AI for friction, humans for meaning. Raw output is never finished work. Verify before trusting. Disclose where it matters. Skepticism welcome when specific.
Standing recap. New faces: handout has everything.
Today's reframe
The deliverable of an image session is not an image. It's a decision trail.
"Professionals generate wide, kill fast with reasons, repair by hand. We grade the trail, not the pictures."
Deliverable
You will leave with
A process board: 6+ iterations · keep/kill decisions with written reasons · one human-repaired direction
Your kills are where your taste shows.
Acknowledge opt-outs now: art-director round = direct and judge without generating. Equal deliverable.
Today's map
Today's map
The four legitimate jobs + prompt anatomy — 40 min
Rights: training data, copyright, provenance — 20 min
"Style words invoke the average. Process words invoke physics."
Always
The avoid list always includes
"No text. No logos. No letters."
Models grow fake type. Type is yours anyway.
Today's planned demo failure is exactly this. Seed it now.
Course rule
Still true
Still off the table
Living artists' names as style prompts.
Process + quality words do the same work — legitimately, and they teach you WHY the look works.
One slide, firm, no relitigating — Week 2 covered the reasoning.
Part 1, continued
Iteration discipline
Wide, then narrow
~0:30.
The loop
The loop
Generate wide — 4–8 from one brief-shaped prompt
Kill fast, with reasons — one line each
Select — also with a reason
Refine narrow — change exactly ONE variable
Board version stays up all day.
The vocabulary
Kill-reasons: the vocabulary of review
✗ "Don't like it"
✓ "Kill — texture is mush where the eye lands" ✓ "Kill — palette drifted warm; brief says bone and rust" ✓ "Keep — the light behaviour is real"
"This is literally how art directors review. Today you build that vocabulary."
The difference
Rerolling vs. directing
Rerolling
Same prompt, again, again, hoping. Slot machine.
Directing
"Keep option 3, change only the light direction." Studio.
Seed/variation features make this concrete; name them when demoing.
Part 1, finale
Surgical edits
The production skills
~0:38.
Surgical 1/4
Inpainting (Generative Fill)
Select a region → regenerate ONLY that. Fix a prop. Remove an object. Change one element.
Your hand chooses what changes. Surgical, not slot machine.
The skill that transfers to real client work immediately.
Surgical 2/4
Outpainting (Generative Expand)
Extend past the frame. A4 poster → wide banner without re-shooting.
Verify the invented regions.
Campaign reformatting is a real junior-designer task; this halves it.
Surgical 3/4
Image-to-image: your sketch, its rendering
Your rough drawing in → rendered options out. Strength = how much of YOUR structure survives.
If the composition isn't yours anymore, you gave it too much freedom.
"The bridge between rolling dice and directing." For students mourning their drawing time — this is their lane.
Surgical 4/4
Upscaling invents detail
Plausible texture, hallucinated exactly where it matters.
Inspect at 100% before print. Always.
Quick war story if you have one (type edges, skin, fabric weave).
Break
Break — 10 minutes
Rights block next — the part everyone has opinions about.
Stage contentcredentials.org tab.
Part 2
Rights, tools, and honest choices
~1:00. 20 minutes. Don't rush, don't preach.
Ethics
Rights 1/4
Training data tiers
Firefly: licensed + Adobe Stock → the classroom-safe default Most others: scraped data → a values decision
Make it knowingly, not by default.
Honest footnote for Q&A: Firefly contributor compensation is itself contested. "Licensed" is cleaner, not spotless.
Ethics
Rights 2/4
Output copyright
Purely AI-generated images: generally not copyrightable. Your edits, composition, combination: protectable.
The law keeps siding with your craft.
US Copyright Office guidance linked on week page; EU broadly similar on human authorship.
Ethics
Rights 3/4
Content Credentials (C2PA)
Tamper-evident metadata: how this image was made.
Provenance is becoming infrastructure — clients and platforms will ask.
Show contentcredentials.org for 60 seconds live if wifi allows.
Ethics
Rights 4/4
Disclosure, the image edition
✗ "Made with AI"
✓ "Background textures generated with Firefly, then composited, repainted, and colour-graded by hand. Characters and type are original."
"Say it like it's normal, because it is."
Demo
Generate → Reject → Critique → Repair
~1:20. Firefly + Photoshop. Prompts from DEMOS file.
Demo
Stage 1
The brief-shaped prompt
Poster background for a contemporary dance festival called "Hinge." Visual territory: industrial materials under stage light — folded steel, tensioned fabric, raking warm light, deep shadow. Bold abstract composition with clear empty zone in the upper third for typography. Muted palette: rust, bone, near-black. No people, no text, no logos.
Narrate the anatomy while it generates: "named empty zone — type needs somewhere to live." Number outputs 1–6.
Demo
Stage 2
The rejection round
Six outputs. Keep/kill + one reason each. Fast. Aloud.
Then: overrule me.
Take one overrule seriously and reverse the call with their reason on record. The room doing kill-reasons IS the lesson.
Demo
Stage 3
Critique the survivor
Critique this poster background against my brief [paste brief]. Where will typography fight the image? What reads as AI-generic at arm's length? What would a print production person flag?
Screenshot into chat tool. Read the two sharpest points; reject one critique point with a reason — filtering critique is also modelled.
Demo
Stage 4
Repair by hand
Crop for the type zone · Generative Fill ONE region · levels · place real type.
Five minutes of recognizable design craft. The part that's yours.
Slow down here. This is when skeptical students decide the week is legitimate.
Planned failure
It happened, didn't it
It grew letters. It always grows letters.
"No text" was in the prompt.
It can't be trusted with type. Type is ours.
If it didn't happen live, show the prep screenshot. Never skip.
Break
Break — 10 minutes
Lab next: your board.
Per-track subject slide staged.
Lab · 70 minutes
From Prompt to Process
brief (10) → generate 6–8 (10) → kill round, written (10) → select + refine (10) → repair by hand (15) → board (15)
The kill round is the core assessment artifact — say it twice.
Lab
Your subject
By track
Illustration: book cover rough for a folk tale you like
Graphic design: gig poster background with a named type zone
Animation/motion: one shot, three light moods (style frames)
3D: previs of a set you might actually build
Same structure for all; subject is the only variable.