One thing I pride myself on is making great technical diagrams. But those I make manually, and they take time. Boxes are placed intentionally. Colors, lines, and arrows that actually mean something. Proportions and placement to reduce mental load. A good diagram is a form of thinking made visible. It takes time to get right.
Recently, I saw someone make an amazing technical drawing. Naturally, I reached out to learn more about how they made it.
They responded with a huge prompt.
That’s when I realized it was fully AI-generated. I tried it myself. While those drawings looked great at first glance, it was difficult to get the details right. When I went back to the original image, all of a sudden, I started seeing all the signs of slop. The arrows were going in the wrong direction. The proportions of objects were off. The longer I looked at it, the worse it got.
It’s one thing to spot AI-generated content immediately, but it’s another to think something is genuine only to find out it’s AI-generated once you take a closer look. Somehow, that’s very disappointing.
Although the diagram didn’t change, my relationship to it did. The disappointment is that what I assumed was the amount of thought behind it turned out to be none. (There’s probably a German word for it.)
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