This blog runs on Ghost, and as with any good CMS, you can attach a "featured image" to any post you create. You can upload your own photo, or Ghost has this nice UI for searching for something on Unsplash and adding it to your post as well. I think this is a great feature, and it helps streamline the process of getting nice images into your posts.

However, this year has seen the rise of generative tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, and these tools are great for generating images tailor-made for whatever you're talking about. I've used these images on a bunch of occasions recently (here, here, and here) and have found them to be fantastic at adding a bit of flair to my posts.

I'd love to see Ghost add the ability to generate these images inline using one of these tools. As shown in the mock up above, you could upload your own image or search for one from Unsplash like before, but there'd be a third option to generate an image. When you click the "generate" option, you could get something like this:

Basically let the user enter a text prompt if they want or click "auto" to generate an image based on the text in the article (assuming they've written it, of course). Also people have different needs for aspect ratios, so give them an aspect ratio dropdown so they can choose the right one for them (and make this sticky so it remembers what you chose the next time you generate an image).

There could be more done here such as setting general style guides ("classy", "minimal", "hand drawn", etc.), and Ghost's self-hosted users (like me!) would need to set this up with an API key or something of our own, but this all feels doable.

I don't know what the Ghost team's opinions of generative AI are, and maybe they're morally against creating a feature like this. If that's the case, fair enough, but if they're okay with the technology, I think this would be a pretty rad feature.