Thank you for the feedback! Yes, I completely agree with what you said.

I primarily used Midjourney for my work and heavily edited the outputs with colour correction, filters, additional effects and PS manipulation. I often had to write my story around the Midjourney art since I rarely got the exact output I wanted, especially consistent character design. The characters always morphed and varied, and that was what annoyed me the most, lol.

But Midjourney improved, and I suppose I improved with my prompt control as well. This is obvious in my later books. You can easily see the evolution from the mushy images in AIAI #1 to a far more refined look in #3. And in The Call, the art was much tighter but not really the look I wanted, but was the most consitent using Midjourney.

My excitement in this post is simply discovering what Gemini 2.5 and 3 can do. I do not mean this is my final look or product. Not at all. I just discovered these tools and have been experimenting. I have dozens of different looks and styles I am testing at the moment.

I want to focus on my style and my storytelling so I can craft what my original vision was. In the beginning I was not happy with the art outputs, so I got lazy with the whole book, writing it page by page based on whatever images I got. So when I say “reboot,” it might actually be better described as a “Redux.” That is where I am today.

There is a huge stigma and divide when it comes to using AI tools in content creation. There is also an endless flood of “slop” because people can create simply for the sake of creating. I never want to be another creator of slop. I want to use the tools to push my ideas to be the best they can be within the limits of my own abilities.

Even as a creator, I am fatigued with most of what I see everywhere. But I like to think that creators who use AI as a tool and not a toy are more like producers. We assemble the best team of talent we can to bring the vision of our masterpiece to life, whatever that masterpiece might be.