A professor told me my AI art was just 'fancy filters' back in 2020

I was showing off some early generated portraits in a digital art class, feeling pretty slick. My professor looked at them and said, 'These are technically neat, but they're just fancy filters on a dataset. Where's your intent?' It stung, but he was right. I stopped just typing prompts and started using control nets and inpainting to guide the AI like a real tool. Now I sketch a composition first, then build the image piece by piece. Anyone else get a critique that totally shifted how you use generative models?

3 comments

3 Comments

riley_sullivan25d ago

Remember my buddy showing his AI landscapes to his boss at a game studio. She said they looked like generic stock photos, which kinda wrecked him. He got so mad he spent a month learning to make custom models based on his own sketches. Now he bakes his own weird textures into everything, and his stuff has this grungy, personal feel you can't get from a basic prompt. That one harsh comment basically forced him to develop a real style.

julia6225d ago

Remember my friend who tried to make a whole comic with AI? Her editor said the characters had no weight, like they were just floating stickers. It crushed her. She started doing what @leet32's friend did, adding real world junk. She'd crumple paper for texture, scan her own coffee stains, and feed those into img2img for backgrounds. Now her panels feel dirty and lived in, like you could smell the alleyways. That one note about "weight" made her glue real life into the process.

leet3225d ago

My friend's music teacher said his AI-made songs had no "human error" and sounded too perfect. It was a weird point, but it stuck. Now he records himself playing sloppy guitar or hitting random objects, feeds that audio into the AI as a base, and builds from there. The mistakes give the final track a weird groove that pure generation never gets right. That idea of adding physical mess changed everything for him.