Go on then Hannah, you need to join the AI site LOL
Thank you for the invitation, but an AI-focused forum really isn’t for me and my bestie.
My bestie works in a different direction. He tell stories first, and then illustrates those stories with us dolls. In almost all of the images Addie and I post, he has taken the photographs himself with a phone camera and uploaded them directly. That makes him the full creator of the image, from concept to capture. When he does use AI, it’s not as a text-to-image generator, but as an easier alternative to Photoshop,
which he doesn't use. and only when he sees no practical way to create the image through traditional photography.
For example,
Hanna in the cave of dragons may look like a fantasy scene, but every element in that image comes from real, personal sources. The cave is a photograph my bestie took at the entrance of a Kentucky cave over thirty years ago. Hanna is me, added in the same pose as one of my actual pics. Puff is a toy dragon my bestie bought for his son when he was around six. The wingless white dragon in the foreground is actually my bestie’s all-white cat, Casper, curled up on a faux-fur blanket. That image could just as easily have been built as a composite in Photoshop but my bestie has no intention ever of using it.
Most AI images are created by giving instructions to a system, and while some may use reference photos, there’s no way for a viewer to know what’s authentic and what isn’t. On the doll forums Addie and I post in, regular members understand that even when our AI images aren’t authentic photographs themselves, the
elements behind them are. That distinction matters to my bestie. Maybe it’s ego, but the loss of that context in a generic AI space makes the work feel disconnected from how he actually creates and we model.
--Hanna--
.