Just realized AI art actually requires a ton of manual work

I used to think AI art meant typing a few words and getting a masterpiece. Then my friend showed me her workflow last week, she spent 6 hours tweaking prompts and masking out bad fingers in Photoshop. She also had to generate over 200 images just to get 3 that were usable. Has anyone else seen the behind the scenes effort that goes into this stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_sam1mo ago

Holy crap people really don't see the sweat equity in this stuff... I watched a friend spend an entire afternoon just fixing hands and teeth on one image. She had to paint over individual strands of hair with a stylus because the AI kept generating this weird melted look. The real kicker is she had to learn photo editing basics just to clean up the AI output. It's like buying a fixer-upper house and then realizing you gotta rewire the whole place yourself. The software does the broad strokes but all the detail work is pure manual labor.

the_max1mo ago

@sean_green44 hit it right - masking layers save so much headache with AI hands.

sean_green441mo ago

God that's such a good way to put it! The fixer-upper house analogy hits hard because nobody talks about the hidden costs of time and patience, right? I remember my buddy spent like three hours trying to get an AI to generate a simple landscape with a bridge, and it kept putting the bridge sideways or halfway underwater. He finally just drew the bridge himself on a separate layer and photoshopped it in, which honestly took more skill than if he'd just painted the whole thing from scratch.