Latest news with #MidJourney
Business Upturn
7 days ago
- Business
- Business Upturn
Voist Enterprises Announces New Milestone: 30,000 Students Enrolled in ‘Print on Demand with Etsy for Passive Income' Course
Detroit, MI, June 13, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — With nearly 30,000 students from over 180 countries and a stellar 4.7-star average rating, Patrick Gamaliel's Udemy course, Print on Demand with Etsy for Passive Income 2025 , continues to empower aspiring entrepreneurs to transform their creativity into profitable online businesses. From mugs to shirts, totes to posters—design it, sell it, profit! Designed for beginners and seasoned creators alike, this bestselling course provides a comprehensive guide to building an automated Etsy store using the innovative print-on-demand model. Students learn to harness the power of cutting-edge AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney to streamline the creation of visually captivating designs, all while mastering insider strategies for marketing, SEO, and scaling their stores for consistent passive income. 'The goal of this course is to make creating a passive income source both achievable and exciting for anyone with creative potential. Seeing students from around the globe succeed and grow makes this mission incredibly rewarding,' said Patrick Gamaliel, creator of the course and a highly experienced eCommerce entrepreneur. The course curriculum goes beyond foundational knowledge, offering practical tools and step-by-step instructions that simplify the path to success on Etsy's thriving platform. Students also gain access to exclusive downloads and ongoing updates, ensuring they stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market. Complementing the course is Patrick's Amazon bestseller, Artist to Entrepreneur: Turn Your Hobby Into a Six-Figure Business , a book inspired by his expertise and insights from teaching. This guidebook provides a deeper exploration of turning artistic talents into profitable ventures and is a must-read for those striving to scale their creative pursuits. Additionally, course participants can benefit from a wealth of free resources available at With downloadable infographics, cheat sheets, and mini-courses, the platform is a treasure trove of tools designed to support creatives at every stage of their entrepreneurial journeys. Aspiring entrepreneurs eager to start their path to passive income can join the growing community by enrolling in Print on Demand with Etsy for Passive Income 2025 today. For more details, visit the course page at Udemy or explore additional resources at About Voist Enterprises LLC Voist Enterprises LLC empowers artists worldwide to turn their craft into thriving businesses. With bestselling courses taken by over 54,000 students in 180+ countries, hit books on Amazon, and free resources at we equip creative entrepreneurs with the tools to succeed. Backed by a vibrant community of 100,000 Instagram followers and 50,000 YouTube subscribers, we're on a mission to make creativity profitable while fostering a fun, supportive, and inclusive space for all creators. Press inquiries Voist Enterprises LLC Patrick Gamaliel [email protected] (315) 503-1361
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Voist Enterprises Announces New Milestone: 30,000 Students Enrolled in 'Print on Demand with Etsy for Passive Income' Course
Detroit, MI, June 13, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With nearly 30,000 students from over 180 countries and a stellar 4.7-star average rating, Patrick Gamaliel's Udemy course, Print on Demand with Etsy for Passive Income 2025, continues to empower aspiring entrepreneurs to transform their creativity into profitable online mugs to shirts, totes to posters—design it, sell it, profit! Designed for beginners and seasoned creators alike, this bestselling course provides a comprehensive guide to building an automated Etsy store using the innovative print-on-demand model. Students learn to harness the power of cutting-edge AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney to streamline the creation of visually captivating designs, all while mastering insider strategies for marketing, SEO, and scaling their stores for consistent passive income. 