I don't think you have seen the pictures I have been making since 1995 when I start using PS. If so, I think you would feel differently about my writing.
I'm not talking about Instagram or fake images; I'm talking about how AI can be just another tool in your arsenal, just like PS was back then and still is today if you are a digital draftsman. I have used photographs and drawings so far, so I look at AI pictures as sours, just like I use photos and paintings.
Those pictures I have made so far talking to the MidJourney Bot are today 39.451, and we have been talking together, the Bot and I, for 728 hours. I looked it up just now when writing this. I made all the 39.451 pictures by feeding the Bot with my oven photographs, drawings, and writing. I have published 13 books so far, with different combinations of images and text, so I got some experience in writing also. And no outside materials. I mean, nothing others have made or written.
For example, the text I have been using now for some time, and all the thousand pictures that are no good, looking for the ones that I can use, is;
"A house that is supposed to stand for two thousand years, I must host the house in my body, and we must become one so I to can live for two thousand years also, and I have to take care of the little people who live in the house."
This text, and some variations of it, but always the same core, have totally blown the mind of the pore Bot away. Then I handcuffed him to a drawing I made so he couldn't come up whit anything except variations of that drawing and using this text to make endless variations and its long sins it gave up and started to come up whit pictures that are the pictures I'm looking for, some so distorted variations of my drawing that I can use them.
This is a conversation I'm having with the Bot; I never tell the Bot what I want and how it should look; I try hard to make the Bot confused so It doesn't know what is up and what is down, and then the pictures I want, starts to emerge step by step. Getting the picture I want or like, usually takes about 1.000 pictures at least to get. Then it takes many hours for me to puzzle together the images I have seen on the way, a hand here and an aye there. Then I start mixing it all with my photographs, printing them out and drawing on them, scanning them in bak agen, digitally whit a digital penn pant, cutting, altering, distorting the "sours" I get both from my photographs, my drawing, and the pictures I get from the Midjourny Bot.
I believe that is what you would call a digital drawing. Ore mix media making, or whatever. From where you get your sours doesn't matter to me. But in my case, I don't use other people's pictures, just mine. Other people can have it as they like; I have no opinion on how others make their pictures.
But the result? I look at the result.
And after talking to the Midjourny Bot for 728 hours, you learn to recognize when you see that someone is just using the AI picture as it is and when folks are using it as a source making their own thing.
I don't know how it is in other places, but in the Midjourny forums and gatherings, it is called Midjourny Paint On; no meaning in that name; you have to use some name that everybody uses so everybody understands what you mean; people post the pictures that the Bot gives them, and then what they did whit it. No one is interested in what the Bot is doing, but folks are interested in what people use it for and what they make of it.
Of course, in the beginning, people showed off pictures the Bot made. But it soon loses all interest. There is no difference from one AI picture to the next when you have seen many thousands of them, they all start to look alike. Like all the fake pictures on Instagram, you know it right away when you see one that it's fake; you just learn it; there are so many thousands of them, you simply cannot not learn to see the fake from those that are not, at least not if you have been working whit PS for decades.
But when people start using them to make something new, only those with the talent and experience in digital drawing can come up with exciting pictures that got the X factor, as it is so popular to call it today. And that is what I aim for when I talk to the Bot, getting sors for something different and new.
That is what I'm talking about, not how somebody fakes a picture on Instagram; I couldn't care less what someone is doing on Instagram.