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Showing posts with label Jane Austen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jane Austen. Show all posts

Thursday, November 27, 2025

How Thankful Should We Be for Generative AI?

 I thought I'd like to generate a picture of Jane Austen in context of an American Thanksgiving celebration for a holiday greeting post on the social media accounts I have associated with my Totally Jane Austen brand. I opted to use Google Gemini. 

Here's how it went: 

First prompt: Can you generate an image of Jane Austen celebrating an American Thanksgiving

Here's what it delivered with this message: 

"Here is an image of Jane Austen celebrating American Thanksgiving."



Second prompt included the portrait of Jane Austen that I referenced: Let's have fewer people, no signs, and a woman who is dressed like Jane Austen is in her portrait 



Second iteration came back with this: "Here is a Thanksgiving celebration with fewer people, no signs, and a woman dressed like Jane Austen in her portrait."




I attached the Jane Austen portrait again and wrote: "Nope you didn't do it. That's almost the same picture. Try doing it with Jane Austen herself looking like this."

Gemini then delivered this with the note, "My apologies, I misunderstood the previous request. Here is an image of Jane Austen herself, looking like in her portrait, celebrating Thanksgiving with fewer people and no signs." 


My response was to again attach the portrait with this prompt:  "That's the same picture again. Delete that and just put this picture of Jane Austen in a context of a table with turkey, etc."


Gemini then offered this monstrosity with this phrase "You are absolutely right, I apologize for the repeated image. I will generate a new image for you, placing Jane Austen from the provided portrait into a Thanksgiving setting. "


I then wrote:  "She's out of proportion to the people. Just take them out and get the proportions right."


Gemini responded with "My apologies for the scale issue. Let me correct that for you. Here is Jane Austen, in proper proportion, at a Thanksgiving table by herself." and delivered this: 


I wasn't thrilled with the results for several reasons but was tired of the back-and-forth, so I said, "It'll have to do."

Gemini's response: "I understand. I apologize that the image generations were not meeting your expectations and appreciate your patience with the process.

Is there anything else I can help you generate or create today?"


Related:

Aim higher than SEO for your marketing content


Conversation with Gemini

can you generate an image of Jane Austen celebrating an American Thanksgiving

Let's have fewer people, no signs, and a woman who is dressed like Jane Austen is in her portrait

Nope you didn't do it. That's almost the same picture. Try doing it with Jane Austen herself looking like this

That's the same picture again. Delete that and just put this picture of Jane Austen in a context of a table with turkey, etc.

She's out of proportion to the people. Just take them out and get the proportions right.

It'll have to do.

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Aim higher than SEO for your marketing content


You know, Jane Austen could have opened "Pride and Prejudice" with the standard line, "Once upon a time there was a family with five girls and no sons to inherit the estate that they depended on for their support." She didn't.

Pride and Prejudice tote with the opening line of the novel
https://www.zazzle.com/pride_and_prejudice_tote_bag-149363338488539996


Instead of sticking with the safe formulation, she crafted one of the most memorable openers for a novel that also gives the readers a taste of her wit and sense of irony. That opening line is Austen's brand in a nutshell.


This is what businesses should be striving for in their opening lines on their sites and their reports. Generative AI will not deliver that because it will work off pre-existing models. Simply tweaking that output will still not result in something truly fresh, though it may be just good enough to not incur the generative AI penalty Google has promised to deliver for those who aspire to achieve high SEO results.


Achieving SEO goals is not the same as making a memorable impression on your target audience when they click through to your site or blog.


What impresses Google is not necessarily going to move your target market to establish a relationship with your brand. The content that does can only be produced by a combination of analytics and human creativity.


You can't just be content with optimizing for search engines by following SEO guidelines when you need RO -- responsiveness optimization -- that requires blazing your own brand path.


That's what Write Way branding and marketing is all about. Learn more about my business offerings here.


Related

What B2B content marketers get wrong
Add a pinch of salt to creative claims for AI
Most Memorable Brand Slogans
What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO
Pride, Prejudice and Persuasion: Obstacles to Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels


You can also follow Ariella Brown.  

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

What's in a pen name?



We’ve all heard that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about the name on the cover? Should it be the author’s real name or her chosen one?

The Reclaim Her Name series is a re-release of books “with their author's real name on the cover for the first time.” To mark the 25th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction, there are 25 books available for free download or eBooks (which definitely keeps costs down for printing and shipping).


It’s a fact that women have written some of the best novels ever published. It’s also a fact that some of those novels feature a man's name in place of the authors.



The question then is: are we doing a favor to George Eliot and her pseudonymous peers in stamping their birth names in place of the names they chose themselves?

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

The quantified swoon, or how readers fall for Mr. Darcy

Personally, I've never had a crush on Mr. Darcy -- in book or film form. But I see I'm very much in the minority here. You just can't argue with data. 

I wrote about the kind of data Oyster Books and similar services pick up on their readers a little while back in Reading & Being Read by E-Books
Now Oyster is sharing its data to track readers' fascination with Mr. Darcy. Here's the infographic that was shared by Huffington Post:








Friday, May 31, 2013

Jane Austen's influence on English language

A recent Guardian article on Jane Austen as the "queen of modern slang:" fits quite well with a piece I wrote a few months back about the influence of her work on the literature that followed -- as confirmed by big data in The Big Wow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory

The Guardian article informs us that
Oxford professor Charlotte Brewer told the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye that while Austen had a great influence on the first Oxford English Dictionary published in 1928, she is quoted 1,640 times in the most recent edition.Entries include 321 phrases from her 1815 novel Emma, which includes ‘dinner-party’ and  ‘brace yourself’. She also came up with ‘if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you 100 times’.
As the piece is very short, though, it adds in a piece of what it considers good news: an upcoming  BBC adaption of Death Comes to Pemberly. I don't usually like the modern writers' takes on the most popular couple of Pride and Prejudice. Someone picked out that book for me once, and I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. That's saying quite a bit. However, I have no objection to the Jane Austen stamps issued by the UK recently. They are little works of art in themselves.