“Make them look in love” sounds like a simple prompt. The first image usually disagrees.
Two men appear on a cream sofa, each wearing a shirt that has never encountered a washing machine. Their teeth are perfect. Their apartment seems to be hovering somewhere above Manhattan, although neither man has a coat, a book or any visible means of paying the rent. One hand rests on one knee. It was very tasty. Very dead.
The problem isn’t that the picture is attractive. It’s that the men look as if they were introduced thirty seconds before the shutter clicked.
I tried mentally editing this scene. Lose the skyline. Make the sofa slightly too large for the room. Put a cold cup of coffee on the floor because somebody has ignored the coaster again. One man is reading; the other has fallen asleep with his feet tucked under the reader’s thigh. Now there is a relationship in the frame, or at least the beginning of one. The coffee stain may be doing more emotional work than the cheekbones.
The Men on the Sofa
AI image tools are good at giving us recognisable types. Ask for a romantic portrait of a gay couple and you may get the polished shorthand: young, lean, fashionable, affectionate in a way that would satisfy a jewellery campaign. Nobody has a bad haircut. Nobody is waiting for the other person to finish in the bathroom.
Fantasy has every right to be glossy. Sometimes the whole point is the impossible hotel suite, the white dinner jacket and the face that looks wonderful from every angle. Still, a gallery full of flawless strangers grows boring surprisingly fast. Beauty without specificity has the shelf life of hotel flowers.
A queer portrait doesn’t need to explain itself with a flag in every room. Nor can a moustache, earring or leather jacket establish somebody’s sexuality. Those things may belong to the character, of course. Let him keep the jacket. Just give him somewhere to go in it.
Perhaps he is late for his sister’s birthday dinner. His boyfriend is downstairs, sending increasingly irritated messages. The jacket looks good, but one boot has a loose sole and the rain has started. That image has tension, vanity and a small practical disaster. I know more about this man already, and I still don’t know his star sign.
Backstory helps even when none of it appears in the caption. If you know that one partner cooks and the other performs elaborate acts of helplessness near the oven, you’ll arrange the kitchen differently. If they met at a terrible office party, perhaps an old photograph survives on the fridge. The viewer doesn’t require a dossier. A few consequences are enough.
A Little Less Perfection, Please
There is another trap here: treating “representation” like a casting checklist. Add an older man. Add a larger body. Add somebody with a scar. The resulting group may look varied, yet each person can still feel like a sample selected to prove a point.
People become interested when they get to want something besides being included. The older man is trying to fix a record player and refuses to read the instructions. His husband has read them and is wisely saying nothing. The larger man has bought trousers online, hates them, and plans to wear them anyway because returning a parcel has somehow become a week-long administrative crisis.
These aren’t grand revelations. That’s why they work.
Millennium Magazine’s report on queer and trans creativity at the Big Gay Festival described artists, musicians and guests coming together in Los Angeles. A real cultural gathering contains separate tastes, private histories, awkward conversations and people wondering where the restroom is. When a generated crowd turns all of that into identical smiles beneath rainbow lighting, it has confused a community with a theme.
The fix may be as simple as shrinking the brief. Instead of “a joyful queer community,” picture four friends outside the venue after the music ends. One is looking for a rideshare. One has taken off his shoes. Two are arguing over whether they have time for food. The night has happened to them. Their clothes have creased.
You can almost hear somebody say, “I told you to eat before we left.”
The Private Experiment Isn’t Weightless
Making a fictional portrait can be intimate in a good way. You can test a different haircut, imagine a future home or create a character who borrows one of your habits and none of your responsibilities. The image may stay on your phone. It never has to become content.
But the materials can come from real lives. A reference photo might show an ex, a friend or the person currently asleep beside you. A prompt can contain a name, a location and an anecdote that was funny at dinner but feels different inside a company’s database.
Before getting personal, read what the service says it collects and why. The JOI (gay AI image generator) privacy policy, for example, lists images, private content and information about people mentioned in chats among the data categories it may process, and it discusses the involvement of service providers. That page is less entertaining than inventing the apartment. Read it anyway.
A useful rule is to fictionalise early. Change the face, the workplace and the story behind the old photograph. Keep the emotional temperature if that’s what interests you, but stop using another person as free source material. Consent is especially important when an experiment may become a recurring character or a public post. “It was only for fun” is a thin explanation when someone recognises their own face.
There is creative value in the distance, too. Once the imaginary boyfriend stops resembling your actual ex, he can develop new flaws. Maybe he alphabetises the spice rack but leaves wet towels on the bed. Irritating, yes. At least the man is finally his own problem.
Keep the Bad Lamp
When the picture feels finished, ignore the faces for a moment. Look at the hands, the furniture and whatever is happening in the corners. Does the room belong to these people, or could another pair of polished strangers move in without changing a thing?
Remove a few signals. A second wineglass doesn’t need to sit precisely beside the first. The books can be untidy rather than selected by colour. If every object announces romance, the room starts shouting.
And if you publish the image, call it what it is: an AI-generated fictional portrait. Realistic pictures shed their original context quickly, especially once they are reposted. A plain label saves the viewer from having to work out whether the couple, home or event ever existed.
Back on the cream sofa, one of the men has woken up. The reader has reached the end of his chapter but can’t move without disturbing him. The coffee is still on the floor. I would keep the ridiculous lamp after all; they bought it together and neither will admit it was a mistake.