Howard Saunders | 22and5.com

AI UPDATE

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!

Hedra (Character 3)

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.

Ideogram 2

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.

Kling

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.

Fish Audio

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

theretailfuturist.com

@retailfuturist

Howard Saunders Mar 17, 2025 AI, Future, technology, Uncategorized Comments Off Read More

ESCAPE FROM PROGRESSIVILLE

I had a terrible nightmare last night.

I dreamt I was living in a strange dystopian city called Progressiville where thousands of innocent children were having their genitals surgically removed and old ladies were imprisoned for timeworn tweets while gang rapists were freed to make room for TV licence dodgers. It was weird. Everyone had their own nonsensical pronoun and a global HR department, high on a new kind of McCarthyism, ruled the world. The city centre was overrun with blue haired non-binaries daubing businesses with orange paint, toppling statues and throwing soup at works of art. The streets were lined with tents for drug addled zombies bent double in hallucinogenic stupors while menacing youths waved giant machetes amid the haze of dope that permeated the air. Suddenly, a howling gang of looters burst from a moribund department store, arms full of Nike sneakers only to make their getaway past a row of multicoloured ‘Be Kind’ posters pasted over old advertisements. The city was completely lawless as the police had been defunded and were only permitted to observe the chaos as they drove past impotently in their garish rainbow liveries. I ran indoors to escape the madness but every TV programme warned me of some impending doom I was partly responsible for, or berated me for being overly privileged. I switched to the Disney channel in the hope of some family-friendly entertainment but all I could find was Ms Marvel a film about a Muslim teen superhero or She-Hulk: the adventures of a bright green man-bashing lawyer.

You guessed it. I awoke I in a sweat only to realise it was in fact all reality, if a somewhat cartoon version.

French miserabilists, Foucault and Derrida, must be looking down on us, smiling knowingly. The virus they unleashed upon us, catalysed by university academics with gargantuan shoulder chips, has infected the West to the point that phrases such as ‘cultural appropriation’ ‘diversity is our strength’ ‘systemic racism’ ‘toxic masculinity’ ‘my truth’ and ‘cancel culture’ have slipped neatly into our daily lexicon. We know how we got here: In short, the rich West tormented with guilt and privilege has embraced every stupid idea that promised to punish it a little in some vain attempt to level the playing field. A kind of reset I suppose.

Well, tides turn and like some divine intervention things are shifting much faster and more graphically than I could ever have predicted. A year ago, if I’d suggested that Mark Zuckerberg would be sacking his DEI department and replacing Nick Clegg with UFC CEO Dana White you’d have thought I’d lost my mind. That’s like a remake of Bambi with King Kong as the lead part ffs. His Joe Rogan podcast was nothing short of a religious confessional and is deeply significant. Sporting a gold medallion and 70s perm, Zuck chatted enthusiastically about martial arts and how masculine aggression and energy is a good thing for business. A damascene conversion if ever there was one. And there’s certainly lots of evidence that points to testosterone levels being directly linked to entrepreneurship in both men and women. Yes folks, testosterone has had a rough time of it lately but, like perms and medallions, it seems to be coming back into fashion.

In the last few weeks alone we’ve witnessed super-activist AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) dropping pronouns from her bio, and a multitude of mega-corporations including Google, Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s, Ford, John Deere, Harley Davidson, Jack Daniel’s, Molson Coors, Lowe’s and Toyota backing away from, or at least loosening, their DEI policies. Trudeau has resigned, Pope Francis had the epiphany that much of the news we rely on is fake and dare I mention that the very breeding ground of much of this woke culture is currently battling fires of Biblical proportions. You couldn’t make it up.

Meanwhile, here in cowering Britain our awakening won’t arrive for another four or five years, but arrive it will.

Over the last decade I’ve noticed how the companies I work with have changed. In meetings and brainstorms I can sense that people are scared to speak out, challenge ideas or simply tell the truth. Primed to take offence at every opportunity they appear visibly terrified of suggesting something that might not be ‘inclusive’. It’s as if our businesses are inadvertently mirroring the technocratic model of government: sticking firmly to the narrative and ignoring or censuring contrarian ideas. Our entrepreneurial sprit has become diminished amid of fog of pessimism and a storm of acronyms (ESG, DEI, CRT). Moral relativism and identity politics have pushed us to the brink.

So when you read that Starmer is contemplating turning pub landlords into Maoist informants don’t get too upset. See it as the swan song of tyranny: the last vestiges of a technocratic authoritarianism that failed us. As it always does. The backlash is sure to be beautiful.

Let’s hope that in 2025, like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, this soul destroying, business despising culture war comes to an end and we finally get to escape from Progressiville.

Happy new year!