AI Slop or Human Curation Failure?

I previously wrote that I believe that AI will be able to start a school of surrealism that will be considered art. It is a partnership. The human dreams up prompts, supplies style images and curates the winners. The AI does the heavy lift. 

I’ve been reading about AI Slop a lot lately, soulless art, text that doesn’t sound right, or logos that don’t work. At least for now, in the creative fields, there is a strong need for quality curation. The companies that try to take shortcuts are creating a growing temp worker industry for humans to fix AI products.

And there is a place for this. When I am working with images, my preferred AI tool is MidJourney. I still work with Krea, DeepDream, and Firefly, but I tend to get better results with MJ. One thing it they all struggle with is handling text. I’m guessing that has to do with the adding noise back in part of the diffusion process. It can do a single word most of the time, something common like “Happy Birthday”, but after that it gets frustrating. And that is when companies look to outsource to an artist with Adobe Creative Suite or similar.

I will try three or four times, which means I have 12 - 16 images to choose from. Having done this multiple times I know which images I can repair the lettering in Photoshop easily. I have two basic approaches. If the calligraphy is pretty good and there are minor misspellings I will usually hand create the correct letter. If the text is not close, I look for an image that I can write the text using Photoshop’s text tool. The trick to success is to be able to pick, or curate an image that will work.

Logos are an area where people criticize AI. I’m old, been in business a long time, and I’ve learned you can never make everyone happy with a logo. So what is the purpose of a logo? If you aren’t Nike it is probably a way to differentiate your product, or service. Most of us are going to need two things text, usually the name of the company, product, or service and some sort of recognizable image. Plan on using Photoshop for the text and AI for the image. I am building a restaurant and ordered a smoker. Primitive Pitts will stencil your logo on the smoker. Spray paint art means keep it simple. Now our BBQ has a name, a brand.

I have no guesses how well AI will do writing text in the sense of novels, short stories and poems. We have an operational commissary and foodbus. You are required to have an SOP for every process and product that gets created in your facility. I’ve used both ChatGPT and Gemini for this. In both cases, a four line prompt and 20 seconds later there is an SOP that makes the health department happy. I’ve never had one returned for rework.

I’ll end with this. With the restaurant we are trying to figure out whether to put in the front door now because we have not received the ovens, ice machine and dishwasher yet. So we uploaded the spec sheets to Gemini this morning and asked it if we would be able to get everything through a 36” door. It didn’t answer. Instead it said creating audio file. A few minutes later it had created a two voice podcast about a look behind the scenes talking about each major piece of equipment and why it would help us turn out quality, sanitary dishes. It was surprisingly good. The guy I was working with said, it reminds him of the first time he got on the Internet. If you aren’t spending some time playing with AI you might be missing out.