My art teacher said my AI images were just 'fancy photocopying' and it stung

I was really proud of a series I made with Midjourney for my digital art class in Austin, but my teacher pulled me aside last week. She said, 'This isn't your vision, it's a collage of a million stolen ones.' I've started sketching my own concepts first now, even if it's just a rough stick figure, before I ever type a prompt. Has anyone else had a critic change how they use these tools?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenixwalker23d ago

Ouch, that "collage of a million stolen ones" line is brutal. When you sketch your own stick figure first, does that actually make the final AI image feel more like your own work, or does it just feel like a more complicated step in the same process?

brooke52023d ago

It's like following a recipe versus just heating up a frozen meal. The sketch gives you a real starting point to build on, even if the tools do most of the work later. Does that small bit of original input change how you see the final thing?

derek_singh23d ago

Yeah, my buddy tried that sketch-first method... he said it went from feeling like he was just typing orders to a machine to feeling like he was giving a rough map to a partner. That tiny bit of hand-drawn chaos, @phoenixwalker, gave him a real stake in the final picture. It stopped being a "stolen collage" and started being a weird co-op project he could point to.