After 15 years, I finally gave AI-assisted art a real chance

I spent the last decade rolling my eyes at AI art posts. The weird extra fingers, the melted faces, the same glossy style everywhere. But last November my daughter showed me her process for a character design contest. She spent two days sketching the base idea, then used AI to generate 30 variations of lighting and composition. The winning entry looked nothing like typical AI junk, it looked like something from a concept art book. She told me the AI was just her sketchbook with a fast rewind button. So I tried it myself with some old landscape photos from my trip to Sedona in 2018. I painted over the AI outputs, fixed the weird edges, and ended up with two pieces I'm actually proud to frame. What convinced me was realizing the tool only works if you bring the vision. Has anyone else had a similar turnaround, or do you still think it's all shortcuts?

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olivia39821d ago

My dad had the exact same meltdown about 6 months ago with his bird photos, now he's got a whole workflow where he sketches first and uses AI just for color grading. The key thing I learned watching him is you gotta treat it like a fancy brush, not a paint-by-numbers kit, and once you do that it stops being scary.