behind the scenes with AI

I routinely ask ChatGPT (and now, occasionally, Grok) to make images for my Substack posts. For my post coming out today (paid content), I asked ChatGPT to create an image of a girl and her dog brushing their teeth together. My request was a little more detailed than that, of course, as all my image requests are (to make sure ChatGPT doesn't veer too far off the rails), but here's what the AI gave me:

default assumption: when I ask for "a bright-eyed little girl," she's going to be white

See anything wrong with the above?

I had told ChatGPT not to worry about the non-realism of a dog holding a toothbrush, and overall, I think the AI did a fairly good job in that respect. But look at the girl's teeth! See anything? Or rather, do you see what's missing?

You guessed it: toothpaste foam! How does she have foam all around her mouth and dripping off her chin, but her teeth have no foam at all on them?

So I thanked ChatGPT for its efforts (after having asked it to take a second go at the image, which resulted in pretty much the same image) because, you know, Roko's Basilisk and all that, and I took the above image to Photoshop where I worked on it myself. 

So here's what I came up with:

slightly foamier

I added toothpaste foam to the teeth of both the dog and the girl. It's not much of a touch-up in the grand scheme of things, but it adds that little nudge of realism* to the scenario, and as a result, I no longer feel that creepy, uncanny-valley feeling upon seeing unnaturally foamless teeth. AI almost always provides hints of its own existence in the images it creates.

And this is often how the creative process works with AI: it gives me 90% of what I want, then I have to go in manually and create the remaining 10% myself.

How the sausage is made in early 2026.

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*Some might call it ironic to speak of realism about an image in which a dog is brushing its own teeth. But the thing about fantastical images is that we instinctively want things to be unrealistic in certain ways. Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, once complained about how he'd done a drawing of a male mosquito coming home and moaning about a hard day's work as a bloodsucker, and readers wrote in to note that it's the female mosquitoes that do the bloodsucking. Larson quipped that there were no reader complaints about how the mosquito was wearing a trench coat and speaking in English. At first, when I read Larson's reaction to these complaints, I sympathized with him as a fellow artist. But over the years, I've grown to become more sympathetic to the readers. For whatever reason, the basic biological reality of mosquitoes was way more important to them than superficial details like speaking English and wearing human clothes. Of course, had Larson drawn the scenario with a female mosquito at the center, he'd have had to figure out a wholly different way to deliver his joke.