The AI Image Abundance Problem

For most of visual history, making images was expensive. you needed a photographer, camera, crew, location, model, time, some actual technical ability, usually money. Even digital production still had friction.

Generative AI basically blew that up.

Now I can make 100 plausible campaign images before I've even decided whether I like the campaign.

Which is incredible, obviously.

It's also created a pretty stupid new problem.

Now I have 100 images to deal with.

The bottleneck moved

Production used to be the hard part.

Increasingly, the hard part is deciding what deserves to survive production.

Not expensive in compute.

Expensive in attention.

You have to look at everything.

Compare it.

Remember what you've already seen.

Decide whether two images are meaningfully different or whether the camera just moved six inches.

And after staring at enough generations, everything starts looking kind of good and kind of bad at the same time.

More generations don't necessarily mean more ideas

You can have 300 files and realize you basically made the same 15 compositions over and over with different lighting, faces and camera angles.

I mean, they're different.

Technically.

But are they giving you 300 creative options?

Not really.

Generative AI is extremely good at variation.

Variation and creative range aren't automatically the same thing.

Judgment gets more valuable

There's an assumption that if making polished creative work gets easier, creative expertise becomes less valuable.

I'm not convinced.

Someone still has to look at everything and say:

this one.

not that one.

these belong together.

we're missing a close-up.

that weird one stays.

stop generating.

That's creative direction.

Maybe the next creative AI problem isn't generation

Most AI creative software asks some version of:

What should we make?

I think there's another problem sitting right behind it.

What should we keep?

What's repeating?

What's missing?

Which direction is actually working?

Do we even need to generate anything else?

WALLPAPrrr basically came out of me running into this myself. I'd generated way too many images for one campaign and realized I didn't need another generation tool.

I needed a better way to see what I'd already made.

Maybe the next creative AI problem isn't making more.

Maybe it's figuring out what the hell to keep.