The most incredible creative tools are getting tetchy waiting for you. I’m talking about a jaw-dropping explosion of FREE AI creative tools that are rewriting the rules of art, design, and storytelling. Forget those creative blocks and endless hours sweating over storyboards or chewing your biro at boring ‘blue sky’ brainstorms. The world has moved on. Now, you really are the maestro, and AI is your orchestra waiting desperately for your input. Prepare to be utterly amazed at your own brilliance when you dive into the mind-bending possibilities of this creative revolution. It’s time to unleash the artist within us all!
Gemini 2 (Flash Thinking)
Google’s Gemini 2 just got a whole lot smarter as direct response to OpenAi’s 01. When you ask it a question, you’ll get more comprehensive and accurate responses. It can analyse visual content and provide useful insights as well as generating more creative and engaging stories, poems, and other forms of writing. Most importantly it’s what they call ‘more multimodal’. That means it’s getting better at understanding and working with different types of information, not just text.
Think of it like being able to understand pictures, videos, and audio, and then being able to connect that information to text. For example, it could analyse a picture and then write a detailed description of it, or understand a video and then answer questions about it. You can say ‘now try it with this etc’ and it knows to reference the last image. Impressive.
It’s fantastic for product shots or fashion photography without the need for, well…anything other than your imagination. All free too!
When I first used Hedra last summer it created what I thought were some pretty impressive lip-synced videos. I created a couple of characters which spoke the words I wrote (in a selection of accents) or spoke in time to my voice recording. This latest version can create much more realistic characters with movements and facial emotions that are more nuanced and, therefore, believable. The backgrounds are customisable too so you really can place your character anywhere, saying anything. Overall, Hedra Character 3 makes it much simpler to create high quality videos with engaging, lifelike characters and backgrounds.
The opportunities for marketing here are obvious. Please give it a try.
One of the best image text-to-image generators out there just got way better. Completely free, the images are crisp and precise. Use it to experiment with imagery and colour. It will create graphic icons, logos, ‘photographic’ images and in Canvas mode you can upload, remix, add text and edit images to your heart’s delight. Bye bye (expensive) Photoshop.
Now take a couple of those still images you created in Ideogram or Gemini and feed them into Kling’s image-to-video generator. Add the first frame, then the last and click to go. The movements are considerably more natural than they were six months ago. It also does lip-sync voices but you’ll have to subscribe to get the benefits of the full package. In the battle for video generation this one is right up there. Very, very impressive.
Perplexity v Google
Google’s search engine has lost the plot. Its answers are skewed and cluttered with so many ads and maps and sponsored responses it’s almost impossible to navigate. Perplexity is vastly more detailed and accurate in its responses…and without all the ads and the sponsored stuff, so it’s much more focussed, cleaner and easier to use. Download the app to your phone and make the switch. You won’t be disappointed.
This is the best voice tool I’ve found. It needs only ten seconds of your voice to clone it pretty damn accurately. And yes of course you can recreate the voices of Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and even Ronaldo for creating those cheeky memes. You can add expressions, pauses for breath as well as little mid-sentence giggles for added authenticity. Lots of fun for all the family!
Suno & Vinylify
For music there’s none better than Suno, now on version 4. If you’re serious about it you can build a song in stages describing the genre and the instruments you want to hear at each stage. This means you can have a lot of fun mixing genres and adding strange instruments into the mix. But the new version allows you to crop and paste in sections: a proper editing tool that’s really handy as it does tend to spit out some random stuff occasionally. It also has an inclination to turn every track into an anthemic epic if you’re not careful. Also, never ever let AI write your lyrics…not unless you want every track littered with lines like ‘shadows of the night’. I’ve actually created a few full albums this way and in a reverse quirk of technological delight have uploaded one to Vinylify to transfer to vinyl. You design the sleeve, the centre label, choose the vinyl colour and upload mp3 or WAV files. It takes a few weeks to turnaround so I’ll let you know how it looks, and sounds, later.
If you still need some inspiration check out Kelly Boesch’s work here: https://www.youtube.com/@kellyeld2323
She has produced some gorgeously weird and enchanting music videos all set to her Suno musical creations. She’ll get you going.
Howard Saunders is a writer, speaker and The Retail Futurist
howard@22and5.com
@retailfuturist
