No. I’ve been messing around with AI-generated blog posts, and the text doesn’t seem to go anywhere, but supporting images sometimes can be worked with. I’m aware of how this difference in taste may show that I’m a better writer than illustrator. Or maybe it’s the other way around? If I can transform slop images better than I can edit slop writing, where do my skills lie?
And it’s not that AI writing is bad per se. That would only be a matter of trying a better model in the future, as whatever you can pin down as bad can eventually get fixed. My issue is a dampening of creative expression, as the machine can only provide a placeholder for what I aspire to be on the page. I want to write.
Doesn’t mean I may not have the same aspirations when making an image, but for this blog I frequently fall into “I just need X” territory. Line drawings on a blackboard, often with stick figures, that’s a deliberate choice to save time. Not getting a post out there because you don’t have an image for it is a good blocker, but only for some time.
As I don’t rush this process, I’ve pretty much experienced every variation of working with slop images, although I’m just an amateur and therefore have no idea what I’m doing:
- I’ve done the full drawing first and then sloppyfied it with a prompt that simply describes what I’ve already drawn.
- I’ve iterated a prompt until some variation gives me a different idea, and then I iterate on that.
- I’ve taken a slop image and manipulated it to fix composition, often by removing extraneous details.
For writing, getting editor feedback beyond basic error correction pulls you into safe friendly prose, the place you always want to escape when starting a sentence in a personal blog. Perhaps some statistical average of my writing would be acceptable if I was some kind of genius or this blog was swimming in money.
Maybe people can expect to see me struggling with my writing in my blog, but they’re not here for my boringly bad drawings. That’s one excuse, I guess. More broadly, how do you handle the lack of real feedback that most of anything published online can get? “That’s the neat part you don’t.” You enjoy the process itself, at least as much as possible.