First, find a lackluster icon that fills you with boredom. This can be for many different things, but you should probably choose something you see fairly often. I highly recommend the programs here to make icons large and very visible! >>3789

You should probably prompt in a square resolution, but it depends on how willing you are to crop things. It's probably better to keep it square for framing purposes.
Think of a good AI image to replace it with. Since this is 'desktop' I'll try to theme it by using a computer and desk in the prompt. Okay, this prompt sucks. But it's a start.

There. This is much better. So you should add tags that fill you with joy. Yes, something like this will work nicely. If you look closely you can see a computer in the background, so it's still on theme. Any minor AI errors can probably be ignored at the target size, at least for me.

>>3828
Edit the image if needed. In this case I cropped it a bit so more of Kuon would show up. I also scaled it down to 256x256 because photoshop's downscale filter thing is a lot better than gimp's.
Open it in gimp, then choose to export and type "[name].ico" and export it.

In windows, right click the icon and go to Customize. This may be more involved for some types of icons, like internet browsers that demand that you change the icon of the .exe itself instead of the shortcut. Find your .ico file and select it.

Behold, your computer experience and by extension your life has improved. Do this with many icons and use those programs that I mentioned earlier to fill your computer with happiness!

I did a few icon replacements with resource hacker since the icons never stuck through customize, but generally I keep them as default unless I find a really good replacement, like this for firefox which I clipped into an icon. My issue with everything else is from a UI perspective. Over-detail drowns out any meaning of what the icon is supposed to represent, and if you're using names to figure what they are then they completely fail as icons in the first place; especially when shrunken down to around 70 pixels. Not to say you can't have any detail like what seemingly every corporation is doing, but it should still be a readable logo for what you're doing. And that's really hard for AI to do, it really wants to cram in detail and struggles with more abstract concepts. Like for example, a "my computer" icon could be a computer tower with your character of choice hanging out the open side panel; simple and thematic, but good luck wrangling the machine to do it.

>>3831
Um... but then how do I start telling stuff apart if all my various shortcuts are Kuon...

Just use one of the thousands of icon sets designed by real people and have them actually look good.

>>3825
Making custom icons has nothing to do with AI. You can grab any image you like, crop it, and use that.

>>3832
Yeah, something like a plain or transparent background is probably a good idea. Tags like "simple background, [color] background" is good for that and photoshop's magic picker thing is pretty good at removing backgrounds.

>>3834
My Computer: Kuon sitting at computer
Recycling Bin: Kuon holding a bag
Firefox: Kuon holding sparkler (the firework thing)
Media Player: Kuon holding a camera

I won't really use Kuon for all of this, but it's fun to think of themed things to make the desktop space more interesting

>>3835
Thank you for the rude sage of disapproval, but the idea of this is to personalize it with boobs and butts and cute Kuons.

>>3836
SPIKE?!

>>3837
Thank you for the second rude sage of disapproval! This thread is off to a good start!

>>3828
you can barely even see the desktop in this

>>3832
Prompt stuff like "flat colors", "abstract"

>hide /jp/ shitposts
>they start shitting up other boards
Dumb niggers. inb4 who are you quoting -- my life.

You know I actually started doing this, not with AI, and drew about 5 different folder icons but then lost interest.

>>3844
Why not offer genuine criticism then instead of meaningless angerposting?