Lesson 1: What is generative AI and how does it work?

Hey there! So let’s talk about what’s actually happening when you type words into Midjourney/Ai Studio and get a beautiful living room back. It feels like magic, right? But there’s some really cool science behind it.

Think of generative AI like this: Imagine if someone showed you millions and millions of interior design photos—like, literally every design magazine, Pinterest board, and architecture website combined—and asked you to remember the patterns. What does a Scandinavian kitchen usually look like? What textures show up in Art Deco spaces? How does natural light typically fall in a bedroom?

That’s essentially what these AI models have done. They’ve been “trained” on billions of images from across the internet, learning the visual language of… well, everything. They’ve learned what “velvet sofa” looks like, what “marble countertop” means, and how “golden hour lighting” should feel.

Here’s where it gets interesting: When you write a prompt like “modern minimalist bedroom with oak flooring,” the AI isn’t searching through a database to find that exact image. Instead, it’s generating something brand new based on all those patterns it learned. It’s kind of like how you might sketch a room you’ve never seen before—you know what furniture looks like, you understand proportions, you’ve seen enough bedrooms to create something new.

The AI does this through something called a “diffusion process.” It literally starts with random noise—think TV static—and gradually refines it into a coherent image based on your prompt. It’s essentially asking itself thousands of times: “Does this look more like what she’s asking for?” and adjusting pixel by pixel.

The key thing to understand: The AI isn’t thinking or being creative in the way we are. It’s recognizing patterns and recombining them in new ways. That’s why YOUR creative direction—the prompts you write—is so important. You’re the designer. The AI is your rendering tool.