Bought a $200 'AI art prompt guide' and it was just a bunch of stolen ideas

I saw this fancy ebook online promising to teach the secret to making amazing AI art. The sales page made it sound like you needed these special prompts to be creative. So I paid the $200, thinking it was an investment in learning a new skill. When I opened it, half the prompts were just copied from free forums I already read. The other half were basic stuff like 'a cat in a spacesuit' but with fancy words added. It made me think, if the guide itself is just stealing from other people, how creative is the process it's selling? I feel like I paid for the idea of creativity instead of actually finding my own voice. Has anyone else gotten burned by these overpriced 'expert' guides that don't deliver anything new?

3 comments

3 Comments

beth2762mo agoMost Upvoted

That's a rough lesson to learn for sure. The thing is, a lot of those guides miss the point. The real skill isn't copying fancy words, it's learning how to talk to the AI to get what's in your head. You can find that out for free by just trying stuff and seeing what happens. Paying for a list of words someone else used feels backwards. Your own experiments will teach you more than any stolen prompt.

moore.beth2mo ago

Remember when people tried to sell cheat codes for games? Feels just like that now.

grant4782mo ago

Totally saw this with a buddy of mine. He bought one of those expensive prompt packs and just got super frustrated because none of it worked like he wanted. Ended up just talking to the AI in his own words for an hour and finally got a decent result. Felt like he wasted all that money on a shortcut that didn't even take him where he needed to go. Kinda proved the whole point about just messing around with it yourself.