'The goal of this course is to make creating a passive income source both achievable and exciting for anyone with creative potential. Seeing students from around the globe succeed and grow makes this mission incredibly rewarding,' said Patrick Gamaliel, creator of the course and a highly experienced eCommerce entrepreneur. The course curriculum goes beyond foundational knowledge, offering practical tools and step-by-step instructions that simplify the path to success on Etsy's thriving platform. Students also gain access to exclusive downloads and ongoing updates, ensuring they stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market. Complementing the course is Patrick's Amazon bestseller, Artist to Entrepreneur: Turn Your Hobby Into a Six-Figure Business, a book inspired by his expertise and insights from teaching. This guidebook provides a deeper exploration of turning artistic talents into profitable ventures and is a must-read for those striving to scale their creative pursuits. Additionally, course participants can benefit from a wealth of free resources available at With downloadable infographics, cheat sheets, and mini-courses, the platform is a treasure trove of tools designed to support creatives at every stage of their entrepreneurial journeys. Aspiring entrepreneurs eager to start their path to passive income can join the growing community by enrolling in Print on Demand with Etsy for Passive Income 2025 today. For more details, visit the course page at Udemy or explore additional resources at About Voist Enterprises LLC Voist Enterprises LLC empowers artists worldwide to turn their craft into thriving businesses. With bestselling courses taken by over 54,000 students in 180+ countries, hit books on Amazon, and free resources at we equip creative entrepreneurs with the tools to succeed. Backed by a vibrant community of 100,000 Instagram followers and 50,000 YouTube subscribers, we're on a mission to make creativity profitable while fostering a fun, supportive, and inclusive space for all creators. Press inquiries Voist Enterprises LLC Patrick Gamaliel Photog@ (315) 503-1361 A video accompanying this announcement is available at in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Scoop
10-06-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Marketing Agencies Urged To Pivot As Meta Moves Toward Fully Automated Advertising By 2026
With Meta announcing its ambition to fully automate advertising campaigns by 2026 using artificial intelligence, social media marketing agencies are quaking in their boots, and being urged to rethink their role in a fast-evolving digital landscape. According to a recent Reuters report, Meta is investing heavily in AI systems that will plan, purchase, and optimise ad campaigns with minimal human input, generating 30-40% better results at 10% of the cost, which could potentially wipe out much of the creative industry around social. The announcement signals a dramatic acceleration toward a future where media buying, and ad creative are machine-led. This shift is already being felt across the industry. AI tools like ChatGPT, Canva, and Meta's own Advantage+ are allowing small and mid-sized businesses to produce marketing content and run campaigns in-house, reducing their reliance on traditional agencies for execution. "Clients no longer need an agency to write every post, design every banner, or set up every ad campaign," said Rachel Alexander, founder of Alexanders, Christchurch's first digital marketing agency."They have Canva, ChatGPT, HeyGen, MidJourney & Meta automation. What they need now is someone to help them make sense of it all,' she said. Agencies that once focused on deliverables like social posts and Google Ads are now being challenged to step into a new role: strategic enablers (helping clients convert leads into customers). A recent YouTube vlog 'Meta just killed the creative industry: The 2026 Automation Apocalypse' by Julia McCoy, CEO at First Movers & AI thought leader, describes this well. 'Agencies must pivot from being tactical executors to strategic advisors, bringing clarity, structure, and prioritisation to an increasingly overwhelming landscape,' said McCoy. 'Business marketers need to think of their agency as a marketing generalist doctor: diagnosing weak points, recommending tailored treatments, and coaching internal teams through implementation,' said Alexander. With many SMEs building internal marketing teams and experimenting with DIY tools, the opportunity for agencies lies in offering higher-value services such as sales enablement, CRM integration, AI content workflows, and conversion strategy. 'It's less about deliverables, more about direction. Less about content calendars, more about conversion journeys…The marketing agency of the future is less like a factory and more like a consultancy,' said McCoy. Alexander said she is mindful, but not anxious, because we've always been a hybrid between a marketing consultancy and marketing agency. For New Zealand agencies looking to adapt, this means embracing AI, not competing with it and reasserting their value as interpreters, integrators, and insight-driven advisors. 'AI has been disruptive technology but being agile is the key to success. It's helped us survive for 28 years. Time to pivot again!," said Alexander.
Arab News
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
A new artistic epoch or the collapse of meaning?
