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How Brian Kim Stefans incorporates AI into his creative process

December 16, 2025
UCLA Technology Development Group

This article is adapted from “AI For Good,” a special edition of the UCLA TDG Innovation Magazine. Read the complete feature.

Brian Kim Stefans has published several books of poetry and created works of digital literature since the late 1990s.

Lately, the UCLA English professor has been experimenting with ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into the creative process. Most recently, for an online anthology of Los Angeles poetry called “Extremes and Moderations,” which he expects to publish in 2026, he used AI to help design nearly 100 covers, primarily using the platform Midjourney.

“Midjourney is different because it’s not owned by one of the big AI companies,” Stefans said. “As a result, there is slightly more freedom and the quality of the images is higher, if not stranger. Every time you send in a prompt, it gives you four images that you can then create variations of through largely indirect methods.”

While AI automates some of the work, Stefans said the process still requires significant human input at every step.

“You just don’t type in something and get a perfect image,” he said. “It’s not like Photoshop, where you make very specific changes based on precise decisions. You can also have the image be inspired by other artists, and you can erase parts of it and have the AI fill it in and so forth. A lot of these covers would take hours.”

“Beauty Face: A Poem,” published in August, was Stefans’ first true collaboration with AI. To create it, he provided unused stanzas from another recent poem and prompted ChatGPT to write 100 stanzas in a similar style. Stefans kept revising the prompts until he was satisfied with the results and then swapped out stanzas here and there.

But it wasn’t just the text that was AI-generated. He also directed ChatGPT’s Dall-e image generator to create artwork to accompany each stanza and for the book cover design. The project took four solid days of work.

And the result? “I don’t think it’s a good poem that it came up with, but it’s a funny digital artifact,” he said. (Judge for yourself: The entire publication is downloadable for free from Stefans’ website.)