Two nearly identical landscape images can hit your Facebook feed and get wildly different reactions, even when the platform is doing the distributing. This video puts Midjourney and ChatGPT in the middle of a bigger problem: how “real” work gets judged when the algorithm and AI aesthetics keep blurring the line.
Coming to you from Blake Rudis of f64 Academy, this blunt video starts with a simple comparison: one image racks up quick likes, the other pulls people back days later for longer comments. Rudis uses that contrast to talk about what happens when a platform rewards instant impact over slow attention. He also calls out how fast people jump to assumptions now, especially when a photo looks unusually polished. You see how easily a normal post turns into a referendum on whether something is “real,” even when the person sharing it did nothing unusual. The point is not to pick a side, but to notice how your work gets filtered before anyone even thinks about what you were trying to say.
Rudis then puts names and stakes on it, and he stays more measured than you might expect. He describes a workflow where an AI render becomes a starting point, then gets shaped further in Adobe Photoshop until it resembles his own taste instead of the model’s defaults. It changes the conversation from moral panic to practical choices. You are not just deciding whether AI is “allowed,” you are deciding how much of your voice survives the tools you use.
The most useful part is where Rudis breaks down how AI-made images tend to land on people at first glance versus what happens when someone sits with a human-made photo for longer. He argues that AI is often built for the first second, the kind of punch that stops scrolling, while a human photo can take longer to open up. He also points out the uncomfortable math: it is easier to generate a long run of strong-looking AI frames than it is to come home from a trip with one image that really holds up. That gap is where a lot of frustration comes from, and it is also where smart decisions live, especially if you share work online and want the response to match the effort. Rudis gets into the social dynamic too, where the loudest voices tend to be the most hostile, which quietly pushes others to keep their process vague. He does not treat disclosure like a purity test, but he does treat clarity as a way to avoid getting boxed into somebody else’s argument. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Rudis.