This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.

Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.

And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.

Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.

It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.

So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.

How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?

No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.

That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.

I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."

But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.

AI is the same.

The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.

The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.

Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.

Usually this means I have forgotten to eat, or that I need to take a step back and consider whatever I’m doing at a deeper level. Once I recognized that the “keep trying and trying and nothing works” days vanished for good.

Yeah, no. Competent artists are not generalizable as "unconscious", solely "mashing up" influences or input, or even working with "signifiers": many are exquisitely aware of their sources; many employ diverse and articulated methodologies for creation and elaboration; many enjoy working with the concrete elements of their medium with no concern for signification. Even "technique" does not have a uniform meaning across different fields and modes.

For me, the artist, sure. I've not yet had a day where Affinity Photo just doesn't have the juice, and I don't see the appeal. Photoshop, for all it's faults, doesn't have bad days.

That's the difference between the artist and the artists' tool. A difference so obvious I feel somewhat condescending pointing it out.

> I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." ... But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.

"People were wrong about a completely different thing" isn't the slam dunk counterpoint you think it is.

Also as someone else in that space at that time, I genuinely haven't the slightest idea what you mean about photoshop not being real art. I knew (and was an) artists at that time, we used Photoshop (of questionable legality but still) and I never heard this at all.

> The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder,

Understatement of the year.

> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.

The difference is the lack of intent. A "person" mashes up what resonates with them (positively or negatively) and from those influences, and from the broader cultures they exist in, creates new and interesting things.

AI is fundamentally different. It is a mash up of an average mean of every influence in the entire world, which is why producing unique things is difficult. You're asking for exceptional things from an average machine (mathematical sense not quality sense.).

> In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

And I think one of those psycho-social consequences we're not discussing is everyone is just... fucking annoyed now, constantly, about shit that it doesn't feel right to really complain about. Like, you plus or minus live on your phone, and I'm very much including myself in that statement. Every time you get logged out of an app you use every day to, for example, board your morning train, or park your car, or have to reset a password to pay your power bill, just like, all of that? Every time your day is interrupted with stupid bullshit from Modern Life takes a tiny bit of that energy, and I dunno about everyone reading this, I have a quite well managed and streamlined life, and I still have just... dozens of these. Every single day. I can't fathom being one of the folks who ISN'T as well versed in tech as I am, existing for them must be utter HELL.

And that's the essentials, that's not even going into how most tech products now are constantly begging for your attention, for your engagement, trying to pluck the strings of your psyche into making you angry, or horny, or whatever. Engage with platforms, buy these products, watch 9 TV shows so you're not out of the loop, you've been added to an SMS spam group, and everyone is replying to it saying they're not interested, on and on and on.

Sorry this turned into more of a rant than I really envisioned but yeah. I can easily comprehend a day where I try and go to my gym, and the fucking app doesn't work right and I can't get in, and I just quit because I've already solved 20 fucking captchas today and I simply lack the energy to do another, to help train some goddamned AI, for a company I don't know, you know?

You've certainly hit upon why they use the same password for every single thing.

It was an intense deluge of SMS codes, flipping back and forth to the Authenticator, dismissing welcome popup modals, security email notifications.

I was frazzled by the multitasking and can only imagine how hard it would have been for some senior citizen that was badgered into updating their device.

I love this job but I can absolutely get people saying that AI helps them not "fight" the computer.

Once you've done it, you'll hopefully never have to do it again (or at worse be derivatives). Over time you'll have a collection of 'how to do stuff'.

I think this is the path to growth. Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.

But things like "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" are not hard leetcode problems

They're precisely the kind of tedious, but not taxing, problems that we prefer to farm out to someone else. Like asking a junior to do it.

Then we're just puppetmasters pulling the strings (which some think this is the way the industry is going).

* Shitty food is fucking delicious.

* For whatever reasons an individual cites, being fat is undesirable.

And... you can't. At least not with today's technology. But people hate that answer and so there's huge money in figuring out how to make it so people can eat like fatasses without being fatasses.

And... same. I'd fucking love that, I just don't expect it coming anytime soon.

Though I might have misunderstood.

I have an old laptop with 8GB of RAM and an ancient CPU that I haul around with I when something small for basic work. I can run Discord, Visual Studio Code, and Chrome just fine.

Something else was going on with that PC.

Or the kid did an excellent job of socially engineering his parents into an upgrade.