Some revolutions begin with a manifesto. Ours began with a shark in sneakers, a gorilla made of bananas, and a bomber jacket-clad crocodile. No, not a metaphor. Not a symbol. Just a digitally generated image of a shark wearing crisp blue Nikes, jogging through a neon jungle with a caption that read: 'Monday is a concept, Kevin.' Not a painting, not a sculpture, but a digitally rendered, golden-hued banana gorilla — smiling, no less — circulating wildly on social media. One minute, you are scrolling past wedding photos and baby updates; the next, you are face to face with a crocodile in a bomber jacket sipping tea at a Parisian cafe. Welcome to the new Renaissance, apparently. Only this time, the artists have silicon brains, limitless imaginations, and no regard for the difference between Salvador Dali and a children's cereal ad. The rise of AI-generated images has become the latest absurdity in our ongoing tango with ethical reason. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new artistic epoch — or the collapse of meaning as we know it? Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: 'If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.' One wonders what Wittgenstein would say about a lion generated by MidJourney, wearing glasses and riding a unicycle through Times Square while quoting Plato. Is this communication, parody, prophecy — or simply pixels gone wild? Let us not pretend we have not seen this before. The memeification of art has been underway for some time, from deepfakes to NFT apes. But this new wave, this deluge of digitally conjured, hyper-real absurdity, invites more than idle chuckles. It raises deeply confusing and slightly horrifying ethical questions. Who owns an image that no human created? Who is responsible for its message — or its misunderstanding? And just like that, the age of AI image-generation brain rot was born. This term, now lovingly and ironically adopted by digital natives and reluctantly Googled by digital immigrants — describes the mental state induced by consuming endless streams of surreal, absurd, contextless AI-generated content. You know the kind: a goose in a business suit negotiating peace between planets; a Victorian child made of waffles; a platypus holding a sign that says: 'Capitalism is soup and I am a fork.' And yet we keep scrolling. We are enchanted. Philosopher Theodor Adorno once said: 'Art is the social antithesis of society.' In Techville, AI generated imagery is the social antithesis of logic. It is the philosophical equivalent of an espresso martini at 4 a.m. — confusing, unwise, but oddly invigorating. Let us take a moment to consider the rise of AI-generated nonsense. These are not merely strange pictures. They are surreal flashes of algorithmic creativity, trained on the deepest layers of the internet's subconscious. And they come with short, cryptic phrases like: 'Let the ducks speak.' 'Reality is just poorly rendered soup.' 'He who controls the cheese, controls the skies.' Somewhere, Franz Kafka is either applauding or suing. A generation raised on surreal, algorithmic absurdity risks losing its appetite for clarity, coherence, or even causality. Rafael Hernandez de Santiago We are not just talking about art. We are talking about a cultural shift — where traditional storytelling collapses under the weight of its own earnestness and is replaced by AI-generated absurdity that says nothing and yet, somehow, feels like it says everything. But what does this mean ethically? Who is responsible when an image of a bishop made entirely of spaghetti holding a flamingo whispering 'Free me, Deborah' goes viral and is mistaken for a political statement? And more urgently: if the shark in sneakers gets invited to the Venice Biennale before any human artist from an emerging country, what does that say about the role of merit, meaning, and memory in the digital age? Let us not pretend we are above it. Even the most hardened ethicist has giggled at the image of a courtroom filled with sentient toasters. There is something irresistibly clever about the stupidity of it all. But cleverness is not meaning. And meaning, in this age, is in short supply. Wittgenstein warned: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' But in the AI era, silence is drowned out by a relentless stream of images of owls wearing Beats headphones, standing on Mars, yelling: 'I miss the smell of Tuesdays.' One might ask: is this art? Or is it something else entirely — a kind of digital dreaming, outsourced to machines, shared by humans, and celebrated not for depth but for derangement? The concern is not the images themselves. It is the passivity they invite. A generation raised on surreal, algorithmic absurdity risks losing its appetite for clarity, coherence, or even causality. Why analyze the 'Iliad' when you can generate an image of Achilles as a grumpy cat in a trench