I’ve been (really, really) into photography since I was six, and I’m still (really, really) at it three decades later. I never felt much appeal toward photography as an art form – it’s always been a way to capture moments and share them with people I care about.
These days I play with both AI photography and “normal” photography. My main camera is the A9 III with a global shutter – a machine gun that fires 120fps RAW files. I shoot a lot of sports, and the people I photograph are thrilled to get such high-quality shots of moments that mattered to them. It doesn’t really matter how much cultural value society attaches to photos – those captured moments will always be meaningful to them, and they feel joy when they see them. That’s the whole point of photography for me.
AI photography is a bit different. I take 15–20 photos of a friend’s face with my camera, train a LoRA model to use with Flux1.dev, and upload it to network storage on RunPod. Then I spin up a serverless worker on an H100 that runs the ComfyUI API, and use my own Flutter-based frontend to play with prompts and generate new photos of that person. I can make far better headshots this way than in a real studio. For some friends, it’s even been a therapeutic experience – seeing so many high-quality images of themselves looking confident, happy, and fully alive helped them feel that way, even if just for a moment. One friend told me, “You did more with these AI photos of me than therapy did in the past year.”
That's actually working technique in sports psychology – one version of it called VSM (Video Self-Modelling), where edited video shows athlete performing correct/advanced technique. It tricks brain to belive in "future self". I'm not surprised it works with photos that well, but I think it's not studied yet. These AI photos I make a very different from, say, photoshopped faced. I tried it on myself too, and can confirm that it does have psychological effect.
Anything has an "psychological effect," and tricking a person into thinking any old junk is "better than therapy" is trivial - look at all the people who spend time and money on AI chatbots. It's also pretty clear it's not actually _good for them_.
And there's zero surprise here it would be used to manipulate potential athletes.
When I was in grade school I got the whole pitch on visualization: picture yourself making the free throw and you're more likely to make the free throw.
These days I play with both AI photography and “normal” photography. My main camera is the A9 III with a global shutter – a machine gun that fires 120fps RAW files. I shoot a lot of sports, and the people I photograph are thrilled to get such high-quality shots of moments that mattered to them. It doesn’t really matter how much cultural value society attaches to photos – those captured moments will always be meaningful to them, and they feel joy when they see them. That’s the whole point of photography for me.
AI photography is a bit different. I take 15–20 photos of a friend’s face with my camera, train a LoRA model to use with Flux1.dev, and upload it to network storage on RunPod. Then I spin up a serverless worker on an H100 that runs the ComfyUI API, and use my own Flutter-based frontend to play with prompts and generate new photos of that person. I can make far better headshots this way than in a real studio. For some friends, it’s even been a therapeutic experience – seeing so many high-quality images of themselves looking confident, happy, and fully alive helped them feel that way, even if just for a moment. One friend told me, “You did more with these AI photos of me than therapy did in the past year.”