The anecdote in question is not about mis-diagnosis, it's about a delayed diagnosis. And yeah, the inquiry sent a doctor down three paths, one of which led to a diagnosis, so let's be clear: no, the doctor didn't get it completely on their own, and: ChatGPT was, at best, 33% correct.

The biggest problem in medicine right now (that's creating a lot of the issues people have with it I'd claim) is twofold:

- Engaging with it is expensive, which raises the expectations of quality of service substantially on the part of the patients and their families

- Virtually every doctor I've ever talked to complains about the same things: insufficient time to give proper care and attention to patients, and the overbearingness of insurance companies. And these two lead into each other: so much of your doc's time is spent documenting your case. Basically every hour of patient work on their part requires a second hour of charting to document it. Imagine having to write documentation for an hour for every hour of coding you did, I bet you'd be behind a lot too. Add to it how overworked and stretched every medical profession is from nursing to doctors themselves, and you have a recipe for a really shitty experience on the part of the patients, a lot of whom, like doctors, spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with insurance companies.

> How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcomes?

Depends on the quality of the research. In the case of this anecdote, I would say middling. I would also say though if the anecdotes of numerous medical professionals I've heard speak on the topic are to be believed, this is an outlier in regard to it actually being good. The majority of "patient research" that shows up is new parents upset about a vaccine schedule they don't understand, and half-baked conspiracy theories from Facebook. Often both at once.

That said, any professional, doctors included, can benefit from more information from whomever they're serving. I have a great relationship with my mechanic because by the time I take my car to him, I've already ruled out a bunch of obvious stuff, and I arrive with detailed notes on what I've done, what I've tried, what I've replaced, and most importantly: I'm honest about it. I point exactly where my knowledge on the vehicle ends, and hope he can fill in the blanks, or at least he'll know where to start poking. The problem there is the vast majority of the time, people don't approach doctors as "professionals who know more than me who can help me solve a problem," they approach them as ideological enemies and/or gatekeepers of whatever they think they need, which isn't helpful and creates conflict.

> Are there medical boards that are sending PSAs to help doctors improve common mis-diagnosis?

Doctors have shitloads of journals and reading materials that are good for them to go through, which also factors into their overworked-ness but nevertheless; yes.

> Whats the role of LLMs in all of this?

Honestly I see a lot of applications of them in the insurance side of things, unless we wanted to do something cool and like, get a decent healthcare system going.

The distinction between "can't do" and "can't get paid for" seems to get lost a lot with medical providers. I'm not saying this is necessarily what's happening with your wife, but I've had it happen to me where someone says, "I can't do this test. Your insurance won't pay for it," and then I ask what it costs and it's a few hundred or a couple thousand dollars and I say, "That's OK. I'll just pay for the test myself," and something short-circuits and they still can't understand that they can do it.

The most egregious example was a prescription I needed that my insurance wouldn't approve. It was $49 without insurance. But the pharmacy wouldn't sell it to me even though my doctor had prescribed it because they couldn't figure out how to take my money directly when I did have insurance.

I get that when insurance doesn't cover something, most patients won't opt to pay for it anyway, but it feels like we need more reminders on both the patient and the provider side that this doesn't mean it can't be done.

Tell me you've never lived in poverty without telling me.

An unexpected expense of several hundred to a couple thousand dollars, for most of my lived life both as a child and a young adult, would've ruined me. If it was crucial, it would've been done, and I would've been hounded by medical billing and/or gone a few weeks without something else I need.

This is inhumanity, plain as.

This is ignorance, plain as.

The statistics you see about bankruptcy due to medical debt are highly misleading. While it is a problem, very few consumers are directly forced into bankruptcy by medical expenses. What tends to happen is that serious medical problems leave them unable to work and then with no income and then with no income all of their debts pile up. What we really need there is a better disability welfare system to keep consumers afloat.

I am absolutely not. I am reacting to what's been replied to what I've said. In common vernacular, this is called a "conversation."

To recap: the person who replied to me left a long comment about the various strugglings and limitations of healthcare when subjected to the whims of insurance companies. You then replied:

> I generally agree (and sympathize with your wife), but let's not present an overly rosy view of government run healthcare or single-payer systems. In many countries with such systems, extensive therapy simply isn't available at all because the government refuses to pay for it. Every healthcare system has limited resources and care is always going to be rationed, the only question is how we do the rationing.

