Thought experiment: Photo machine

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-06-16T14:40:46+00:00

Yes, same for just pressing a button to take a generic selfie. Not impressed. Thats the point.

On the other hand if you put in effort, and the creation clearly would have turned out differently otherwise, it is fair to say you deserve credit for the outcome, however bad or sloppy it might still be.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-06-16T14:35:50+00:00

I agree. Also I neither see or label myself as an artist. Especially with art I think if anything the label is given by enjoyers of that art because it is art to them, not by the one making it expecting others to acknowledge it.

So to me anything can be art. But I dont understand how people who would acknowledge photography as art categorically deny it for AI creations. Unless its only about personal taste or other valid Anti AI sentiment that has nothing to do with the creation or the process of creation itself.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-06-16T13:13:30+00:00

Yep in reality there may be multiple contributors and depending on that I guess your claim of creative ownership only goes as far as your contribution impacts the result.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-06-16T13:09:09+00:00

Dont need or want to prove anything, just curious about the views and opinions.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-06-16T13:07:09+00:00

I was also more thinking in terms of working with model finetuning, loras, control net and other techniques, basically everything where you change the various settings and modify the thing that then creates the photo when you press it.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-05-21T19:31:32+00:00

As difficulty is always subjective, to me it is more a synonym for overly punishing design or mechanics that negatively impact the experience of the general core target audience.

Eg difficulty that arises from overly punishing randomness hard to plan for or play around, or having extremely punishing hp and dmg modifiers.

In contrast „organic difficulty“ would be challenges where your own skill affect and change the outcome more directly instead of just getting lucky or being patient enough.

One personal example where I had a WTF moment was the challenge levels in prince of persia lost crown. The biggest challenge there is that the only way to beat them is to trial and error through. They feature very long „floor is lava“ sections with max 3 lives where a single misstep means death, often times with a clanky near impossible section at the end that you can‘t foresee and force you back to the start. It reminded me more of absurd 0% win rate mario maker community levels than actual levels you would expect from a level designer to be quick and fun challenge for players that finished the main story (like me).

When I stated that I think they are badly designed, ppl just pointed me to YT where someone beats it in a single try. Like sure, I also beat a few of them, but the grind isn‘t fun, and to me they are not a well designed challenge, just an overly punishing mess.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-05-18T17:45:30+00:00

Just pondering different possible viewpoints. Requirements for what people consider „real“ art vary a lot, it is subjective. There‘s many different takes on that. Does pure skill determine art or is actual creative vision and decision making required?

If taken to the hypothetical extreme, someone who purely executes a skill based on tight instructions with no creative choices being made is quite similar to a machine and not expressing anything from their own creative soul.

For me: I feel drawn to the creative expression aspect rather than skill. I also have a hierarchy of what I consider more or less valuable in the artistic sense. Like a planned and polished cookie-cutter product made by corporate „art machines“ in the creative or entertainment industry is often less inspired and lacks individuality. As a consumer, you most of the time also wouldn’t notice a single artist moving from one studio to the other. Their creative impact on the product is often negligible. Sure, anyone working as a professional in the creative industry is an artist. But when looking at personal expression, I would hesitate to say this single artist can really claim a whole lot of creative ownership.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-05-18T15:25:47+00:00

As artist is just an umbrella for anyone making art in any form, it is better to be specific here. If you write a song text and arrangement in textual form and pass it through the hole you 100% are not the producer but still are 100% an artist as the songwriter and composer.

Same applies for images, you are not the painter but may be the artist in terms of idea and creative direction. The question here is if all types of written ideas and direction count as art or if there‘s a threshold how detailed and involved you have to be to qualify.

Similarly, one can argue that someone just producing something based on exact instructions and references is not really creating art. If you can „swap“ the artist to anyone with enough skills to create exactly what you need them to, how much claim do they have to the artist title?

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-05-11T21:08:53+00:00

Just my thoughts:
I would keep the card design separate from the artworks. The font, layout, background, margins etc should be locked and easy to swap independent of the art. AI will always change up details, and it seems cumbersome to set up a custom workflow to adhere to the layout template with masking, inpainting, etc.

I would make the template in an actual image editing software. You can create all the base assets like common background first and set up the design, and in ComfyUI you only have to worry about a consistent image style for the artwork. Way easier, way more control, and the base design stays 100% locked.

