Not a piece about how AI is the end of the world, or the greatest creative collaborator of all time. Just what actually happened when we used it.
The Blokhaus creative team is distributed across time zones, but we've gotten good at simulating the in-office experience: shared screens, relentless Slack threads, regular video calls. This setup proved useful when we needed to generate visual directions quickly for a real project — and decided to bring in Midjourney as an unexpected collaborator.
The project
XQST is a Web3-powered collaborative art collective built around the "exquisite corpse" — a Surrealist game where a sheet of paper is folded into strips, each artist contributing without seeing what came before, then folding their work to partially conceal it before passing it on. It's structured randomness. Mad Libs, but for art, and with more absinthe.
The challenge: the product was still in development, the timeline was tight, and we needed to generate a visual identity direction fast. So we subscribed to Midjourney.
What it was like
Working with Midjourney felt like calling up an endless library of mood boards. A seven-word prompt — "the letter X made out of bodies" — was enough to send us in a clear direction. From there, we began refining: textures, materials, art historical references, unexpected combinations. We found ourselves stringing together prompts that drew on decades of shared visual knowledge:
/imagine the letter X made from black glossy rubber with tentacles inside
/imagine the letter X sculpted on a podium surrounded by giant walls in the style of Hieronymous Bosch
The experience was genuinely addictive. And genuinely frustrating. Midjourney is a blunt instrument — it cannot make the twelve micro-adjustments you'd make working with a human designer. "Blend this part. Smooth the shadow. Change this expression." None of that is possible. You get what you get, or you prompt again.
What we discovered
Midjourney doesn't handle the Latin alphabet well — Q and T proved nearly impossible to render accurately, which killed our original concept. It also struggles with hands, which, fair enough, so do most humans in their first year of drawing class.
In the end, we combined textures, created new prompts, and did the heavy lifting of collaging and finishing in Photoshop. The AI got us started and pushed our thinking in unexpected directions. It did not finish the job.
Would we use it again? Yes, as a brainstorming and ideation tool. As a replacement for trained human designers? No. The human brain — its art history, its taste, its ability to make the final call — remains irreplaceable. At least for now, and honestly, probably for a long time.
