Last week, I posted about a personal situation where I struggled with Generative AI and how I was able to fix the problem by asking if a real person could help me. I believe that some people got the point of the story, but some comments started piling up, and I thought that a full post following up on that discussion would be better than a long discussion thread.
Generative AI Is Basically a Gacha Game
The strongest counterargument deserves to be stated properly: Inference is cheap. A hundred image generations cost less than one hour of a senior designer, and there's no dispute on that.
The problem starts when you notice that the winning result might show up at attempt 2 or only at attempt 1,000, or never show at all. In a way, content generation is like a gacha game. Every prompt is another pull. Better prompts don't necessarily guarantee the rare drop, they simply improve the odds that you'll get it before your token budget runs out. Even if you structure the first prompt like a real design brief instead of drip-feeding small corrections, a good model will often still require several tries.
And you could argue "ok, but it's still cheaper than a designer", and again, sometimes that math is correct. I use GenAI myself for blog illustrations and placeholder art, where honestly even an uncommon pull in the gacha machine is a good result.
