The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.

How can you say what the output of that workflow communicates or doesn’t communicate without seeing it?

The lot of them can’t even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that’s the thing they actually put effort into.

That statement is unsubstantiated. Without knowing the creator of that workflow I venture the following proposition: If the creator put in hours of effort into constructing it, so the AI would produce just the right output, then they clearly had a vision of what they were going for. And If they tried to get a detail just right, then that detail must have meaning to them, or else they wouldn’t bother.

I see another issue with the statement “The lot of them can’t even explain their own work”. Do you think every stroke of the brush has a meaning for a painter? Is every note carefully chosen in a piece of music? Or is it rather a case of “doing what feels right at the moment”? I ask that because I don’t see the difference in playing a few chord progressions on the piano and seeing what fits best, and letting AI generate a few outputs and seeing what fits best.

The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.

So, not all art is communicating heartfelt emotion. Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into the space of emotionally communicative art?

What if someone is making art (or maybe you want to use another word) purely for money? Or depraved tentacle porn? If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art or might it just be a means to the end of getting people to laugh?

You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.

Photography completely displaced the segment of visual art whose primary goal was to accurately (what we might now call "photorealistically") reproduce what could be seen, because it was a better tool for that goal. If you pay a painter for a portrait today, it's because you want to see the brush-strokes, not because you want the most accurate rendition of your face possible.

I don't think the displacement of the former kind of portrait painter by photographers is in any way a problem with photography. It was a problem for portrait painters, so I can understand the distress of people who are producing art at risk of being displaced by AI.

So how is it that use of AI is "selfishly invading" but photography was not?

Artists have always gatekeep art.

It's not even a new trope. It had happened forever.

The best indicative for something to be a true art is angry artists saying "that's not art".

Once again, your ignorance on how AI art is made is causing the hate. It's common to hate what we ignore.

You can communicate love with AI art if you want. You can communicate whatever you want, because you can make the art look whatever you want as good as you can do with any other media.

That complex workflow is not for shit and giggles. Is the pencil to make the final image be one way or the other. Same as a photographer would control que exposure or the focus. You can chose what's on the picture and what's not. With better accuracy that doing a collage.

Your premise is based on a limitation of the media that it's not real, thus is a false premise, thus your conclusions are false too.

I get that the hate for AI is mostly an irrational pseudo religious though. So I do not expect to change anyone's mind. But I will explain things anyway. I have an easy question, is your theory about AI arr falsable? Is there anything that you think could prove you wrong?

Asking it to write an entire song for you is not art.

Please correct me if I misunderstand your point. Are you saying that produce is not art if it is made because someone threw money at the creator and told them “do something for me”?

Cause if that’s your point, then a whole lot of classical music, for instance, is not art, because it was commissioned.

Plenty of artists stole other people's art. Entire genres are based on that. And one can even argue that all art is derivative and that truly original art do no exist.

It's not just prompts there are hundreds or thousands of different variables, several programs you can join in different positions, you can make it complex to inimaginable level, to writing your own programs to do part of the task, or making your own Lora with your art or training a lors with other people's art to achieve the result you want, it can get infinitely complex. You not liking or thinking is boring is irrelevant. Is complex enough and you can achieve specific results. It take time and expertise to do it right, as any other technique. And at the end it gives you enough freedom to be able to use it to express yourself which, in my book, is the definition of art.

You don't need to explain art to me. I've been doing artistic work as amateur for several decades now, I can more or less paint, write and play some instruments, I have a few short stories with a few thousands readers, it's nothing, but I know what the creative process is. And I've studied several courses of art history in university. I'm quite knowledge on the topic. I know about AI art because I find it extremely interesting and I've played quite a lot with it. But to be true most of the artistic things I still do are all manual, because I like it better, and because I get better results doing it like that. But I've seen other people getting very good results with AI tools.

Go search renaissance or baroque Churches and then come back and tell me that "copying other people's work is not art". Art being so different artist to artist is a relative recent thing, for most history all artists in a period just keep copying each other blatantly. I remember doing an exam where we had two pictures of two nearly identical renaissance churches and had to be able to differentiate the architects, and it was HARD. Those fuckers didn't need AI to copy each other's styles to the last stone. And nowadays are still studied as grand masters of their art.