Can’t-miss news from your favorite AIs 📣

Hey AI Puppies,

If you think you’ve learned everything you need to know about this whole AI thing…

… think again 😅

Don’t get us wrong – we’re sure you’re mastering these tools at record speed, but when we say it’s evolving by the day, we mean it. 

In just one week…

⚡ Midjourney launched version 5.2 and ChatGPT surpassed 400 plugins ⚡

But if anyone can adapt to the changes, it’s the ever-eager, endlessly enthusiastic AI puppy. In this community, we know to…

🐶 Never get too comfortable

🐶 Always keep our ears perked

🐶 Love the thrill of sniffing out the next big thing

Ready to play some major AI catch-up? Here’s what’s new, why it matters, and how to use the changes to your advantage.

Let’s get into it 🎾

Meet Midjourney, Again

If you (like us) were already blown away by the previous Midjourney, you’re about to be swept off your feet yet again.

While the core concept of the AI remains the same, the latest version removes a lot of the barriers that may have held you back previously – even if you didn’t even realize there was a barrier to begin with.

Of the many updates, highlights include:

🖌️ High Variation Mode: you’ll now notice Vary(Strong) and Vary(Subtle) when you receive your initial 4 images. With these new buttons, you can control for a wider swath of image variations. If you didn’t like how repetitive your images were before, you’ll love this one!

🖌️ Zoom Out: All upscales will now be sent your way along with with a ‘zoom out’ button. You can decide how far to pull the camera out (1.5x or 2x, for example) to see new details and context. You can also do so while making the image a perfect square with Make Square.

🖌️ Panning: similar to Zoom Out, you can now fill in the rest of the image to the left or right to create a panoramic effect. Useful for banners or horizontal illustrations!

Here’s that image of a puppy playing in homework again, this time enhanced by the Zoom Out feature:

Oh, and according to the folks at Midjourney, everything created by 5.2 will also have sharper clarity and improved aesthetics, as well as improved prompt understanding.

Whether or not you tinker with the new features, your Midjourney artwork is about to soar to new heights 🚀

Two of ChatGPT’s Strongest (and Newest) Plugins

If you still don’t understand the ChatGPT hype, perhaps a plugin rundown will do the trick.

As a refresher….

🔌 A ChatGPT plugin is a tool that you can elect to add to your personal ChatGPT message field. 

🔌 Each plugin is powered by OpenAI technology, but can be created and posted by people outside of OpenAI.

🔌 By choosing to add a plugin, you grant your ChatGPT conversation permission to integrate it into its responses.

… if you’re still confused, think of a ChatGPT plugin as a smartphone app, and your ChatGPT convo as your smartphone. Of the many apps out there, you get to choose the ones you download you use on a daily basis. And like the early days of the app store, the number of available plugins goes up by the day.

Let’s take a look at two we can’t get enough of – if your job or hobby involves a lot of research, you’ll want to keep reading 👀

First up, Scraper.

The Scraper plugin is simple to use, but performs a very advanced function: it analyzes entire websites in seconds, then regurgitates the info back to you in whatever format you’d like.

After loading Scraper into our ChatGPT toolbox, we typed out this question, then made sure to highlight the box with the Scraper logo before hitting send:

We needed a bit more info, so we regenerated to make this:

Puppies, we say this every week, but this time we really mean it: this is a big deal.

With Scraper in ChatGPT, you can:

✅ Analyze your competitor’s website in seconds by downloading their site into an Excel sheet

✅ Turn Wikipedia pages into bite-sized, information-filled tables

✅ Pull out links from otherwise time-consuming websites to navigate

Now, perhaps your web surfing tends to include more videos. Settling into a long YouTube video can be fun, but if you’re in a rush, scrubbing through content for easy-to-miss details is a headache.

Want to cut down your watch time into … seconds? Or not watching at all?

Meet our second plugin of the day: Video Insights.

This plugin performs the same task as Scraper, but for video content.

For example, we found ourselves using it while going down a Midjourney rabbit hole.

We wanted to take notes on this video from Making The Photo about prompts and art styles, but didn’t want to miss her very specific list.

So, after downloading Video Insights and highlighting it in the ChatGPT message field, we tried ‘please give me the different art styles in a table from this video’ and got:

We’ll admit that we’re more visual learners, so we regenerated like this:

Even though we watched her whole video, this helped us keep track of her exact recommendations. While we might have only watched this video and remembered a point or two before this plugin, now, we can actually put her tips to use quickly and easily.

Again, we’re not talking replacement here, puppies – we’re talking enhancement.

Your Next Assignment

We love these plugins because their value is clear for a variety of roles: marketers, data analysts, salespeople, teachers, hobbyists, writers, and just about anyone who spends time on the internet can spend less time researching, and more time learning, doing, and growing.

So, this week’s assignment is simple: paint and scrape!

Testing out Midjourney’s new features should be easy, so focus on choosing something useful to scrape with the new plugins.

If you’ve had your eye on a competitor’s website, try downloading their blogs into a table to strategize your next SEO push.

If you have a long YouTube video in your queue, try taking notes with Video Insights.

We’re just thinking out loud, but the possibilities are endless!

As usual, we want to know what you get up to – share your thoughts and experiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.

Until next time, Puppies! Keep enjoying your summers, and we’ll be back in your inbox next week with another round of AI tactics and insights.

Talk soon,

The AI Puppy