A thousand AI faces in my feed and none of them made me feel anything.
…then I described my courtyard.
For about eighteen months, my social media feed was a gallery.
AI-generated portraits, mostly. Faces rendered in the style of oil painters who’ve been dead for four hundred years. People reimagined as characters from animated films, as warriors, as royalty, as versions of themselves that had never existed and somehow looked more real than the photographs. Pets. Children. Couples. The same faces, over and over, filtered through a dozen different aesthetics and shared with the particular energy of someone who has just discovered something delightful.
I scrolled through all of it. I tapped on some of it. I felt, for the most part, approximately nothing.
Not contempt — I want to be clear about that. The delight was real. The novelty was real. I understood what people were responding to. I just wasn’t responding to it myself, and I filed that away as evidence that AI image generation probably wasn’t for me.
I was wrong about that. But I was wrong in an interesting way.
What was actually missing
The portraits were technically extraordinary. The gap between what these tools could produce and what any individual could create without them was vast and obvious. That wasn’t the issue.
The issue was that none of them were about anything I cared about.
They were demonstrations of capability. Proof of what the technology could do when pointed at a face and a style reference. Impressive, certainly. But impressive in the way a magic trick is impressive — you appreciate the skill, you marvel briefly at the result, and then you move on because there was nothing in it that belonged to you.
I didn’t know this was the issue at the time. I just knew the scroll kept scrolling and nothing was sticking.
The Friday afternoon
Some months later, on a Friday afternoon that started as an experiment and ended as something else entirely, I typed out a description of my courtyard.
Not a label. Not “courtyard with plants.” A description — the kind you’d give to a friend who’d never been there but genuinely wanted to picture it. The L-shape of the space. The long arm open to the southern Melbourne sky. The shelving along the fence packed with cacti and succulents in everything from terracotta pots to old baking tins and ceramic dishes. The glimpse around the corner into the shaded entertaining area, the BBQ just visible, the vertical wall of tropical plants catching whatever light made it under the overhang.
I typed it the way I’d tell it. Warm, specific, mine.
What came back took my breath away.
Not because the technology was different to the technology behind all those portraits. It wasn’t — same generation of tools, same underlying capability. Because the conversation was different. Because I’d brought something real to it — a specific place, described by someone who loved it — and the AI had listened and given it back to me whole.
I sat there for a moment just looking at it.
The difference that made the difference
A thousand AI faces taught me that the technology was capable.
One courtyard taught me that capability isn’t the point.
The point is what you bring to the conversation. The portraits were demonstrations. The courtyard was a description. One was about showing off what the tool could do. The other was about something I actually cared about, communicated in a way that was genuinely mine.
The AI didn’t get better between the portraits and the courtyard. I got more present.
And presence — bringing a real place, a real feeling, a real description spoken in your own voice — is what turns a demonstration into an experience worth having.
The tool doesn’t make it meaningful. You do.
What this means for the scroll
I still see AI images in my feed. The gallery never really closed — it just changed exhibitions. And I still scroll past most of it with the mild appreciation you give to something technically impressive that doesn’t have anything in it that belongs to you.
But I look at it differently now.
Not with contempt for the people who generated it — they were doing what novelty invites you to do, which is play. And play has its own value. I’m not dismissing it.
I look at it and think: they found the capability. I wonder if they’ve found the conversation yet.
Because the conversation is the part that sticks. The part that takes your breath away. The part that produces something you actually want to keep, rather than share once and scroll past.
It starts, as it always does, with something real.
A place you love. A problem you’re actually trying to solve. A description that belongs to you and nobody else.
The AI is ready when you are.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.