Using a node based workflow with comfyUI, also being able to draw, also being able to train on your own images in a lora, and effectively using control nets and masks: different story...
I see, in the near future, a workflow by artists, where they themselves draw a sketch, with composition information, then use that as a base for 'rendering' the image drawn, with clean up with masking and hand drawing. lowering the time to output images.
Commercial artists will be competing, on many aspects that have nothing to do with the quality of their art itself. One of those factors is speed, and quantity. Other non-artistic aspects artists compete with are marketing, sales and attention.
Just like the artisan weavers back in the day were competing with inferior quality automatic loom machines. Focusing on quality over all others misses what it means to be in a society and meeting the needs of society.
Sometimes good enough is better than the best if it's more accessible/cheaper.
I see no such tooling a-la comfyUI available for text generation... everyone seems to be reliant on one-shot-ting results in that space.
Very interesting to see differences between the "mature" AI coding workflow vs. the "mature" image workflow. Context and design docs vs. pipelines and modules...
I've also got a toe inside the publishing industry (which is ridicilously, hilariously tech-impaired), and this has certainly gotten me noodling over what the workflow there ought to be...
Aside for the terrible name, what does comfyUI add? This[1] all screams AI slop to me.
Basically it's way beyond just "typing a prompt and pressing enter" you control every step of the way
[1]https://blog.comfy.org/p/nano-banana-via-comfyui-api-nodes
I'd say that comfy UI is like Photoshop vs Paint; layers, non-destructive editing, those are all things you could replicate the effects of with Paint and skill, but by adopting the more advanced concepts of Photoshop you can work faster and make changes easier vs Paint.
So it is with node based editing in nearly any tool.
Think of it this way: spreadsheets had a massive impact on the world even though you can do the same thing with code. Dataflow graph interfaces provide a similar level of usefulness.
They’re about as similar as oil and water.