This is Lesson #20 of the ANTIghostwriter course — a free, complete system for creating authentic content with AI assistance.
New here? Start from the full course overview.
Previous lesson: #19: Create Viral Twitter Threads with Engagement Frameworks
What You’ll Learn
Add custom illustrations to your articles using AI image generation. In this bonus lesson, you’ll learn about free local options (Comfy UI + Flux model) and paid services (MidJourney), how to structure prompts for consistent visual style across all your content, and how to create images in different formats for different platforms (square for social, widescreen for blogs).
Time to complete: ~30 minutes to set up + time per image
At this stage, your main content creation work is complete. You’ve developed a longform article based on your notes that can serve as a post for Medium, your blog, or a newsletter.
I also use portions of these articles—individual paragraphs—for posting on Telegram. The Telegram audience appreciates longer posts, though they’re shorter than full articles. While Telegram supports various formats, including short-form content, I prefer to use it as a blog. I simply repost chunks of the article there, and it works well—these excerpts intrigue readers and introduce the topic. If your article is well-written and engages the reader, this approach works perfectly.
If you want to enhance your content further, you can create accompanying images. I do this because I like my articles to have illustrations that visually demonstrate key ideas or concepts—visual elements that show readers the meaning of the article in a helpful way.
Plus, I use images across all publishing platforms—Medium, my blog, and newsletters.
How I Create Images
Open-source solutions
I have deep technical skills, so I’m comfortable installing AI image generation tools locally on my computer. While this course isn’t technically focused, I’ll briefly mention that I use Comfy UI, which allows you to run local image generation models. My preferred model is Flux.
Flux is one of the largest models available right now, weighing in at almost 30 gigabytes, and it produces excellent results. You can find tutorials on YouTube for installing Comfy UI and the Flux dev model—there’s abundant information on this topic.
Flux is available for free, as are all these open-source solutions, but they require technical skills since you’ll need to install numerous prerequisites.
Previously, I experimented with Stable Diffusion and its local web interface. This approach requires setting up a virtual machine to run the interface. However, I encountered limitations with using the Flux model, which I prefer because it produces excellent results very similar to MidJourney when properly prompted.
Online services
MidJourney offers another option that works as a standalone program or web interface where everything is pre-configured—this is one of the best options for image generation.
There are various alternatives, including free ones. Stable Diffusion has numerous web applications that you can find through Google or by asking ChatGPT for recommendations for your specific needs.
Currently, MidJourney is the most advanced image generator on the market.
It delivers excellent results, and with proper prompting that includes your desired style, you’ll receive consistent outputs. I won’t delve into details here—you can simply visit MidJourney, explore the works it produces, find a style that suits you, and then copy portions of prompts that establish the stylistic approach, or create your own.
Your prompt will typically consist of two parts:
The first part is the idea itself—what you want depicted in the generated image.
The second part is the stylization. Keep the stylistic elements unchanged for each new image while changing the prompt for the key idea each time.
This approach ensures your images maintain a consistent style.
Image Formats for Different Purposes
For different uses, you’ll want images in various formats:
- For social media posts, square images with a 1: 1 aspect ratio work well
- For blogs and articles, widescreen images often work better, serving as a Hero Section (a large image stretching across the entire screen width). For this purpose, images with aspect ratios of 16: 9 or 24: 9 are more suitable
MidJourney and similar tools allow you to enlarge images and extend them. If you initially created a square image, you can ask the AI to draw the missing parts to achieve your desired format.
These capabilities are available with nearly any tool—whether MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, or other models you can easily find online.
By the end of this lesson, you should have an image that complements your article, making it more visually appealing and complete.