coat yelling at a holographic Helen? And yet — ironically, tragically, wonderfully — some of these AI creations do resonate. Like dreams or parables, they bypass logic and tap into something weirder and older: our deep love of surprise, of nonsense, of fractured truth. Kierkegaard, of all people, might understand. He once wrote: 'The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.' Maybe that is what the AI duck in a spaceship is trying to tell us. But we must not look away. Because behind every absurd AI image is a real question: who shapes our imagination? Who owns our attention? And what happens to a society that forgets how to ask why, as long as it keeps saying 'wow'? It is tempting to laugh and move on. To repost the image of a minotaur doing taxes under a disco ball with the caption: 'He files, therefore he is.' But we are in dangerous waters. Or worse, dangerous milk. Because the cow now has laser eyes and speaks French. And it is trending. In conclusion, though in this genre, conclusions are entirely optional, the AI brain-rot phenomenon is not just a meme. It is a mirror. A funhouse mirror, yes, one cracked and sprayed with digital nonsense, but a mirror nonetheless. We must reflect, not only on the images but on ourselves. Why do we laugh at a shark in sneakers? Why does it stay with us? Why does it feel truer than the news? Maybe that is the real concern. That meaning has been replaced by mood. That critique has been swallowed by consumption. That we are all just raccoons in suits, holding signs that read: 'Context is cancelled.' • Rafael Hernandez de Santiago, viscount of Espes, is a Spanish national residing in Saudi Arabia and working at the Gulf Research Center.
Mint
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Can AI replace children's book illustrators?
In the late 1990s, when Sudeshna Shome Ghosh was working with Puffin, the children's imprint of Penguin Books India (now Penguin Random House India), she had an opportunity to publish one of the most exciting books of her career. 'The Puffin Book of Magical Indian Myths (2000) by Anita Nair was a big book for us—one of the first of its kind to retell Indian mythology for young readers," says the editor and writer. She commissioned Atanu Roy, one of India's finest illustrators and cartoonists, to illustrate it. 'His approach was 'old school', he took no shortcuts, and worked on each illustration for as long as he needed to," Shome Ghosh adds. 'Anita would lose patience once in a while, but then, Atanu would send an image, and it would be mind-blowing." The piece de resistance was the depiction of Lord Vishnu's matsya (fish) avatar for the cover, which remains iconic to this day. 'It was a different era," Shome Ghosh adds. 'If you needed time to produce good work, you could afford to take it." Cut to 2025, and you can write a children's book in a weekend and publish it. All you need to do is compose a prompt for an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, provide a skeleton of a plot, along with a few references for illustrations, and you will have your illustrated book ready in a few hours. All in all, AI can do a passably good job— but more often than not, it is hit and miss. 'Although AI-generated images often have a highly finished and rendered quality, I am yet to see an AI-enabled book that offers consistency of style and design throughout," writer and illustrator Pankaj Saikia says. 'But considering the speed at which it is evolving, it won't be long before AI is able to produce better quality books. Also read: Art in children's books comes of age GEN AI AS AUTHOR In 2022, Ammaar Reshi, a product designer in Silicon Valley, was one of the first people to publicly put out the idea of using AI to write and illustrate children's books. On 9 December last year, he posted a thread on X, starting with, 'I spent the weekend playing with ChatGPT, Mid Journey and other AI tools… and by combining all of them, published a children's book co-written and illustrated by AI!" The finished product was called Alice and Sparkle. It is a story of a girl, Alice, who creates her own AI, Sparkle, and together they embark on an adventure to make the world a better place. In a feel-good pitch, the blurb described Alice and Sparkle as a story that 'hopes to inspire children, encourage their curiosity and learning, in one of the most technologically exciting moments in our lifetime." Since then, the impact of AI on the livelihoods of artists and illustrators has become far more palpable. Writer, educa tor and illustrator Parismita Singh, best known for her graphic novel The Hotel at the End of the World (2009), remarks on the ease with which AI-generated images are being used in textbooks and educa tional content. 'Some of my friends are using AI to create teaching materials," she says. 