Free courses / Making Things With AI / Lesson 1
How it makes a picture
It starts with static and tidies up. Nothing is copied.
Picture the fuzz on an old television. A picture tool starts with that and asks itself the same question a few dozen times over: what would this look like with slightly less noise in it, if it were the thing you described?
Each pass removes a little fuzz and commits to a little more picture. After enough passes there is no fuzz left and what is underneath is the image. The method is called diffusion, and the name is worth knowing because it explains everything else.
Nothing was fetched. There is no folder of photographs it rummaged through. It learned what the thing you asked for tends to look like, and then it made one up. That is also why the same words twice give you two different pictures.
- It starts from noise and cleans it up, over and over.
- Nothing is copied, so there is no original to go and find.
- The same words twice give two different results.
ORBIT / THE NAVIGATOR
It makes the picture worse before it makes it better, which is the only art form where that is the actual plan rather than a Tuesday.
Try it
Ask a picture tool for the same thing twice, word for word. Look at what changed between the two. That difference is the whole method showing itself.
Make a picture of a British corner shop on a wet Tuesday afternoon, with a handwritten sign in the window. Then tell me which parts of the sign you got wrong and why.
Then paste it into whichever assistant you use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Not sure which? Meet them all.
Progress is saved on this device.
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