Human or AI Generated Images

You probably think I have all it all together. Social media posts planned and written months in advance. Images to go with them carefully created and approved before being published. I’ll let you in to a secret. Not so much!

More often than not, I speak about what is top of mind or something that caught my interest in the previous couple of days. Far too often I will be writing the post an hour or so before you see it and at best, the evening before.

That mostly left me with a couple of choices if I was going to have an image to go with the text, stock photography (which I also sometimes use) or AI Generated. Usually this meant AI because as its a closer match to the text.

Last week though someone gave me some good advice (well the second or possibly even third someone actually). Use less AI generated imagery. Solid advice. Always found it hard to implement. This time though it was enough to make me try.

And boy was that a lot of work!

The two AI generated examples below took about 15 minutes of back and forth with an LLM to generate. The image at the top was about 4 or 5 hours of work and forced my poor sister Fatima to jump in her car and drive my camera back over to me on Tuesday night. (Side note: her photography is much better than mine!)

I scribbled three different versions of the text that I wasn’t happy with. My daughter decided she could do a better job and gave me her version too. In the end I cheated and wrote it on an iPad and traced it onto my notebook. NGL, I was low key worried that someone out there might also analyse my real handwriting and tell everyone I’m a psychopath. I blame Silicon Valley and there’s no way I can afford Banksy. 🤣

The photo was taken with a Canon 5D Mk III and 50mm F1.4 lensat F2.5 for the photography geeks.

Totally worth the effort. Will try harder, but can’t promise future images will have the same level of effort. Please tell me the top image is better! (or don’t).