'They send me their work from time to time to check if the art looks alright." Apart from sabotaging the careers of professional illustrators, the AI invasion may diminish the trust of organisations and NGOs that are funding projects to make children's books more diverse and accessible through translations and wider dissemination, Singh adds. That's why not for-profits, especially, have to be vigilant. 'As a not-for-profit organisation, we curate our books very carefully. We want to find humans who have a unique story to tell," says Canato Jimo, writer, illustrator and art director at Pratham Books. 'I haven't yet encountered AI-generated images in my field. There is a trust I share with the artists I work with." At the same time, it's not unwarranted for a textbook publisher to improve the bottom line by using AI-generated images, Canato admits. Why pay for the labour of human illustrators, when it is more expedient as well as cost-effective to get AI to do the job? Yet, it is not easy to take a black-and white view of the role of AI in children's books. For Reshi, generative AI was a tool for personal innovation. Excited by the possibilities he had opened up, many adopted AI to breach the gatekeeping of mainstream publishing. Even a child aspiring to write a book could get on to an AI-enabled self-publishing platform like BriBooks to fulfil their dream. If you want to correct historical wrongs, you can use AI to create stories that don't smack of gender biases, as illustrator and author Karrie Fransman and her partner Jonathan Plackett did in their 2020 project, Gender Swapped Fairy Tales. Such egalitarian uses notwithstanding, these trends forecast an uncertain future for professional illustrators. Also read: Isn't it time that Snow White learnt stranger-danger? A NEW VOCABULARY Rather than giving in to alarm, Saikia, whose recent work includes illustrations for Shome Ghosh's middle-grade novel, A Home to Haunt, takes a different stance. 'As a professional for almost a decade, it feels like the time has come to re-evaluate my approach to illustration as a practice," he says. 'I do not feel threatened by AI art. Rather, it feels like an important juncture in art history, similar to the rise of photography that led to newer movements in the visual arts." Indeed, illustrated books for young readers have evolved significantly over the few last years, becoming sophisticated tools for cognitive, behavioural and social development rather than didactic instructional manuals. Think of the work of writers and illustrators like Oliver Jeffers, Julia Donaldson, Quentin Blake. Or closer home, of Prabha Mallya, Priya Kuriyan, Rajiv Eipe and Adrija Ghosh, to name a few. Instead of lamenting the rise of AI, a more useful response may be to bring the human hand strongly into the creative process. Shome Ghosh gives the example of Tsering Namgyal Khortsa, whose novel, The Tibetan Suitcase (2024), she has published at Speaking Tiger. To provide a reference image to the book's cover designer, Khortsa had asked AI to create the imaginative suitcase he had in mind. But the final result, beautifully illustrated by Mohit Suneja and designed by Maithili Doshi, not only superseded the AI version but also had nothing to do with any AI tool. Even for the smartest AI tools, it is still hard to rival the richness of observation and lived experiences that humans bring to the creative process. That's why, as AI continues to improve, it is key for artists to 'get their hands dirty, rediscover the joy of creating illustrations by hand," says Canato, instead of relying heavily on digital tools like PhotoShop. In the days when Roy was illustrating Nair's book, illustrators had to go out into the world to collect ref erences, be it of a leaf or flower. 'With the coming of the internet, we became armchair artists, sitting in our rooms and drawing based on the visuals available on the internet," says Saikia. 'In the process, we have become the mythical snake eating its own tail." Also read: What artists' childhoods can tell us In the end, the survival of any form is linked to what its audience expects of it. 'The crux of the matter is visual literacy," Singh says. 'As writers and illustrators, our job isn't to simplify narratives for readers. To be able to read a graphic novel, you'll need to understand how visual lan guage works." With their subjective access to the joys, sadness and wonder of the world, artists can thus become the conduits of precious knowledge. 'Recently, I was in an interior village in Arunachal Pradesh to research a project. ...I realised that no amount of pre-existing material on the internet could have told me the way I needed to engage with the community," Saikia says. 'I had to be present there to understand the lives of the people, which, in turn, will inform the work I'll go on to make. No AI tool I know can do the job of an artist going out into the world and feeling things."
