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Remember when AI mashups used to just be bad photoshop?
I was digging through my old hard drive last night and found some of the first AI art I made back in 2022 with one of those early free generators. It was supposed to be a giraffe shaped like a coffee mug, but it came out looking like a melted blob with spots. I remember spending like an hour tweaking prompts and getting garbage. Now I can type "a taxidermy squirrel holding a tiny electric guitar made of cheese" and get something that actually looks funny and has decent lighting. The newer models just understand weird concepts way better. Back then you had to spell everything out step by step or it would give you a nightmare. Now you can just say "cupcake shaped like a toaster" and it nails the reflection on the metal. Has anyone else noticed how much less "body horror" the outputs have gotten? The old stuff always had extra legs or fingers in weird places.
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reesea493h ago
Honestly tweaking prompts was the real game changer for me. Instead of just typing "dog astronaut" I started adding things like "soft studio lighting, no extra limbs, realistic fur texture" and that cut down the melting body horror by a lot. Learned to also avoid words like "surreal" or "dreamlike" because those always made it worse. The biggest tip that worked was keeping prompts short and specific instead of trying to describe everything at once. Once I stopped treating it like a magic genie and more like a really literal intern, the results made way more sense. Still miss the janky charm of those early blob creatures though.
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hernandez.blake6h ago
Yeah but do you feel like we traded body horror for this uncanny valley sheen where everything looks too polished now? Kinda miss when the AI had that charming jank to it.
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jessica_hall495h ago
Those uncanny early AI videos of people melting into furniture, is that what we're actually nostalgic for though?
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