Appreciation post: the guy who showed me AI art can still feel human

At a small tech meetup in Austin last spring, a retired graphic designer named Tom spent 20 minutes showing me how he tweaks every single AI prompt by hand to keep the imperfections in his pieces, and he said 'the machine gives you polish, but you give it soul.' Has anyone else found a way to make their AI work feel less sterile and more like your own?

2 comments

2 Comments

avery6297d ago

Tom's approach makes sense. The whole key is breaking away from what the AI naturally wants to do, which is smooth everything out into a bland average. Loading up a prompt with specific flaws or random constraints forces it to make weird choices that look like a person actually thought about them. Seen people who feed their own rough sketches or bad photos into the mix as a starting point, because the AI has to work around that mess instead of building something perfect from scratch. That tension between the machine's polish and your own messy input is where the real character shows up. Takes more work, sure, but the result actually looks like someone made a decision instead of just typing a sentence.

ward.mason7d ago

Read a blog post recently where someone showed their workflow doing exactly that. They'd paint a blob of random colors and shapes, let the AI turn it into a detailed scene, then paint over parts they didn't like and repeat the process.