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Boring Is The New Interesting
There’s just something kind of heartless about A.I., have you noticed? The engines get more advanced, the renders get more dynamic, but the feeling — it just kind of stays the same. Another beautiful render to forget about in 15 seconds.
It’s all too interesting. Or trying to be. The pool of images that A.I. pulls from is all showcased work. It’s like if you learned about sports only through highlight reels.
And we think pushing it to do more makes it better, with promts like: “insane detail,” “cinematic,” “like a movie,” or “last light of day.” This just leans into the problem.
Images created off of A.I. engines feel like attempts at perfection, with shallow depth-of-field, beautiful skin, rim light and drama. It’s too hard to relate to it.
The solution? Be boring.
This is the secret of all great film and stories. You don’t start with the final scene, you lead people there, step-by-step. And the first step? Establish ourselves someplace entirely normal.
Achieving this in A.I. prompts is tough. It actually takes work to get an image to not look super interesting. But this is how it should be. Just like writing. Less adjectives, less exclamation marks, less hyperbole. It’s hard because we want people to feel what we feel and we get impatient and try to cram all the emotions into every sentence. It takes work to be boring. It takes patience.
But ask yourself: where do most lotteries get won? Where do great chance encounters happen? Middle of nowhere, that’s where.
Rocky came up in Philadelphia. What’s interesting about that? What made it interesting is that he rose out of Philadelphia. If he was born in a championship prize fighting ring… nobody cares.
