Creativity AI #12: Weekly updates on creativity and productivity

Midjourney Office Hours (2025-03-19), Perplexity Windows app, Another way to think about wealth, How do animals sound in different languages

Mar 19, 2025

Available for iOS and Android

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 (2025-03-19)

Optimistically, Midjourney V7 could be released next week. There are still image quality issues for the developers to address.

What to expect in V7:

It is a “chunky” version with some weirdness sprinkled throughout (for example, the text is weird in some ways. Text is not the main focus of this release).
Omni-reference works well.
Good prompt adherence and understanding.
Faster image generation.
Much better at not generating nudity.
V7 attempts to change many things at once, and the features are heavily interdependent. The upcoming release will not include all of the features — for example, larger batches.

Midjourney would like to know your preferences for its upcoming video feature in terms of quality and cost. Fill out the survey here: https://midjourney.typeform.com/to/FMT23xWj

The developers are also working on new storytelling features, such as a tool to create comics.

The 3D feature will come after V7 and video updates. The 3D feature allows you to reframe an image and explore the world within it.

Perplexity

Perplexity now has a Windows app that allows you to access its features from Windows, much like the web version. There is no major change. Except, perhaps, there are keyboard shortcuts where you could change some of them.

The Windows app allows you to access keyboard shortcuts.

Perplexity also launched a new advertisement poking fun at "Poogle" :-)

Why does this matter?

If you are familiar with the web browser Perplexity, the standalone Windows app is entirely optional. It is possible that Perplexity will add more features to the app in the future, but it currently does not offer significantly more features than the web and mobile versions.

Another way to think about wealth

A sophisticated young man seated in a lavish study, a wall of ornate clocks behind him, each showing a different time zone, evoking a sense of control over time --ar 16:9 --sref 2844694732 --v 6.1

Lifehacker published an article that challenged the way I thought about wealth. Typically, a wealthy individual is thought to have a lot of money, but having more time is what defines a wealthy person.

Financial decisions are really decisions about using your time—Jeff Somers.

Nobody can create more time, no matter how wealthy or powerful they are. It is a valuable, finite, and unforgiving resource that, once depleted, cannot be replenished.

Time affluence is the feeling of having enough time to complete all of your goals, which leads to happiness and personal satisfaction.

On the other hand, studies have shown that time poverty has a negative impact on both mental and physical health. The common misconception is that all you need to do to gain more time is increase your income. However, if all you do is sell your time for money, your bank account will grow, but you will still be in time poverty.

The trick is to think about how you spend your time rather than just how you spend your money.

The article also outlined four ways to be time affluent:

(1) Organize and prioritize. Time is limited, so stop treating it as an infinite resource. Invest in and use time management techniques such as time blocking and prioritization to complete the most important tasks first, saving yourself from worry and stress.

(2) Delegate. Paying someone else to clean the house for you (if you have the money) or relying on your team to handle specific tasks. You do not need to do everything by yourself.

(3) Automate. Automate bill payments and use AI to schedule and execute tasks. Reduce manual and low-value tasks.

(4) Focus solely on one task. Multitasking does not always increase productivity. Identify the tasks that require your full attention and avoid distractions.

How do animals sound in different languages?

Enjoy a fascinating journey through how people perceive and encode simple animal sounds in their language. And why the cat's "meow" is the universal sound of many cultures.

Link to the journey: here

Screenshot from the Onomatopoeia Odyssey by the Pudding.

Other news

Google has made the following Gemini features freely available to the public: Gems (similar to custom GPTs but cannot be shared), Deep Research, and the Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking (Experimental) model (reasoning model).
- The free Deep Research is a big deal. I'm impressed by its ability to extract difficult-to-find information from a variety of sources and languages and generate a well-organized report.
The Chinese court ruled in favor of copyright protection for AI-generated images. The court ordered the defendants to issue a public apology and pay USD 1,380 to the creator for using the image without permission. The creator used Midjourney to create that image that depicts a heart-shaped balloon.

Inspiration

Inspired by Utagawa Hiroshige's beautiful Japanese woodblock prints, I created a Midjourney moodboard that generated the images below. You can use my moodboard code (--profile j4fpm39) to generate images with similar aesthetics.

Have fun!