slop machine

When Adobe folded their AI image generation stuff into Photoshop a few years ago, I had a bit of a tinker with it at work. I found a picture of some colleagues and, with some prompts, turned one into a Viking, another into a medieval minstrel and a third into a bass player in a wetsuit standing on a surfboard. I showed this to my boss and remarked that pretty soon, people like me - who have spent years learning to use photo manipulation tools - will be surplus to requirements. He laughed but kind of agreed, which made me a bit nervous. On Friday he got in contact about some design work he wanted doing. So we had a meeting and he showed me the designs that he had "created" using ones I had previously done for him, that he had fed into AI. They were terrible. Images were blurred; none of the wording was in English; there were inexplicable things, weird shaped things appearing all over, even odd bearded gnome-like figures that didn't feature in my work. Basically it was a dog's…