You’ve no doubt been reading in the news in recent months or hearing other people get swept up in the excitement over AI and what it can do.
What is AI?
AI stands for artificial intelligence and has been the feature of many science-fiction books and film. More often than not, ending not so well for humans as AI becomes sentient, gets too powerful and takes over the world. The AI we’re seeing at the moment is not that powerful and is not designed for that so don’t worry.
In reality, there’s a lot of AI already in the world and you probably come into contact with some forms of AI every day, from the algorithms which power your Netflix recommendations to image identification on smartphone cameras like Google Lens (Android) and Visual Lookup (iPhone). But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
The AI we’re seeing popularised and talked about in the news at the moment are AI Chatbots. These fall into two main categories:
Text Based or Natural Language Processing - AI systems that you type requests in everyday language into (rather than computer commands), which process that information and return results in natural language.
Image Creation or Generative Models - which can create new images based on a text prompt, again, using natural language.
Both of these types of AI use ‘prompts’ to generate the content.
What is a Prompt?
A prompt is a piece of text that is given to an AI system to generate a response. Prompts can be used to ask questions, give instructions, or provide information. The AI will then use the prompt to generate a response that is relevant and informative. Prompts are important as changing the wording of your request will change the results that you get. The more specific you are, often the better results you will get.
Which AI is the best to use?
There are a few AI companies out there with different specialities and some of them are free, and some have paid for versions. We’re covering a couple of the big ones we’ve tried out here to give you an overview.
Text-based (Natural Language Processing)
Chat GPT – probably the most famous artificial intelligence at the moment from OpenAI, who have been in the press a lot. ChatGPT is good at having natural-sounding conversations with users on a variety of topics; it can explain difficult topics in simpler terms, generate creative text from poems to emails and it learns and remembers previous information you’ve told it in conversation.
Bard – Google’s experimental AI which can generate text, proofread, translate languages, summarise information, answer questions by accessing information through Google Search and even write jokes (they’re very bad though).
Image Creation (Generative Models)
DALL-E 2 – from the same people behind ChatGPT, this image generation AI can create realistic and creative images from text descriptions. From our experimenting it’s not always accurate with the prompt you put in, and in order to get what you’re after you do have to be quite specific, so keep that in mind. The drawback with the free version of this tool is that you’re only allowed 10 requests per month, though you can pay to have more. On the free version, because it’s popular, it’s also sometimes hard to get access to as so many people are accessing it at the same time.
Midjourney - known for its ability to generate very high-quality images. This looks to be one to look out for in the future. The drawback of this at the moment is that it’s still being tested; lots of people have been trailing using it even though it's not been officially launched to the public yet, but look out for it in the future.
How can AI help you in floristry ?
Okay, so now we’ve covered a bit about what it is, let’s talk about how can it help you in your business. We’ve thought of a few examples for prompts you can give AI to get it to help you.
