You can almost hear the dramatic synth music swelling in the background when you look at Clouded Thoughts III. What promises to be a contemplative collection of poetry has instead walked straight out of a vaporwave weather simulator powered by mid-tier AI. It’s not so much after the storm as it is during a high-def, overexposed climate crisis, brought to you by a neural network with a love for rainbows and zero understanding of cloud physics.
Let’s begin with the elephant in the sky: the AI-generated art that’s trying so hard to look profound. The clouds come in an unnatural blend of indigo, magenta, orange, and “apocalypse peach.” They billow with all the drama of a soap opera on Mars. The lightning? Less electrical discharge, more promotional graphics for a sci-fi energy drink. And the rainbow—oh, the rainbow—it arches across the page like a proud, technicolor brag, practically yelling, “We hit every Photoshop slider and we’re not sorry!”
But the chaos doesn’t stop at the atmosphere. The typography has its own storm system. “CLOUDED THOUGHTS III” floats up top in bold, bubblegum-pink neon, like it’s headlining a spoken word night at a synthwave nightclub. Then we get the subtitle: Poetry Thoughts After the Storm. Poetry… thoughts. As opposed to what, poetry shrugs? Poetry ramblings? The redundancy here is more cloudy than thought-provoking.
Now brace yourself for the author’s name—because it’s vertical, and not in a cool, “art gallery catalog” way. It’s more like someone realized there wasn’t enough room and just said, “Eh, let’s run it down the side like a spine that forgot its place.” Vertical text: difficult to read, awkward to balance, and in this case, a visual speed bump on a design highway already filled with AI potholes.
And then there’s our tiny mystery man at the bottom. He’s walking into the storm, sure, but it looks more like he wandered in from a completely different book—perhaps one about lost video game protagonists. He’s there for scale, or mood, or because someone typed “man walking into storm” and the algorithm had a spare silhouette lying around.
The overall result is an aesthetic that screams “deep and emotional,” but lands firmly in the realm of “AI-generated Pinterest fail.” It’s the kind of cover that wants to be profound but ends up looking like it’s recruiting you for a spiritual retreat hosted inside a lava lamp.
This isn’t a reflection after the storm. It’s a fever dream during a tech demo.
A cloudy thought, indeed.