Nice story and reminiscent of my own experience. I burned through my free credits pretty quick and never did get exactly what I wanted, but close. It was an outdoor scene and the main problem is that the AI would insert random extraneous elements in the scene that ruined it. Like a big sort-of-a-cactus in the middle of an intersection. So then I was going to use another AI product to do a “magic erase” of the cactus but never got around to it.
And regarding your “smiling nicely while appearing happy” prompt innovation, I have done similar reiterations with ChatGPT. Kind of like you have to do with some people.
Try leonardo AI- it’s free, and you get 150 credits pr day- and soemthing like 900 prompts per month- https://app.leonardo.ai/ai-generations
Also Craiyon.com (note the spelling) is another free unlimited AI, and they have a basic prompt suggestion too- not as extensive as leonardo’s though- https://www.craiyon.com/
playgroundai.com/create is another- not sure if it is limited to certain amount of credits or not- but worth al look https://playgroundai.com/create
Blue Willow is another AI but i can’t join because something got messed up trying to join, and now discord won’t verify my account- keeps telling me i gotta give them a cellphone number to verify- and i don’t have one- https://www.bluewillow.ai/
With soem AI programs, they have a ‘negative prompts’ section where you tell it to say ‘Erase cactus in middle of road’ as in your example- not sure how good it works- but worth a try - one AI even has their own ‘eraser’ where you draw what you want changed, and then type in what should be there instead- like if a woman is wearing a blue broach, you could select that area and say “Make Broach red” and it will-
There are so many AI’s out htere now it’s hard to keep up on them all and what they can do- I liek Craiyon
Forgot to mention- i don’t know about the others=- i think they cost tokens to do upscaling, but craiyon.com does upscaling free- it’s a bit slower than the other AI’s- but not bad- takes about 1 minute- Upscaling renders a scene much nicer
I open several craiyon pages and do several works of art in each so I’m not waiting around for just one to finish-
For instance, if I’m doing a scene of say “Loretta Young, Vibrant Lighting, Unreal Engine Rendering, Godlike lighting with sun rays, standing on a beach next to a Porsche” i would put that into each page, and just change the name to someone else for each rendering- like Susanne Sommers, Angelina Jolie etc or whatever names you want to see- and leave everything else the same-