Adam AI, an artificial intelligence that allows you to create headline images from article titles, is impressive. The tool is funny, but does not allow real professional use.
If you are a journalist, then you know that finding a good image to illustrate your latest article is a step that is not always easy. It must be free of rights (or you pay for access to image banks), it must be attractive, of good quality, and related to the subject.
Fortunately, at Numerama, we have Nino, our super videographer who is also very good at making headline images as superb as they are delirious. But, for all the newsrooms that would not have the privilege of having a Nino in their team, there is an artificial intelligence that could help them in their task and for the illustration of their articles.
Adam AI, artificial intelligence for article illustrations
Adam AI is a Twitter bot specialized in creating images. More specifically, it uses titles from English-language press articles such as quick for Midjourney, an image-generating artificial intelligence known for its style and very realistic creations.
Thus, the image below was created using as an instruction the title of an article published on the BBC website, “ California braces for brutal rainstorm “, that is “ California prepares for severe thunderstorms “. The result is striking.
Thanks to these quick / article titles, Midjourney is able to create impressive quality images, even when articles are about personalities. Donald Trump, Joe Biden and even Brazilian President Lula are perfectly recognizable in the images.
Numerama failed to find information on the creators of the tool: nothing is specified on the Twitter account, and our Google searches did not bring more details. However, we were able to go back to the creation of the account, on December 2, 2022, and to its first tweet, an illustration of an article talking about an investigation targeting Donald Trump. The style of the image, very different from those created more recently, suggests that Adam AI has since improved its way of doing its prompts.
If the application is funny, Adam AI is however not a real illustration tool for journalists. Already, not all BBC stories are covered: only a few appear in Adam AI’s feed. Then, the images arrive late: you must first publish, without an image of a front page, before the artificial intelligence can do its work.
In any case, the use of artificial intelligence for the illustration of articles is controversial. If the results are most of the time impressive, fast, and above all free, the fact remains that the front pages made by humans are always more accurate. And those of Nino much funnier.