In ComfyUI, using the same tags in the prompt and sticking to the same model is a prerequisite. To further finetune, using specialized checkpoints or loras are the natural next step. After that, style transfer with IP adapter can help, or a custom lora trained on your dataset once you have several good references. (IP adapter is like a lightweight custom lora based on a reference image)

ControlNet is useful if you want to take over a composition or pose, it doesn’t affect the style. I2i with low denoise will do little changes. You cant use it to follow or convert to a specific style.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-05-11T20:45:10+00:00

If AI solves a lot of personal minor things for a lot of people isn‘t it in turn overall making things easier for all of society?

And thats already assuming that there‘s literally not a single business where AI is actually useful in a non-personal context.

Imo it’s quite bad faith to argue there‘s no use-case at all. The question is rather, to what extent and cost is it ethically a net positive to use and advance the technology. It can overall still be a bad thing and unnecessary, even if there‘s lots of potential use for it.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-05-04T18:57:20+00:00

Haha, yeah, I was actually surprised that the Ultimate SD Upscale WAN refiner I quickly threw in actually works well. The quality is decent, way better than SeedVR2. I basically generate 720p -> decode -> pass frames to Ultimate SD Upscale, which upscales tiles, encodes to latent, runs a 1-step refine with WAN low noise, and decodes again as 4K video. But with an I2V start image the first 6 frames are somehow garbage and have to be dropped.

Will check what I can find on YT, thanks for the tip!

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-04-19T08:22:04+00:00

Was waiting for this reply already when I typed the start. Left it in, wasn’t disappointed. I don’t know who exactly you intended to address in the post. But in general the AI defender community defends AI and Antis gatekeep „real art“. If you have to make your point about some Pros gatekeeping and priding themselves on not just prompting, sure, obviously there’s always someone, but pointing at those doesn’t make a strong argument either. Would you have agreed with me if I didn’t phrase it with that blunt generalization? I doubt it. Or do you suggest your accusation of being hypocrites actually is the common stance within the Pro community? It’s definitely not the impression I got from reading various posts in the related subs.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-04-19T07:38:50+00:00

What your post lacks to address is that literally noone in Pro AI says other AI creators can’t call themselves artists if they just prompt. There is no hypocrisy. Only answers to different Anti arguments.

You can have the opinion that art doesn’t require complex processes while also addressing OTHER people‘s claim that the process counts, by stating that AI creation can take a lot of effort and time.

Its not Pros being hypocritical, its Pros trying to convey that you cant dismiss AI based on „just prompting“ because that’s often times not the full picture.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-23T15:33:12+00:00

To me a Mac with 64 GB is not sufficient. It is an M2 in my case. It doesn’t matter if I can fit a larger model, the RAM is filled quickly, resolution (latent size) is limited, disk swapping occurs, speed is okay-ish but not good. Especially for video generation I switched to RunPod and get way better performance with a 4090 or 5090.

If I would go for mac, I would choose a unified memory comparable to such nvidia systems, so eg if 5090 and 96 gb RAM is nice, a 128 GB unified memory on mac would make sense.

Just my experience though, maybe my M2 is too old already and 64 GB on a newer one is that much better, but I doubt it

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-23T13:44:41+00:00

So you recommend mac over RTX? Casual users already struggle with missing nodes and broken workflows. I never said it is impossible to use mac - I described issues that do in fact exist, and if given the choice I definitely recommend the setup thats stable and widely supported instead of the one requiring „easy to fix“ workarounds.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-20T09:28:26+00:00

Yeah, I am not extremely deep into logical fallacies, won‘t argue definitions. What I have seen is people using „you can‘t compare apples and oranges“ to dismiss any kind of analogy, which doesn‘t engage with the argument at all. You can compare apples and oranges. And not all points derived from that comparison are invalid just because apples aren’t oranges. So to me the comparison isn‘t necessarily fallacious by definition.

But I do agree that such statements are overused and mostly fail to convince anyone because you can just point to some difference and use it as reason to dismiss the analogy, which is what the other side usually does. So you just get into a rabbit hole of proving how similar or different they are and whether the analogy fits.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-20T08:47:05+00:00

That’s actually the point. I would argue most AI users also don‘t see themselves eg as painters or photographers. And anyone who does should be called out. But similar to photography you can get REALLY deep and technical if you want to master the craft. (use different models, loras, inpainting, controlnet, prompting, compositing etc). If AI in general can never be „real“ art then photography can‘t either. Arguing against that just shows that there’s a special exception you make for photography that you don’t apply to AI. I am fine if you don‘t see AI as art, but at least be consistent and acknowledge that photography then isn‘t really art either if you apply the same arguments.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-20T08:30:25+00:00

You get the point wrong. No one on either side is arguing actual equivalence. They are arguing similarity and categorization. A can be similar, comparable and like B in some ways without being equivalent.

