The last two blocks were detours. A useful one about quality, and a more philosophical one about the variables you cannot measure. Both were worth thinking through, but I can feel the project drifting away from the thing it is actually about. So this block is a reset. I want to restate the real question, keep what the detours taught me, and commit to a direction again.
The question has not changed since the beginning. How do visuals communicate a story when there are few or no words? Everything else, the stories, the styles, the test, is just a way to get at that. It is easy to lose sight of it while fighting with file consistency and AI quality, so I want it back in the center where it belongs.
Here is what the detours gave me, kept short. From the quality problem: the two image sets have to sit at a similar level of finish, or the test measures polish instead of medium. From the variables detour: I can control the expected things and never fully control the human ones, and the human conditions around an image are part of how images really work, not just noise. Both of those are now part of how I think, but neither one is the project. They are guardrails, not the road.
So, the direction. I am pulling the experiment back to its simplest honest form. Same banal stories, two visual languages, but this time quality and consistency are treated as something I actively control before anyone sees the images, not something I hope works out. If I keep using AI, the photographic set has to be curated until it holds together as one coherent thing, at the same standard as the illustrations. If I cannot reach that standard, I switch the photographic side to images I can fully control. The test does not go out until the two sides are honestly comparable. That is the rule now.
And I am keeping the test deliberately modest. Two groups, each sees one version, a short questionnaire, the comparison done by me afterward between the groups. I do not need a perfect study. I need a fair one, small enough to actually finish this semester, clean enough that the result points at the medium and not at my production problems.
But that raises an obvious question: how do I actually measure quality? I had to be honest with myself here. There is no quality score, no single number, and worse, illustration and photography are judged by different standards anyway, so I cannot really put them on the same ruler. Trying to prove one set is as good as the other is a dead end.
So I am dropping that impossible half and measuring something I can actually check: consistency. Not whether each set is good, but whether each set holds together as one coherent thing. Does the same person stay recognizable across all six frames. Is it the same world. Is the level of detail and finish steady. Is there a single frame that looks obviously broken. This is almost a checklist, and it is visible rather than subjective. My illustrations pass it. My AI photographs, right now, do not. That is the bar both sets have to clear before the test goes out.
And I can let the people confirm it for me. If I add one small question to the questionnaire, asking whether the images felt like a consistent set, then I am not just claiming the two sides were fair, I have evidence. If both groups rate consistency about the same, the comparison was fair. If one is much lower, that itself is honest data telling me the sets were not equal. Either way I learn something instead of guessing.
So that is the reset. The question is the same one it always was. The detours are folded in as rules to follow, not problems to keep circling. And the next concrete step is clear: lock the two image sets to the same quality, then finally put them in front of people.
