The fast lane to creativity

From the start, AI impressed us with its ability to speed up our design process. Integrated into tools like Adobe’s suite, AI transformed time-intensive tasks into instant results. Complicated comping jobs? Done in seconds. Concept visualisations? A breeze. What used to take hours to mock up became a matter of moments.

But AI’s capabilities go beyond just efficiency—it offered a new way to prototype ideas, to visualise the unthinkable. It opened creative doors we didn’t even know existed.

The process: Sculpting with AI

Creating with AI feels a lot like sculpting. You start with a broad prompt, feed it into the machine and see what it generates. Then, like a sculptor chiseling away at marble, you refine, adjust and guide the tool closer to your vision.

For this project, we developed a prompt template, feeding detailed instructions about recipes and team members into ChatGPT. The tool generated descriptive prompts, which we used to guide MidJourney’s image creation. The results were... mixed—but that’s part of the journey.

Some images hit 90% of the mark, but the elusive final 10% was a challenge. In those cases, we had to choose: refine the prompt further or manually edit the results. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but the process taught us a lot about working collaboratively with AI.

You’ll see in the images down the page how obscure some of the outcomes were from our prompts and how much effort it takes to retrain AI to align with the creative vision. Adjusting wording, testing variations and reworking ideas became an iterative process—highlighting the balance between creative input and the AI’s interpretation.

The challenge: AI isn’t a magic wand

Despite the buzz, AI isn’t some miraculous fix-all tool. Like any instrument, its value lies in how it’s used. The hype of “Can’t you just AI it?” quickly became as misguided as the old “Can’t you just Photoshop it?”. Reality check: it’s not that simple.

To truly harness AI’s power requires skill and direction. It’s not about replacing creativity but blending AI’s capabilities with human expertise. And that’s exactly what we set out to prove with a daring experiment: using AI to create imagery for our annual Christmas cookbook.

Another crucial part of the process is ensuring a cohesive set of images that work together as a whole. Finding the right mood, tone and grade to suit the theme is part of the art and skill of the creative—something AI can assist with but not achieve alone. This step adds another layer of challenge, but it’s also one of the most fun and satisfying aspects of working with AI, where technology and human intuition come together to create something truly aligned with the vision.

Lessons learned

What stood out most was the iterative nature of working with AI. It’s not a one-and-done process. Just like directing a photo shoot, everything from lighting and composition to wardrobe and set design plays a role—and in AI’s case, it all comes down to the precision of your prompts.

Too broad, and the results are random and unusable. Too specific, and AI might decide to ignore critical details. Striking that balance was as much an art as the finished images themselves.