How AI made me doodle

I was a kid with a new toy: Gen-AI.

Enter a few words, and out comes an image?

Yes please! 😃

• Input: "An astronaut completing his tax return"
• Output:

Amazing! The text-to-image flow fascinated me.

I regularly used tools like Dall-E to create images. For example, here's the cover image for my blog post on a Harry Potter database:

This is nicer than anything I can create.

That was 2025 for me. With each new blog post, I ran to AI to craft images.

But two things bothered me.

1. Not right the 1st time

I had to repeatedly prompt the AI to make changes. The first attempts were not good. Sometimes the image would have text that didn't make sense.

I ask for ice cream with SQL... but I get extra letters. And why are the letters in different colors?

Other times, there was too much clutter. I ask for an image of someone deleting old Tweets. I get this... Is that a trash can hiding in the clouds?

I would send up to 30 prompts to get an image I liked. It was exhausting. 😮‍💨

2. Something seems off

The AI-generated images started to look... meh. I looked at images online and could tell which ones were generated by AI. A certain human element was missing. The images were too "air brushed." They lacked aesthetic taste.

The more AI images filled the Internet, the more off-putting they seemed. My eyes glazed over as I scrolled from one image to the next.

These two frustrations led to... doodling.

I got tired of hacking away to get the perfect image. So I went back to the basics.

I pulled out a sheet of paper. I stole my son's crayons. And I made my own image:

This drawing sucks.

I'm not an artist. I'm not trying to be Picasso.

What I am doing is reclaiming what AI overuse took from me. 

Humans are made to create. Running to AI to create something for me made me less human. Instead of pushing my ideas into reality, I was doing a mundane task:

1. prompt AI,
2. review the results,
3. re-prompt AI, etc.

And I was never satisfied with the end result. 

Making something with my hands makes me feel human again. I spend all day at a computer keyboard; it's a relief to make something physical. 🙂

Moreover, there's a certain beauty to human flaws portrayed in art. I look at the lousy picture and see a story. Each stroke of crayon reminds me of what I was doing at the time. The texture and color variation remind me of design choices I made while drawing. The end result is something that gives me joy. 

The allure of AI is that you get something quickly. But things obtained quickly often have little value. 

I don't know how AI will shape society. It's a technological feat that changes how we work, how we live. Ironically, it's something that's also driven me away from technology to the simple things in life, like doodling with crayons.

Cheers,

KP

P.S. Don't think I live under a rock. I still use AI, and I believe developers need to adapt to new ways of coding. As with all tools, there's a balance between under-use and overuse of AI.

P.P.S. Here are more doodles only a momma could love. 

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