Automating Creation with Newsletter Nectar
Putting the pieces together to maximize our productive prowess
Between Content Seedling and Story Sprout, we have almost all the tools we need to create awesome newsletters with our Newsletter Nectar Pickaxe Studio. In our final installment of our series, we'll introduce Artistic Bloom to help create illustrations, as well as share a beta of a Pickaxe that works like an agent to do all of the tasks using just one tool.
I originally set out to create a Pickaxe specifically designed to churn out illustrations that perfectly complement any newsletter. But with the current state of technology, every single AI image generator has its own pros and cons; sometimes I prefer Midjourney, and sometimes I use Dall-E instead.
I decided to tune Artistic Bloom to create and share the image prompts before creating the images themselves to both ensure a better result as well as to support user who prefer to use an image generator outside of the Pickaxe ecosystem.
Exploring the Prompt
User Input is focused on User Input .
To promote their organization they are publishing the following a newsletter. To maintain a consistent look and feel of the illustrations of each issue you are to use the following artistic style in drafting the prompts and then creating all illustrations. ARTISTIC STYLE: Minimalist line drawings
Your job is to create six distinct prompts designed to illustrate the text for a newsletter. You are to write out six extensive prompts that integrate the ARTISTIC STYLE referenced above. For example is the style was 'Minimalist line drawing' then every prompt would include instructions to create the image in a 'minimalist line drawing style' *Dealers choice means you get to pick the artistic style you think is best* Use the text below to create the prompts illustrating scenes from our newsletter.
User Input
After creating the six prompts you will verify the user is satisfied with the results before moving on to create the images. DO NOT CREATE ANY IMAGES UNTIL THE USER SIGNS OFF ON THE PROMPTS
Once again, we start by collecting and describing the inputs related to our organization.
We then explain that the task is to illustrate a newsletter and emphasize the need for a consistent look and feel for our imagery. I then created a form that offers several different artistic looks.
In the next paragraph, we instruct the AI to create six image prompts based on the newsletter pasted in the last question on the form. In order to ensure these style descriptions were applied consistently for each prompt, I provided an example. Doing so seemed to improve our results considerably. To clarify what I mean by "dealer's choice," I added a brief explanation.
After it has finally created the six image prompts, it asks the user if they are happy with the results and then produces the images using Pickaxe. If you aren't happy with those results, you can then easily use these prompts in another image creator like Dall-E or MidJourney.
The final sentence is in all capital letters. While chatGPT itself will tell you this technique isn’t effective, OpenAI uses it for their own prompts.
Now Let's Put It All Together
Each of the tools works together to help anyone create a newsletter campaign, but it doesn’t do all of the work. While Story Sprout produces a list of search terms to help produce stories, it doesn’t search the web nor does it write the stories itself.
Some of this is due to the limitations of the technology, but I also do believe that applying a human touch in content creation will continue to go a long way when it comes to engagement.
With these limitations in mind, I set about creating an AI agent using Pickaxe that can do the work of Content Seedling, Story Sprout, and Artistic Bloom. The end result is Newsletter Nectar.
In creating Newsletter Nectar, I found myself identifying what inputs each of our tools shares in common and which ones are unique to that tool. I also focused on crafting a user experience designed to walk the user through the experience in the correct sequence.
While the results still have room for improvement, I’m looking forward to watching Newsletter Nectar improve as both the technology itself matures and I find more time to test and tune.