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

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opinion

A collection of 141 posts.

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Tropland Universe Runs a Circus Where No Animal Is Real

Tropland Universe is a digital animal kingdom — photoreal lions and tigers doing impossible things, every caption disclosing the AI and promising no animal was caged, trained, or harmed. It started as a children's book about a juice bar in 2013.

PJ Ace Made an NBA Finals Ad for $2,000 and Published the Prompts

PJ Ace made the AI ad that ran during the NBA Finals for about $2,000 in three days — then published the entire workflow. Fifteen years of directing, 300-400 Veo generations, and a rule about never asking Gemini for more than 5 prompts at a time.

imoliver Writes the Words and Generates the Rest

imoliver was the first Suno creator signed to a real record label. He writes every lyric himself, then generates up to 100 versions of a song before one earns a release — a designer's process applied to music he cannot sing or play.

How Xania Monet's Music Actually Gets Made

Xania Monet was the first AI act to land on a Billboard radio chart. Behind her is Telisha Jones, a Mississippi poet who writes every lyric herself, feeds them to Suno, and kept her songwriting credits when the reported $3M deal came.

The Curator Behind The Archive In Between Won't Call the AI Part "Art"

The anonymous Head Curator behind The Archive In Between writes every word by hand, generates the imagery in Midjourney, and flatly refuses to call the AI part "art."

daejin.creates Makes AI Art That Goes Inward

Korean AI artist daejin.creates works at the meeting point of design, psychology, and AI — making quiet, inward images and short motion pieces in a feed built for speed.

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.

creative process

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

creative process

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.

Developer at laptop reviewing automated marketing funnel dashboard with code editor and analytics open side by side

build in public

Behind the Build: Automating My Own Self-Promotion in a Day (and the Silent Bug That Almost Sank It)

Almost nobody enjoys self-promotion, so I tried to automate mine — a whole funnel, built in one session. A few days later I found out it had been throwing every lead away. Here's the build, and why you can't fully trust the machine that does the part you hate.

Microsoft Drops Claude: What It Means for AI Users

Microsoft's cancellation of Claude Code licenses signals the end of experimenting with multiple AI assistants — and the beginning of platform lock-in hell.

Google AI certificate diploma on laptop screen with crowd of diverse students in background

Google's AI Certificate Hit 635,000 Students. Here's What That Actually Means.

635,000 students earned Google's AI certificate—but who really benefits? We unpack what Big Tech credentialing actually signals for your career and AI fluency standards.

Developer debugging broken internal links caused by incorrect domain constant in site automation code

How one wrong domain constant broke four internal links at once

The optimizer is the unglamorous part of the AI pipeline — and where the most teachable bug lived. Here's the break, the fix, and why one constant solved it.

Automated publishing workflow diagram showing Ghost CMS dashboard with scheduled posts and code scripts running in background

Ghost CMS Automation: The Publish Button I Never Press

A cron script publishes this site — no browser, no human. Building it surfaced timezone bugs, a members-only content leak, and a two-phase commit bolted onto a CMS.

Three illustrated AI robot agents with dog name tags on colorful abstract digital background

Named AI agents: why I gave my automations three dogs' names

Naming automation agents Sherman, Wilson, and Sebastian wasn't branding — it forced scoped roles, clean handoffs, and a system William could actually debug and trust.

AI orchestrator managing a multi-step automated content pipeline with connected workflow nodes and agents

AI orchestrator: the layer that watches your whole pipeline

The orchestrator doesn't write or publish — it watches everything else and fills the gaps. Here's how the memory loop, arc tracker, and gap analysis actually work.

Writer reviewing AI-generated draft on laptop screen with research notes and content workflow diagrams nearby

ai-writing-pipeline

AI research-to-draft pipeline: why a prompt rule isn't enough

Two models, a frozen audit trail, and a style guide built from real edit-diffs — here's what it actually takes to keep a human voice intact across an AI content pipeline.

New York Times newsroom journalists working at desks amid tensions over AI monitoring and labor contracts

The New York Times AI Fight: Monitoring Comes Before Replacement

The Times is suing OpenAI while using AI to track its own workers. The union's grievance reveals what AI governance actually looks like inside creative organizations—and why the surveillance fight matters more than the automation one.