Don’t let it bring you down
It started, as these things often do, with a reasonable amount of prior experience and a completely unreasonable amount of optimism. Years of Photoshop. A job at a web agency where AI had recently gone from background noise to the only topic anyone wanted to discuss. A general interest in making things look good. On paper, AI image generation was an obvious next step. In practice, it was more like a next step into a room where the floor plan keeps changing.
First came the platform problem. There are, it turns out, quite a few of them, each with its own models, its own pricing, its own particular way of not quite doing what you had in mind. NightCafé became the main habitat — partly for the models, partly for the community, and partly because the first image of the day is free, which sounds modest until you realise it has quietly restructured your morning routine. There are also credits to be won if you show up every day. You tell yourself you won’t become that person. Reader, you become that person.
Current status: Cancelled my Pro Tier – tried to live on credits alone. Without Pro Status they won’t even let me search my own creations. It’s just a giant heap of limbs and textures now.
The creating itself is its own particular experience. There is the image that looks genuinely good at thumbnail size and reveals, on closer inspection, that the hands have six fingers and the background architecture belongs to no known period or country. There is the prompt you refine seventeen times, with mounting specificity, and which produces the same image all seventeen times, as if the model read the first three words and stopped listening. There is the self-doubt that arrives reliably around attempt nine, when nothing is working and everyone else in the community gallery appears to be producing luminous, technically flawless work without visible effort.
About that gallery. The community showcases are full of images that are, in all honesty, extraordinary — and also, in approximately equal measure, the most aggressively clichéd things you have ever seen. Iridescent dragons. Weeping elves in cinematic lighting. Cottages of such aggressive coziness they constitute a public health concern. AI, it emerges, is very good at giving people exactly what they already wanted, rendered at a resolution that makes it somehow worse. This is not a criticism. It is an observation. The unicorn-doofus content has its audience and its place. It is simply not the place this website is trying to occupy.
What to do with all this stuff?
The website itself exists because images accumulate faster than anyone can sensibly store them, and the alternative distribution channels have their limits. T‑shirt designs on Redbubble and Teepublic are fine as far as they go, which is apparently not very far when you are one among several million designers and the search algorithm has the attention span of a goldfish with options. A website felt like a way of at least having a place. Whether anyone would find it, or want to, given that AI image content is available in quantities that would have been considered physically impossible five years ago — this is a question the website declines to answer directly and hopes you will find charming rather than evasive.
The working assumption is that the ideas behind the images are still doing something of their own — that prompting an AI toward something genuinely odd, or specific, or outside the standard library of beautiful sadness and fantasy grandeur, produces results that at least have the right intentions. Whether the machine catches up with those intentions is the daily negotiation. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it produces something so comprehensively wrong it becomes interesting for entirely different reasons.
GPT muddied things considerably by turning out to be good at the whole package — image, text, the occasional joke that lands — which raises questions about the long-term career prospects of the person writing this. These questions are being set aside for now, on the grounds that they are not immediately actionable and the daily credit is burning.
So: this is a website about making AI images, mostly on NightCafé, with varying degrees of success and a consistent failure to stop trying. That’s probably enough of a reason. It’s definitely enough of a habit.