Creativity AI #11: Weekly Insights on Creativity and Productivity
Midjourney Office Hours (2025-03-12), Perplexity updated model selection settings, Runway + Midjourney Retexture, Niji personalization, Duck.ai, Manus
Creativity AI is a new publication that brings together interesting articles and recent developments in the AI world related to creativity and productivity.
Midjourney Office Hours (2025-03-12)
More or less the same as last week, except for the following:
Midjourney V7 could be released within the next two weeks.
The video model could be released within the next two months.
Developers are working on a 4K Upscaler (about 10 times faster than the current speed), which could be released after the V7 launch.
There may be a separate aesthetic update following the V7 release.
Perplexity
Perplexity has updated its model selection settings, making it easier for users to choose an AI model with or without reasoning before searching. In addition, Perplexity now offers Claude 3.7 with reasoning (extended thinking model). Previously, only the Normal (no reasoning) mode was available.
Why does this matter?
With this update, Perplexity becomes an excellent platform for using various reasoning models. At the time of this writing, only the DeepSeek R1 model is available. But I'm not surprised that R2 will be added soon.
Runway + Midjourney Retexture
Runway introduced a video-to-video restyling based on the first frame. That means you can style your video using a specific aesthetic. You can also style several video clips using the same aesthetic for branding and consistent storytelling purposes,
Read the full announcement here. You can also watch the Runway academy video here.
How does this work?
Upload a video to the video generation session.
Download the first frame image from the video.
Edit the downloaded image. I use Midjourney Retexture because it only affects the surface or texture of the elements.
Upload the retextured image to Runway and select "Generate". (I use the same Runway prompt that generated the original video).
Here are some examples:
The original video was generated using Runway. (no audio for video styling demo purposes)
Retexture result 1: The image appears greener and "fresher"
Retexture result 2: Change the protective suit to Red.
Why does this matter?
Runway video styling and Midjourney Retexture are an effective combination for styling videos and changing the details of the elements in them. By incorporating Midjourney's aesthetic styles into Runway videos, video and content creators can explore a wide range of creative possibilities.
ElevenLabs
You can now control the speed (voice pacing) down to the word level, giving you more control over the expressiveness of your dialogue in Studio, Text-to-Speech, Conversational AI, and the API. The speed feature was initially announced for testing on February 22nd, and it has now been officially announced.
Additional feature updates for its AI voice design include loudness control (to ensure that the generated voices have the same volume), quality settings (always set to higher quality, but lower quality may produce interesting results), guidance scale (adjust how closely the bot should follow your input), and seed option (to regenerate the same voice).
Niji
Niji has released multiple personalization profiles. It is faster (it only needs to rank 40 images rather than 200) and allows users to save multiple personal styles. It advises users to skip images so that they don’t influence the profile after the rating. Access it here: https://nijijourney.com/personalize
Duck.ai
Duck.ai by Duckduckgo is a free chatbot that allows you to use multiple AI models (five at the time of writing). It feels like a Perplexity clone but without the premium models (Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.5) and other features (Spaces, multiple export options). However, it is free and allows you to play with model not available on Perplexity, such as Mistral Small 3.
Manus
Manus is an autonomous AI agent that works independently to complete a variety of tasks, including screening through a large number of resumes and preparing a report, analysing data and creating an interactive website, and many more. It is still in private beta and needs an application for access (not yet publicly available for testing). Watch a video about its features:
Inspiration
Inspired by the trending term "Salvador Dali aesthetic," featuring beautiful flowers, a levitating centerpiece, and inspiration from Salvador artworks, I use Midjourney to brainstorm design concepts for my next dinner party, dubbed "surreal soirées".
Salvador Dalà is a renowned Surrealist artist known for his vivid, dreamlike imagery and use of symbolism, often incorporating elements of other styles such as Realism and Cubism. His artistic style includes bizarre creatures, melting objects, and optical illusions, creating a surreal effect that challenges the viewer's perception of reality.
Here are a few of my creations:
The designs are nice, but there's a problem: I don't have all that fancy tableware, and it needs to be budget-friendly. So I'll probably stick with a simpler version. (Can’t just go and buy a new table for a dinner party, right?).
Maybe something like a cross between these two. What do you think?
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