Speaker 1: It's just so awesome seeing all the AI tools come out to help scientists, and this is another one that I think can help you. It's called MidJourney. MidJourney is an AI image processing and creation AI, and it is doing amazing things, and this is how I think it can help you design research posters, get some awesome images for anything that is, you know, at a conference that you're presenting. Here is how we do it. Okay, so over here we've got MidJourney. MidJourney.com. If we reload, you can see, oh, they've got fancy, nice animations, but ultimately, if we click on the showcase here, this is the sort of image that it is capable of producing, and that's just absolutely insane to me. But of course, my first kind of thought was, well, how can this help scientists? So at first, I went over and I started to ask it to produce poster templates, and to be honest with you, it wasn't very good, but then I had an amazing thought. So all I had to do was head over to our best friend, ChatGPT. So over here, I just said, create a prompt for AI to create a research poster template, and this is what it said. Design a visually appealing and informative research poster, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I copied and pasted that prompt into MidJourney. So here, you can see it's actually done a pretty good job at producing a research poster. There's probably two designs on here that I like. The first one is this top one, this bottom one. This is also okay as well. Now, of course, if you click on it and you look in detail, you can actually sort of like read that text because it's just like weird alien text, but you can start using this to look at designs that you like, colors that you like, and it takes all of that design thinking work out, and I am no good at designing stuff, so this was perfect. So I selected this bottom one here, and there are a few options. You can upscale or you can have variation. So I upscaled version four, and this is what we ended up with, a perfectly reasonable but slightly boring research poster. Now, what I can do to make sure that this is useful for me, now, in its current state, I could go into something like Photopea, and I could use content aware to remove some of the text, but really, that's not really useful at the moment. I think the best way of using this at the moment is to extract the colors and use your favorite design app, whether it's PowerPoint, whether or not it's Canva, whether or not it's Photoshop, whatever it is, but it's about using this as inspiration for your work and your poster. So there's a couple of ways that we can do this. I headed over to html-color.codes, and what you can do is drag and drop an image in, and then you can just select the colors, and you can see that the colors turn up here, which is fantastic if you're like me and have no idea about design and colors. You can get the colors, and this becomes now your design palette, which is really, really simple and easy to use. Now, the thing is is that if we head back to the Discord chat for mid-journey, I asked it here to produce some other ones for me, and so this is pretty bad, I think. It's very cluttered. There's lots going on. Maybe this one is the best one. So let me just show you very quickly how you can go through that entire process. So if we head over to chat GPT, and we say create a prompt for an AI to create a science research poster with limited colors, let's see what happens there. Here we're just going to get a nice little prompt. No more than three to four colors. Okay, good. So it should include blah, blah, blah, all of that, optimize the use of these limited colors along with the appropriate fonts, graphics, and white space to create a visually appealing, ooh, I like that. So we're going to grab all of that, and we're going to go over to mid-journey, and you type in forward slash imagine, which is a prompt, and then you put in your prompt, and then like all AI tools, it's a case of waiting. Okay, when it first pops up, you'll get this, and slowly it will kind of like render the four images, the four options that you've got. And to be honest, I've not had an issue when using chat GPT to create a prompt for a science poster. When I was trying to do it on my own, I think I was just overthinking it. But here we can see, all right, what's it done? It's done not too bad of a job, too crazy, a little bit crazy. Okay, maybe this fourth one is the best one for us at the moment. It's got obvious areas that we can sort of like put data. It's got headings. So maybe this is the best one. But once again, you can just sort of like try different prompts until you find ones that you like. And also I can say, okay, well, I like this fourth one. Give me variations on that fourth one. So I click V4, and now I kind of start, yeah, just generating those styles very similar to that and heading down sort of the direction that I want this to take. Oh, it never looks good when it first pops up, by the way. I always get a little bit scared. But ultimately, once it's all done, we can click open and then just make a decision on which ones we like. Okay, so I kind of like this fourth one. I like that here we could put away, put like an image or some like takeaway key messages. Here is where we can have the data. And so overall, it's done a pretty good job. But overall, okay, I like version, what's that, three. So I'm going to upscale and that's the U. I'm going to upscale image three and then we're going to put it into the color code finder thing. All I have to do here is go to open in browser. Then it kicks out this massive image and then I can just go here and say save image as and then I'm going to save it at my desktop. And then all I have to do is go over to this color codes from images. That's html-color.codes and I just need to sort of like put in my poster design. So let's put that in there and it will say, well, here's some common colors and this is probably a good palette to start with. But if you wanted specific ones, you could go and just click. Okay, I want this one. I want this one. I want this one and I like this blue and I like the dark blue. Okay, and there's your limited sort of color palette. You want to stick to sort of like, you know, three to five colors but that's about it. Now that's really good. It's giving you design things but Mid Journey does so much better. Just watch this. Posters need to be visually attractive and that will draw people to your poster as they're wobbling around drunk in the conference poster session. So I like to look and put in, you know, research posters into Google and look, this one clearly is very visually appealing. Now I know who made this. This is from Animate Your Science, Tulio Rossi and I really like that he's got this massive image here. It really draws you to the poster. So we can now use Mid Journey to create an awesome image for our research poster. So let's have a look at the showcase and see what styles we've got. I want something a little bit just simple, nothing too cartoony, maybe a bit blocky. So how about something, no, what do I like? Come on Stakes, make a decision. There's so many good things. So let's go here. I want this style and I can see the prompt here and it's in the style of Emiliano Ponzi. Okay, so I'm going to take that and I'm going to say, let's say I want solar cells. So I'm going to go imagine give me a solar cell in the style of Emiliano Ponzi in blue and yellow illuminated by the sun. Okay, some spelling mistakes, but we got there. All right, it's actually done a bloody great job. So I can see myself using this one as a really nice feature image. Maybe not this one, not this one. So let's have a look at more variations of number one. And the great thing is you can do this with all sorts of different styles. You can do it with an artist that you really like. You can do it with a style that you found. All right, so here are the different ones it's kicked out. And as you can see, they're all pretty similar and then it's up to me to choose the best one that I want to include on my poster as the feature image. Now, the thing is, is that you are only limited by your imagination for this and I can see AI becoming a very important tool, not only in terms of helping scientists find literature and write stuff, but also in designing really captivating, attention-grabbing posters. You can even put this into PowerPoint presentations. You can even ask Midjourney to create a simple PowerPoint presentation template for you using the similar process of getting chat GPT to do a prompt and then putting it into Midjourney. The combinations and the ability to sort of like design is just got so much easier and I think you should start using this in your workflow when you are creating posters, when you're creating presentations, anything that needs to be visually appealing while you're presenting your research. Use this. So that's how you can use AI to help you communicate your science and produce research posters, produce PowerPoint templates and importantly, produce that one real important eye-grabbing image that you can put on your poster and it's just got easier. Now, Midjourney has got a free sort of like version but I paid to get more access to their program and their AI. So there is a free one that you can use and once you pass that limit, you do need to pay but completely worth it and for a lot of you to be honest, I think the free version is all you'll really need. So go check it out and let me know what you create in the comments below. 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