I can draw now
I don’t get to work on many visual things with AI. Maybe because of that, I am amazed every time I do. AI is a perfect complement for me.
See, I appreciate things that look great to the eye, and I have plenty of ideas for how I could represent concepts visually. My skills to do so, however, haven’t always matched my great intentions. Now, with AI, I can autonomously represent whatever I want, and the result looks fantastic. Not world-class-designer fantastic, but I-am-autonomous-now fantastic. This is a game-changer for me.
I’ve confirmed this while working on user interfaces for personal tools I’ve built, illustrations for blog posts, and, more recently, my upcoming Rails World presentation. For example, even as a child, I was decent at drawing but terrible at coloring. Guess who can pick a terrific-looking color palette if you ask it?
As a programmer, I’m used to AI writing code better and faster than me by now, but this is different. I can now do things I couldn’t dream of doing before. That’s why I find it incredibly appealing to iterate on visual things using natural language. I feel in control, I enjoy the process tremendously, and I don’t see any blockers.
AI-generated images have a bad reputation. Like AI prose, they’re often easy to recognize and can totally come across as pure slop that required zero effort or intention to create. But there’s another, more positive way to look at it: removing barriers to expressing what you want. I’m on that wagon.