I can’t draw to save my life, and I’ve been fortunate it’s never come to that. However, with AI, I can create images that I could not afford an artist to do for me, as I did for the RealityFragments ‘about’ page recently by doing what I am good – hacking text.

The thing is, I know great artists. I’ll not name drop, but I’ll say you see a lot of one couple’s work a lot in Scientific American and other magazines, just to give you an idea of the caliber of people I know in the space. When it comes to that stuff, I would gladly pay them to do some illustrations for me, but I can’t afford them, and using them would not be sustainable.

Of course, my editing skills have gotten better because of AI. For example, I got creative with some AI images generated with DeepAI and merged them together by some painstaking editing and then dropping that image on the first just so. I don’t use photoshop, and I never have, relying instead on Gimp and Paint.net.

So it’s official. The image at right was not Photoshopped.

When it comes to photos and that sort of stuff, I pay attention to what Mark Lyndersay does because he’s so much better than I at it. I’ve told him as much in person. So when he wrote about AI showing it’s creative potential on TechNewsTT, I paid attention.

It’s just that he’s on a superhighway and I’m still looking for an on ramp. Digital image editing is not my strength, and because of that I’m not willing to pay for tools that I may have more dormant than the George Foreman grill in a cupboard in the kitchen. You might have one too. How many of these things did we buy?

Recently I have been playing with an idea on the subscription Photoshop, though, and giving it a month. Thus when I saw a headline like, “With AI, Photoshopping images now requires zero skill” on a Saturday morning… I had to go look. Very good article, I recommend it.

Fortunately, it was dumb enough for me to understand and smart enough for me to work with. I think I’ll wait past the beta.

If I’m going to pay to experiment, I don’t want to be the experiment.