So Andrew Huang released a video about the usage of ai in his Book of Chances musical inspiration deck, and it basically boiled down to 21 minutes of "I don't knoooww guuuyyyys it's just so nuanced and I just don't know enough about it!", and in the video included a timelapse of the dude he hired creating one of the card images, which used a bunch of ai generated imagery that he then collaged into a larger piece. Andrew excused his usage of it because "maybe he just couldn't find the right stock photos" and "it made the process so much faster, you guys!"

And naturally, all of this really fucking pissed me off, so I did what any artist does. I recreated the image myself in only half an hour using free stock photos and basic Photoshop tools that are available in basically all free art programs. No ai necessary, done for free, in 30 minutes. I used 4 stock images with colour adjustments, brightness and contrast levels, overlay and screen layers, and a soft round brush that didn't use pressure sensitivity so even if someone didn't have a tablet they could do this with a mouse. Is it perfect? No, I made it only half an hour, what do you expect? But what if I spent an entire hour, literally twice the time, on it?

I also posted the full, real time video for anyone who wants to see how it was done. I realise that 30 minutes of silence is boring as hell, but you can supply your own music if you want. I just wanted to show the full process from beginning to end exactly how long it took.

Even ignoring the extreme ethical issues with ai, for the argument of "it saves so much time", generating images with ai can take several minutes for a single image, and that's after finding the right prompts. If you watch the video linked below, you can see that I had found all of my stock photos and positioned them on the canvas within the first three minutes, less time than it would take to generate one shitty facsimile of a free ass stock photo.

You can watch the video here: https://youtu.be/odBTiJhQ1vM?si=BQ4nYC2S-ZwJ4lBY