Visualising the 1800s or designing wedding invitations: 6 ways you can use AI beyond generating text

• Many people are now using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to get advice, find information or summarise longer passages of text.
• But our recent research demonstrates how generative AI can be used for much more than this, returning results in different formats.
• On the one hand, AI tools are neutral – they can be used for good or ill depending on one’s intent.

1. Imagining what lies beyond the frame

• Adobe’s recently developed “generative expand” tool allows users to expand the canvas of their photos and have Photoshop “imagine” what is happening beyond the frame.
• You might do this when trying to edit a square Instagram photo to fit a 4x6 inch photo frame.

2. Visualising the past or the future

• Photography was only invented within the past 200 years, and camera-equipped smartphones within the last 25.
• That leaves us with plenty of things that existed before cameras were common, yet we might want to visualise them.
• NASA currently works with artists to illustrate concepts we can’t see, but artists could also draw on AI to help create these renderings.

3. Brainstorming how to visualise difficult concepts

• As one of the deepest places on Earth, few people have ever seen it firsthand.
• Or creating a layered illustration that shows the flora and fauna that live at each of the ocean’s five zones above the trench.

4. Visualising data

• For example, you might upload a spreadsheet to ChatGPT 4 and ask it to visualise the results.
• Or, if the data is already publicly available (such as Earth’s population over time), you might ask a chatbot to visualise it without even having to supply a spreadsheet.

5. Creating simple moving images

You can create a simple yet effective animation by uploading a photo to an AI tool like Runway and giving it an animation command, such as zooming in, zooming out or tracking from left to right. That’s what I’ve done with this historical photo preserved by the State Library of Western Australia.

• I used this description to create the following video:
  Tracking shot from left to right of the snowy mountains of Nagano, Japan.
• Tracking shot from left to right of the snowy mountains of Nagano, Japan.

6. Generating a colour palette or simple graphics

• In these cases, having a consistent colour palette can help unify your design.
• You can ask generative AI services like Midjourney or Gemini to create a colour palette for you based on the event or its vibe.
• This is true for both browser-based generators like Adobe Firefly, as well as desktop apps with built-in AI, like Adobe Illustrator.

T.J. Thomson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is an affiliate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.