Image generated by Nightcafe. Prompt: "A texture of many colorful air balloons in cool colors with warm accents in the style of Fornasetti."
To make your manipulations shine, the background might be critical.
This is a Web version of the Companion Appendix for RAISE: A New Method to Develop Experimental Stimuli for Advertising Research with Image Generative Artificial Intelligence, developed by César Zamudio, Jamie Grigsby, and Meg Michelsen, and published in the Journal of Advertising. Questions? Feel free to contact us!
Even with adequate prompting, it is possible for an image generative AI tool to provide incorrect backgrounds. For instance, in our example of manipulating fine movement, even though the initial prompt stated “The background is white”, the background provided was a blurred office. Furthermore, it might be that a certain research project requires to manipulate entire backgrounds as part of an experiment.
Backgrounds can be manipulated in three ways.
Backgrounds can be manipulated in three ways.
- First, background requirements can simply be added to a text prompt, or existing background requirements can be rewritten until suitable candidate stimuli are produced. This would generally occur while generating Stimulus A, since the look and feel of other stimuli might be influenced by the background generated by the AI tool.
- Second, if a suitable candidate stimulus is generated, but the background must be removed entirely (such might be the case with the smile stimulus example discussed above), a background removal tool can be used. Smartphones usually offer background removal tools built-in into their default photo apps. For very finely detailed stimuli, however, these basic background removal tools might result in unappealing results –for example, incorrectly removing background from portions of a stimulus of a person with long, flowy hair. In such a case, more advanced, yet affordable tools (e.g., Photoroom) can successfully remove most backgrounds.
- Third, if a background needs to be added to an existing stimulus with no background, one option might be to simply place the stimulus (ensuring the background is transparent) on top of a background image. This new background can also be generated by image generative AI as well. Potentially, the background can be blurred as well with accessible software such as Microsoft Powerpoint or Photoroom.
Ready to learn more?
Feel free to browse our gallery of examples with full tutorials, and the technical details section to learn the finer points of generating visual experimental stimuli using the RAISE methodology.