Explainability-in-Action: Enabling Expressive Manipulation and Tacit Understanding by Bending Diffusion Models in ComfyUI

Explainable AI (XAI) in creative contexts can go beyond transparency to support artistic engagement, modifiability, and sustained practice. While curated datasets and training human-scale models can offer artists greater agency and control, large-scale generative models like text-to-image diffusion systems often obscure these possibilities. We suggest that even large models can be treated as creative materials if their internal structure is exposed and manipulable. We propose a craft-based approach to explainability rooted in long-term, hands-on engagement akin to Sch\"on's "reflection-in-action" and demonstrate its application through a model-bending and inspection plugin integrated into the node-based interface of ComfyUI. We demonstrate that by interactively manipulating different parts of a generative model, artists can develop an intuition about how each component influences the output.

Seizing the Means of Production: Exploring the Landscape of Crafting, Adapting and Navigating Generative AI Models in the Visual Arts

In this paper, we map out the landscape of options available to visual artists for creating personal artworks, including crafting, adapting and navigating deep generative models. Following that, we argue for revisiting model crafting, defined as the design and manipulation of generative models for creative goals, and motivate studying and designing for model crafting as a creative activity in its own right.