Abbildung © AURORA, 2025
Glossary
Here you’ll find a growing glossary of the terms we use throughout the IUNO project, some of which may not always be clear to everyone. You can also suggest new terms for the glossary yourself by sending a short email to hi-iuno@htw-berlin.de.
ComfyUI
ComfyUI is a free program that lets you create images, videos, or sound using artificial intelligence. Instead of just prompting, you build your own workflow, which gives you more control over individual parameters: on a canvas, you place building blocks (e.g. “choose model,” “enter description,” “generate image”) and connect them with lines, much like in a circuit diagram (keyword: node-based programming). This way you can see what happens at every step, intervene deliberately, experiment, save workflows, and share them with others.
ComfyUI runs on your own computer, so your work and models stay with you, and you decide which AI models to use. Getting started takes some patience and a computer with a powerful graphics card, but in return you get a great deal of creative control.
ComfyUI was started in 2023 by a developer under the pseudonym comfyanonymous and is now developed further by the US-based organization Comfy Org. A large community also contributes its own extensions.
LoRA
A LoRA (short for Low-Rank Adaptation) is a kind of plug-in that lets you train an AI image model on a specific style, character, or motif. The large base model remains unchanged.
A LoRA is trained on a manageable number of example images, often just a few dozen. Afterwards, it can be added in programs such as ComfyUI, and its strength can be adjusted. This produces images that fit your own personal style, a body of work, or a corporate design. In the cultural sector, this is particularly interesting because it allows artists to build on their own work rather than following the mainstream of common AI models.
The method was developed in 2021 by researchers at Microsoft, originally for text models. As a further development by an open community, it is now used mainly for image generators.