Noticed this also in the Buzzfeed interview with Pablo Xavier, the artist behind the puffy pope jacket AI image:
“I try to do funny stuff or trippy art — psychedelic stuff. It just dawned on me: I should do the Pope. Then it was just coming like water: ‘The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris,’ stuff like that.”
His reference to it ‘coming like water’ rings a bell of recognition for me, as I’ve experienced periods of flow states using AI tools, especially lately with Midjourney.
I’ve noticed that you can get into kind of a place of creative alignment with the tool at hand, the subject matter, the prompts, the results, etc. Usually this happens when the results are really good, and they keep coming, and you kind of end up surfing a wave in this corner of the latent space you’ve uncovered.
Before cresting my first big wave on Hippy Putin, this was the image direction where things started to gel for me, with Putin as lead singer in a 1980’s hair band.
It’s not always like that, though. There’s a lot of stumbling around in order to get there, trying and failing to do certain things, and having the beginnings of understanding what is and isn’t possible within the domain of the tools, and then from that how to do things well and efficiently, and enjoyably.
My hunch is that the future is in cultivating these types of flow states with AI tools, that become deeply intuitive.
Tim B.
also to tack on here:
AI-based products need to be careful not to break user flow states with too many warnings, disclaimers, rejections, etc. It makes it not fun anymore when you’re just trying to be creative and do something interesting & you keep getting blocked when what you’re doing is harmless.