Watson is wearing a pink ballerina tutu just because. T.C. is wearing 1980s gym wear. 
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Content Marketing Strategy 