I Used AI to Create Custom Thank You Notes [CNET]

Generate gratitude for baby shower, graduation and wedding gifts in seconds.

Generate gratitude for baby shower, graduation and wedding gifts in seconds.

Everyone loves a well-chosen gift, and it’s even better when the gift is richly deserved. There may be no one more deserving of lots of presents than a person staring down the barrel of what may be hours of excruciating pain followed by months of sleepless nights: a new mother.

Although I haven’t crossed the gauntlet of parenthood myself, there are several moms in my life who, to quote Kirstie Alley’s character in “Look Who’s Talking,” deserve the world for squeezing something the size of a watermelon out of an opening the size of a lemon.

When it comes time for those people to show their gratitude for the gifts they’ve received, I think they deserve more than just using some off-the-shelf, baby blue, pretty pink or neutral sage thank you notes. They deserve to show off the personality they cultivated pre-baby and maybe even have a little fun.

Here’s how to use artificial intelligence to create custom thank you notes for baby shower gifts, but these could just as easily be wedding gift thank you notes as well. Not that you have to be married to have a baby, but who doesn’t love a good shotgun wedding?

Using Midjourney to generate custom thank-you notes

I’m using the text-to-image tool Midjourney to tackle these thank you notes. Midjourney uses text prompts to generate images based on its training data like most AI tools made to fast-track art creation. 

Midjourney was launched in beta in 2022 and runs through Discord via web browser with the attractive price tag of free for limited queries and a range of $10 to $120 per month for more prompts and faster results. 

Here’s how to get the best results out of Midjourney’s text-to-image prompt — and if you’re looking for other ways to use this tool, check out CNET’s AI tips on how to use Midjourney to create a company logo and how to create custom wedding invitations using Midjourney.

Play around with the term “themed”

I find using this phrase in my prompts to be the easiest way to communicate to the Midjourney bot what the overall vibe of the image I want might include. 

For the example below, I asked for a “western” theme. The result is definitely accurate to the ask, but it’s not reading baby. We continue to refine.

Give it some style

Adding a specific art style to the prompt all but ensures your thank you notes will embody the feel of whatever you’re looking for. 

In this case, I used “pop art” as a style, but it felt a little too harsh for a baby gift thank you note. We want more Sesame Street and less Warhol.

Fill it out with some “features” 

The words “features” and “featuring” reliably communicate to the bot that you’re looking for specific elements to be incorporated into the image but not be the main focus. 

You can also use this term to add specific color schemes to the images. Here I asked for some ponies, stars and vintage-looking bottles to be featured.

Once you’re happy with your results, you can improve the resolution of the image, download it and add custom text with anything from Google Docs to Word to Canva or even drop the image into your phone or tablet and incorporate a hand-written message. To make it extra easy, you can also use an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Copilot to help you come up with the wording on the invitations.

Either way, you’ve avoided the cliche of storks and doilies and made these thank you notes very much your own. If you use the free version of Midjourney, you can also avoid spending money to thank people for spending money, a very valuable savings considering the price of diapers these days.