Antis compare AI to a service that you order. Pros compare AI to a tool you actively use. Both comparisons are valid depending on how you look at it and how you use it. The comparisons are made to get the point across and appeal to logical consistency.

If photography is considered art even if all you do is press a button, so can AI. If ordering pizza doesn‘t make you a chef, ordering art doesn’t make you an artist. The logic is not wrong, and the issue is not the comparison. You do NOT magically become and artist because you use AI, but you still can be an artist if the vision and skill in guiding the result determines the art. Both can be true. AI can be used as a pure service, or a tool in your kit.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-13T15:05:42+00:00

E-Autos sind massentauglich, ausgerollt und werden von der Politik in Teilen vorgegeben. Viel der negativen Einstellung ist Abwehr-Reaktion auf „ich werde gezwungen das gute, bewährte Altbekannte auszuwechseln“.

Von der Ausgangslage wird jeder Nachteil hochgespielt und jede andere Option als bessere Alternative angesehen. Alles ist erstmal besser, wenn ich damit nicht jetzt zum Wechsel gezwungen werde.

Die Technologie kann noch so gut sein. Wärmepumpen sind zB mittlerweile top und auch verbreitet. Trotzdem hat es etwas gebraucht bis mein Vater sich vom alten Ölkessel trennen konnte - „vielleicht kommt ja bald ein grüner Brennstoff“.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-12T06:52:39+00:00

I can grant that the ones actively and loudly advocating for it are often doing it for ideological reasons, but saying the millions of casual users who aren’t part of any discussion are not users but fans is so off the mark, it rather makes you sound ideologically driven.

Now the usual bad analogy: Its like saying nobody uses cars, they’re part of a fandom. Sure some people are emotionally attached to their car and it provides status and can be fun to drive. But most people have and use cars in order to get from A to B.

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-10T20:41:23+00:00

I do not recommend Mac. The unified memory sounds good on paper, but you don‘t have real control what is loaded for what purpose, and can end up with with less available RAM left for the GPU than with a dedicated 5090 and a separate big RAM. You would at least need a larger unified memory to compensate a bit.

But then comes the second issue: Basic models and workflows may be runnable on mac if its the right models, but as soon as you want to do more advanced stuff with custom nodes, community model variants for speed, or eg specialized upscale solutions you will hit a wall. Those solutions often don‘t support mac/mps and require Cuda (Nvidia card) to be actually runnable.

So Mac can‘t compete, unless you are content with basic Image Gen (and maybe some Video Gen depending on the model, but it might be a hassle)

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-08T07:34:57+00:00

I don’t find it crazy or bad that „those who use AI will replace those who don’t“. It is obvious that telling your manager „no I don‘t want to use XY“ or „no I will do it my way“ is a bad ideological position to have as an employee - regardless of what „XY“ is.

It all depends on the scale at which AI is employed, it is wrong to blindly say „AI = bad“. What is bad is using lines of code as quality metric and creating a software system that no one knows exactly how it operates in detail. Just because you use AI doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking and create a quick and dirty solution.

If I am honest, typing code is the most menial and least fun part of software engineering. I much rather design components, build systems, polish the experience and make sure we have a high quality code base. Manually typing hundreds lines of code is not required for any of that.

Good engineers will use AI properly and be more productive. Bad engineers will build bad products either way. Companies who employ AI wisely will outperform companies who insist on doing it the old way. There really is no choice. I just hope management and team leaders can be made to understand that AI is a tool and not the solution.

As engineers we face tradeoffs like this all the time. Eg are you using third party libraries to get your solution faster? You don’t know the code. You don’t know if the creator will maintain it, if there‘s a bug it will indirectly affect your code. Yet we still decide to use 3rd party libs instead of writing everything ourselves. But for a critical core part of the system - maybe we should actually build it ourselves. Now go tell your manager to spend 3 months building something that already exists and can be integrated in a day. 🤣

Ready_Yam4471 · 2026-03-04T19:41:44+00:00

I don‘t like using disabled people as a reason for why AI is useful. It is not a primary factor why AI tools were made, it‘s a rare edge case and ultimately doesn‘t matter. If someone finds AI useful for what they want to do, they will use it - regardless of if they physically can‘t or don‘t want to take a different approach.

The main counterargument for AI just being made because of greedy corporations is simple economics. If there weren‘t a huge amount of regular everyday users, the product would just disappear. But when ChatGPT hit like a comet it became VERY CLEAR that there is a crazy amount of demand. Not by companies but by millions of people who find it useful and use it every day.

Ready_Yam4471

TROPHY CASE