The AI toast shaped like a dinosaur got me thinking about old school photoshop

I was scrolling thru the feed yesterday and saw that post where someone got an AI to make a T-Rex made of burnt toast. It reminded me of like 15 years ago when I used to spend hours in photoshop trying to cut out images with the magnetic lasso tool and they always came out jagged. Now you type a few words and get something wild in seconds. Has anyone else noticed how AI mashups feel less like a deliberate joke and more like random chaos compared to the old days of carefully crafting surreal images?

2 comments

2 Comments

mia74816h ago

That magnetic lasso was the worst, spending twenty minutes just to get a jagged outline of someones head. The old Photoshop battles between the retouching wizards and the glitch artists were at least intentional. Back then you had to manually line up each screw up for the surreal effect to work. With AI its just spewing out whatever combination of concepts it finds in its training data. So is the chaos part of the appeal now or does it make the finished thing feel less like actual art and more like a lucky accident?

alicecooper16h ago

Man I spent way too many nights fighting that stupid magnetic lasso... getting all frustrated while it snapped to the wrong edge every single time. At least back then the mess ups felt like something you wrestled into submission rather than just hitting a button and hoping for the best.