ai products are boring

a short post

Back when Midjourney was first made available for anybody who wanted to sign up to use it, my experience—as somebody who didn’t try it out, because I was too lazy to make an account—was that everybody was suddenly posting slews and slews of images with “wow, check this out.” Suddenly anybody could make a picture of a circus seal in the style of Van Gogh, or whatever, just by typing in the prompts. All these people you knew suddenly posting pictures, and then variations on those pictures, all of which they found really interesting and / or hysterically funny.

But… were those pictures very interesting to you?

My guess is: not really. Even if you were generating your own images. What was actually fun (if you were having fun) was not the end product, but the process of prompting itself. Divorced from this process, nobody’s dump of their interactions with generative AI is all that interesting. Every conversation people post between themselves and ChatGPT has a similar problem. I believe th…