Ep26. AI Fakery. Mirror Polished Edges. Bag Linings & Pattern Making Hacks

hello and welcome to the leathercraft masterclass with me Phil and in today's podcast I have some juicy and somewhat controversial topics to talk about in the leathercraft world uh I know it's been a while since I did my last podcast and I say that a lot because it's so difficult to fit them in around doing the courses and the editing and and running the business and everything but I try to and uh I found some time let's do a podcast now before we start I realize uh how green I am and for those of you who are listening and wondering what the hell I'm talking about I I've sat down in front of the camera I'm looking at myself in the uh in the screen there and I can say I'm wearing a green top with a green flat cap with uh green leatherbound headphones uh with a green boom arm I've even got green on the microphone luckily I'm backed by red so you know you can see me okay so let's talk about the subjects that I'm going to be discussing today so you can kind of get a feel for what we're going to be talking about a couple of these things have been mentioned to me in the past and some of them I've kind of found online and I thought you know what this would make a great subject to talk about in a podcast uh and a couple of them are from uh Forum members who have asked questions on the Forum and I've thought again you know great subjects for a podcast that I could talk about something that doesn't require you know heavy visuals so at the beginning we had have four main subjects so the beginning is the increased use of AI images in bags on social media something I'm want to discuss the next one is a mirror polish burnish is it worth it the third thing I want to talk about is leather drop in Linings and this was a a question asked by a for member on you know what are they and how to do it and how would you measure for one so this is an alternative something I haven't actually done in the master the class before in the courses uh I'm thinking now it would be high time to actually do or create a bag project with a drop-in lining so that people have those skills but I'll talk about it a bit uh today and lastly how to make durable leather cutting patterns how to make durable leather cutting patterns so when you cut out a leather project obviously we use patterns to cut around or at least Mark before cutting um and if you want something durable that's made of metal or not MDF hard that's great but you need Machinery to cut that out that not many people have the alternative is cardboard however after repeated use it starts to show where and you lose accuracy on it so how can we get around that I've come up with an idea that I've used in the past I thought I'd share today so that you can make something for yourself that will last but you can cut out with a craft knife so let's start at the beginning with the increased use of AI on bags on social media so I remember where I was I was in Egypt at the time and I was I can't remember if I was sitting by the pool or in my hotel room whatever the case I was scrolling through Instagram and I remember scrolling through and seeing this really unusual quite remarkable looking bag and I was kind of studying it and looking at it and thinking wow this is incredible this is amazing I can't believe that someone actually made this it was a really intricate design just the way it was sitting on the desk it looked absolutely Flawless absolutely perfect Too Perfect so I could of did what everyone does when they're studying a new design or something interesting that they've seen something that inspires them kind of zoom in a little bit and take a closer look and I remember thinking that seam doesn't go anywhere that's odd well that Buckle doesn't look quite right the tabs go in the wrong way around and very quickly dawned on me that this image that I'm looking at isn't reality but it is in fact an AI image and I went down to the comments cuz I thought okay people are going to be ripping this apart surely and it was a mixture of wow this is amazing and where can I get this from where can I buy this how much is it like people were genuinely fooled by this and it's only really cuz I'm a a leather Craftsman that I can look at it and go that looks looks too perfect and the Design's off and there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense but if you're not used to that and you don't have that kind of knowledge you can see why people will be easily fooled and I think if I remember correctly this account was selling bags that were I did a little bit of digging made in the Far East but they're resellers and they were putting AI images to just kind of get a bit of uh get a bit of attention on on social media so the bags that they were showing that were AI images aren't something that they can make or have made so it was interesting that they were even doing that in the first place and they were I think they were mixing it up with bags that they sell and these perfect AI images so it's probably quite ...