My cousin ruined an oil painting with AI filters and it hurt to watch

My cousin spent like 40 hours on this nice landscape painting of her backyard in Austin. She thought it would be cool to run it through an AI filter to make it look like a different style. But the AI completely flattened the brush texture and changed the colors to muddy browns, and she lost all the original detail she worked for. Now she's upset because the original file is deleted. Has anyone else seen AI tools mess up handmade art in a way that can't be fixed?

3 comments

3 Comments

gray_morgan39m ago

A 40-hour painting, and she just ran it through a filter without a backup? I gotta call that on user error more than the AI being the villain here. Digital tools have always had a way of trashing your work if you're not careful, that's just how it goes. It stings to lose that detail and texture, sure, but I doubt the AI was out to get her painting specifically. Maybe she can still learn something from what the filter did, even if the original is gone.

blair_nguyen3h ago

Just a small correction - if the original file is truly gone, it's more likely she saved over it with the filtered version rather than actually deleting the original file first. That might help her check the undo history or previous saves if she uses an automatic backup program.

mark_ward24m ago

Id been thinking about it the same way as gray_morgan honestly. Figured she just trashed the file by accident or something. But blair_nguyen you're right, saving over it makes way more sense with how most people work. Ive done that before with photoshop files where I hit save instead of save as and lost layers. Totally changes where she should look for a fix. Undo history or any auto-save feature might actually pull through if it works that way.