The wonder, and pain, of AI

For authors, it's the cover of the book. For podcasters, it's the show's logo.

A creative design that everyone sees the first time they encounter the show. It has to be more than the title, but it also has to give a feel for the theme, character and content, along with catch the eye and draw you in. 

As a human blessed with little to no creative design ability, this was always going to be a challenge. Do I just use a mugshot of me? Monobrow and big nose and all? Or maybe just the title in big letters. Without large start-up funding, paying a professional artist was always out of the question, so AI would have to do the heavy lifting. 

As anyone who plays with the image creation on AI knows, it can be a bit of fun. How about a logo with me getting a haircut by a robot?

That's just odd. 

Then I tried prompts around the idea of a retro-futuristic, steampunk-style of image. Flying cars, in a city that also still has airships and gothic architecture. Mildly amusing but quite busy, and hard to make out details in a small image. 

I then decided to abandon flying cars and try a jetpack. After all it's what originally led me to develop the show. Early attempts with ChatGPT and Gemini yielded results such as this.

Again, a little busy, although I liked the concept. The longer I looked at it, too, the more it felt like it was designed for a teenage boy. Far too often, I asked the AI to reduce the breast size of the image to make it less pervy. Typing "Reduce size of subject's breasts" definitely didn't make me feel like a professional podcast host. And of course the AI, which can nearly instantly spit out an image like that, cheerfully tells you "Ok, I've successfully reduced the breast size", while changing nothing. Time to get rid of the pod-porn.

How about a silhouette? And of a male from behind so there's no temptation to enhance his "attributes". Getting there now, although why he's in Utah? Who knows. I like the colours though. 

A good friend then pointed out that the world of "Fallout", the Amazon TV series based on a video game, had a similar tone and would be useful as a style-guide for artwork. Her quick use of AI with a similar palette gave this idea. 

Of course, microphone rockets! Why didn't I think of that. Closer to ideal, although a few things felt off, including one that took me far too long to notice. About which, more later. But it led me to combine the colours and "launch" aspect of that flying microphone image to this. 

That's it! Just a bit of punctuation improvement and we are there.

But, like changing a spacesuit chest-piece from DDs to a C, getting the AI to follow the prompt "After the word "WITH", insert three full stops and then a question mark" was nigh impossible. Hours upon hours, trying different prompts (add "...?" to the end of the last word in this image) neither of the AIs I was using would help. Sometimes they would add 4 full stops and no question mark. Occasionally they would creatively mix up the number of each punctuation points. I am blessed with more than my fair share of head hair. But a significant amount was torn out in the process of convincing a computer program to just put the words and punctuation as I wrote it.

Until finally, one day, using the two AIs against each other, one creating an image of just the jetpack guy, and the other creating just the words, I had it. 

So now I could launch a podcast and website, and use the image as an email signature to all these accomplished, intelligent people I wanted to speak to. For weeks this image sat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube as the podcast logo, while clips posted to social media had it in the corner of the screen, branding the show as we wanted. Hundreds of people have seen it, and for 8 weeks not one of them pointed out what I realised far, far too late. 

That second "with". Stemming from an error in the microphone rocket way back in the development process, that I and several production assistants had looked at repeatedly and never noticed. Unbelievable.

AI. It might take your job and run the world soon, but by god it's stupid.

I hope people who are using it fight cancer don't belatedly realise they've cured canker.