Behind-the-scenes breakdowns of how real AI creators make their work.

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Creator Stories

How independent AI creators actually make their work — the tools they lean on, the process behind the output, and the human judgment prompts can’t replace.

Brain Racked (Ryan McCoy) Builds Alien Civilizations using AI.

Ryan McCoy is a 20-year VFX veteran building elaborate sci-fi civilizations with AI — one prompt at a time, sometimes two full workdays per image. Around 440,000 people on Instagram are paying attention.

STR4NGETHING Made the Wrong Era Look Right

STR4NGETHING is an anonymous AI artist who went viral in 2022 by dressing Renaissance figures in Nike and Louis Vuitton. They built a whole theory about why it looks right — and then built a career around it.

dexplore.ai Posts a New World Almost Every Day.

An anonymous account has been posting a new AI sci-fi world almost every day since 2023 — no name, no face, just the films and the tools he credits under each one.

cursejourney Makes AI Horror That Looks Like Found Footage

cursejourney makes AI horror styled to look like found photographs — sepia, grainy, wrong in the way the genre can use. Built in Phoenix since 2023, with a "photos i found in the basement" series and an AIGA Arizona nod for the piece that broke out.

Mr. Relative Makes AI Art About Us. This Summer He Put It in a Room.

Mr. Relative has been making AI art about human collective behavior since late 2021, under one stated premise: AI was trained on everything we've made, so it's the right tool for looking at us. This summer he put "This is Humanity" in a physical gallery.

Julien Durand Has a Day Job in Engineering. It's Why His AI Films Work.

Julien Durand is a mechanical engineer by training. He's also a CivitAI Award-winning AI artist with 323,000 Instagram followers — and the two things are more connected than they look.

Manuela Klauser Knew What She Was Making Before She Let the AI Near It

Manuela Klauser makes "Soft Goth Surrealism" with AI — dark, gothic figures with a pop-whimsy undercurrent that's shown up at the Saatchi Gallery and across international AI art exhibitions. Here's how she actually does it.

The Photographer Who Accidentally Became the First AI Artist in a Museum

Julian van Dieken is a photographer and educator who started an AI account just to learn something new — and ended up with his image hanging in the Mauritshuis in place of Vermeer. His actual process is worth knowing about.

Solo digital artist Kelly Boesch working on AI-generated artwork at a computer in a creative studio

ai art Featured

How Kelly Boesch Built a Studio of One With AI

Kelly Boesch spent 17 years at IMAX before AI gave her a way to make the work she'd always wanted to make. The process is worth studying.

The Showrunner: How Neural Viz Makes an Entire TV Universe With AI

Neural Viz makes coherent, episodic AI television — a whole alien TV network — as one person. Here's the actual workflow, tool by tool, and why a decade of craft is the part that still matters.

Photographer's hands holding a film camera beside a glowing AI-generated image on a laptop screen

Vagabond Diary: What a photographer brings to AI art that prompts can't

Charles Lopez shot for GQ before turning to AI. His work still looks like 1985 film photography. The background isn't obsolete—it's the whole point.

Zack London's "Zero Skill" AI Critique Actually Makes Sense

Gossip Goblin says AI image generation takes "zero skill." That sounds like the gatekeepers were right — until you actually watch him work.

Voidstomper's 3 Million Followers Prove the Glitch is the Point

The anonymous AI horror artist has built the largest following for AI-native visual art by embracing everything other artists try to hide.

AI Cinema's Fruit Love Island: What Everyone Missed

Everyone called it AI slop. Nobody noticed they were watching episodes 1 through 19 of a serialized show maintained by a single anonymous creator shipping daily.

The Transformer: How James Gerde Turned Other People's Videos into Something Completely Different

James Gerde didn't start by generating video from scratch. He took existing footage and completely reimagined what it could look like — and that distinction turns out to matter a lot.

The Memory Collector: How n.evernow Makes AI Feel Like a Dream You Almost Remember

Maria Pokrovskaya's AI films don't feel like AI art. They feel like grief, dislocation, and the specific texture of a memory you can't quite hold.

storytelling Featured

The Work Inside The Visual Dome

When The Visual Dome showed up in my Instagram feed, it felt like one of those accounts that was just suddenly there, as a fully formed idea.

The Hidden Work Behind GossipGoblins' Worlds

Watching Zack London (better known as GossipGoblin) break down his process in a handful of Instagram stories made me rethink everything.