Which, at least how I read it, attempts to lay the blame for the lack of availability of extensive therapies at the feet of a government's unwillingness to pay, citing that every system has limited resources and care is always being rationed.

I countered, implying that while that may or may not be true, that lack of availability is effectively status quo for the majority of Americans under our much more expensive, and highly exploitative insurance-and-pay-based healthcare system, and that, even if those issues around lack of availability persisted through a transition to a single-payer healthcare system, it would at least alleviate us from the uniquely American scourge of people being sent to the poorhouse, sometimes poor-lack-of-house, for suffering illnesses or injuries they are in no way responsible for which in my mind is still a huge improvement.

> The statistics you see about bankruptcy due to medical debt are highly misleading. While it is a problem, very few consumers are directly forced into bankruptcy by medical expenses. What tends to happen is that serious medical problems leave them unable to work and then with no income and then with no income all of their debts pile up.

I mean we can expand this if you like into a larger conversation about how insurance itself being tied to employment and everyone being kept broke on purpose to incentivize them to take on debt to survive, placing them on a debt treadmill their entire lives which has been demonstrably shown to reduce quality and length of life, as well as introducing the notion that missing any amount of work for no matter how valid a reason has the potential to ruin your life, is probably a highly un-optimal and inhumane way to structure a society.

> What we really need there is a better disability welfare system to keep consumers afloat.

On that at least, we can agree.

I don't know any country that has banned paid healthcare just because they have government run one.

If you can pay out of your pocket for it in USA system when denied by insurance company then you would be able to afford it when denied by goverment. Since the criteria of whats necessary wouldn't shift (hospitals might even more money per patient)

In this way houses are virtually unique in terms of financial vehicles and it introduces all manner of complexity and otherwise strange forces into the market. You can't simply treat it like any other commodified asset.

I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is created by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.

Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them, or deliberately subvert something specific. That’s literally the creative process: choosing what to reference, twist, or subvert, reject, counter.

A model doesn't do that. It doesn't choose influences, it doesn’t have tastes, and it doesn't have intent. It just digests everything it's fed into a massive statistical set of averaged patterns that it has found, and then regurgitates them on command so as to "minimize error." Calling that the same thing as human inspiration is like saying a wood chipper is just an automated sculptor because both involve wood going in and differently shaped wood coming out.

The music industry fucks musicians raw, to be sure, but this is not guaranteeing anything for musicians in the slightest, quite the opposite: it just makes it so users of the models can also fuck musicians. How is that good at all? The exploitation of artists at scale being the status quo is not a reason to excuse even more exploitation, that's certifiably insane.

They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.

Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?

Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.

Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.

I got started in 2017 with an Ender 3, and extremely cheap printer with a basic set of features. I improved it by adding a bed leveling sensor and flashing new firmware, along with adding a tool steel nozzle and heater, and a 3d printed housing replacement for it's screen which included a place to mount a raspberry pi, running octoprint, to manage it remotely, and a webcam on a stick mounted to the Z rail. It worked pretty good, and building it was fun.

However in the intervening years, I also bought a Creality CR-6 Max, a much larger printer with a built-in bed leveler. It too got a pi and a webcam, but nothing beyond that, and it too worked well. However both those printers required constant maintenance, troubleshooting and overall fiddling. It remained my niche hobby.

I've since upgraded to a Bambu Lab H2D at great expense ($3,200 retail, utterly dwarfing the sub-$500 printers of before) and honestly, it's like a different tech all together. I don't even NEED a computer, really, unless I want to use one: I can find stuff on my phone, download it, and send it to the printer over their cloud service. And no troubleshooting really to speak of, I think I've had like 3 prints that did some weird shit and required a figure or two, but absolutely no comparison to the other machines. And in fact it's so bulletproof that my wife, who is utterly uninterested and frankly a bit hostile to tech, now uses it more than I do. She says it's a slightly trickier version of a Cricut, which is just WILD to me coming from my experiences with the Ender and Creality before it.

All of these are of course FDM printers. I have also played with a Photon Mono X I got from a friend who didn't want to use it with their birds in their home, and that one while requiring more fiddling and more chemicals, is also virtually bulletproof with regard to print quality, and you get better finishes with some tradeoffs (vulnerability to sunlight, figuring out curing vs. over-curing, what have you) which sounds a bit more like what you were dealing with. I could absolutely see that souring your opinion if you started there, that's not a beginner machine IMHO.