The Latest AI Distraction: Action-Figure Toy Image Creation!

For the past 24 hours, the majority of my non-working-or-otherwise-engaged time has been spent playing around with social media’s latest meme: ChatGPT-generated image creation of action figure toys that represent people and brands. 

Naturally, making one for myself and Tewdilly was inevitable. 

What surprised me, however, was the pull I’ve felt to continually seek optimization of these outputs. 

I’ve been playing around with prompts and visuals, seeing if I could create a toy action figure that adequately captured my essence and the je ne sais quoi of my brand.

I’ve sent versions to my friends, shown dozens to my daughters and wife, and produced tens of other outputs that were so off or error-riddled that I didn’t bother saving them or showing them to anyone. 

ChatGPT has been generating these images for me in the background of my primary activities—sending emails, cooking dinner, watching TV, scrolling TikTok, waiting in car line to pick up my daughter at school—for the past 24 hours. 

And frustratingly, the more prompts I’ve tweaked, the more images I’ve generated, the higher my subsequent standards and frustrations have grown. 

But why?

The night before last, my friend (and badass entrepreneur and creative mind) Jared Kleinstein innocently texted me a ChatGPT-generated cartoon of me sitting in a gondola. He told me he was tooling around with image generation, presumably for fun and potentially to help promote his company’s upcoming Gondola Sports Summit. 

It intrigued me enough at 10pm to try a few of my own. 

The next day, yesterday, I saw a version of the toy action figure on a friend and former colleague’s LinkedIn post, playfully nodding to his strategic sponsorship agency, One44 Group. 

It was fun, funny, and as it turns out, an attention-grabbing (at least to me!) post. 

At times, the voice in my head said: “Dude, you’re wasting so much of your time on this! Stop!” to which I’d answer (and justify) by exclaiming, “This is research!”

The truth is probably somewhere in between. 

It’s been time-consuming and felt addicting, no doubt.

But it’s also sparked some creative thinking, and forced me to envision a not-too-distant future of marketing and content creation in which the outputs are exponentially better than they are today. 

My mind envisioned a not-so-distant future where a single prompt could generate an entire feature-length film—complete with breathtaking visuals, AI-rendered humans indistinguishable from real actors, and storylines so rich, layered, and perfectly paced they could rival (or surpass) the best of Hollywood.

What does this do to us, to the human creators? What does this to do us, the human consumers? What does this to do us, the human thinkers? 

Scary? Overwhelming? Completely bizarre to think about?

Yes, yes, and yes! 

But also: amazing, broadening, and inspiring to think about?

Definitely. 

Here are the three things I’m thinking about most related to this:

1. Play is powerful.

Even when something feels silly or time-wasting, it often unlocks new ideas, deeper insight, and connection. Call it ‘distraction’ or ‘research’—it’s necessary to evolve. Creativity often hides inside the things we may write off as “just for fun”. 

2. We’re entering an era where vision matters more than production.

Everyone will have access to the same tools. What will set people and brands apart most won’t be who can execute, but who can imagine boldly and direct intentionally.

3. Prompts are the new brushstrokes.

Getting AI to create something meaningful takes clarity, precision, and vision. The tech is available to all, but how you guide it still depends entirely on you.

The future of content is being shaped right now.

Let’s not underestimate the stuff that makes us curious. It might be where the best ideas are discovered.