Here we go with another ridiculous edition of our weak weekly newsletter! In this issue we wish a happy 80th birthday to one of rock's greatest guitarists, reveal another CLAPTRAP sneak peek, and do a little of what every self respecting professional artist does... complain about AI!...on with the 'Wretch!
Happy Birthday Jimmy Page!
I was a bit of a metal head as a teenager and Led Zeppelin was one of my favorite bands, although they had already broken up by the time I was really getting into music in the early 80's. Guitarist Jimmy Page turned 80 yesterday. His name appears in the top ten of virtually any list of the greatest guitarists of all time, and often is at or near the top. He is truly one of the best ever. I did this sketch a few years back.
Another CLAPTRAP Sneak Peek!
Here's another of the movie poster spoofs Desmond Devlin and I did as extra material for our CLAPTRAP book. This one we are going to release online to promote the book... but you all saw it here first! Fans of "Adventure Time" love it.
If you haven’t ordered your copy of CLAPTRAP yet, what are you waiting for?
Grand Theft AI
I get asked a lot about my opinion of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI), its impact on the professional world of art in general and my part of it in particular.
My opinion is pretty simple. AI generated images are not art, they are images created by "scraping" and combining elements of real artist's work. There is no actual creating going on with AI. Without the source material that was created by real artists, no AI images would be possible. One could argue that human artists learn to create the same way, by studying the work of others and incorporating it into their own styles. Studying the work of other artists is part of learning to be an artist, but the ultimate result of that learning is "their own style" because the very process of creating visual art by hand cannot subtract the individuality of the artist. Unless the artist is consciously trying to mimic another artist's style, the end result is unique to them alone. AI has no "style", it mimics the style of other artists only. The illusion of uniqueness is based only on which artists a particular program used as source material.
People who use AI to generate images are not artists. Being an artist means you visualize something in your head and then create that image from nothing using your skills. An artist controls every step of that process from blank paper or canvas to completed piece of art. Using AI, a person types a bunch of prompts into a program and what appears before them is a complete surprise. There is no connection between what they may have visualized (if anything) in their heads and what appears on their screen. Changing the prompts to alter that image isn't creation either, it's "art directing" at best.
Sadly, none of that really matters. Ethics aside, AI is able to generate images that are usable for purposes that previously required the skills of an artist to create. This means that AI generated images can and will be used by two different types:
1. Companies/end users who want images to use but don't want to pay much or anything for them.
2. People who want to be artists but are either too lazy to put in the time and hard work to develop actual skills or who lack any kind of talent in the first place.
Of those two categories it's the former that is the only real threat to the world of professional artists, and honestly it isn't all that new a threat. There has always been a certain class of "client" looking for cheap art and not being willing to pay a fair amount of money to artists to create that art. For professional creatives, those are not real potential clients in the first place. No, the real scary part for professional artists is when clients that can afford and should be paying actual artists to create images for them start using AI generated images instead just to save a few bucks. You would think that big creative companies like media or advertising clients would be smart or ethical enough to understand the relatively small amount of money they'd save using AI generated images rather than paying real creators would not be worth the potential bad publicity and controversy... but then something like this happens:
You can follow this link to read the complete story, but the short version is Wacom Technologies used some purported AI generated images in a few of their New Year promos including the one pictured above. Of all the companies you'd think would be the LAST to do something like this, it would be a company whose very target audience for their products are artists who create work that is now being threatened by AI. If a company that sells digital art creation products to actual artists thinks it's ok to run ads for those products using AI generated images rather than paying one of their customers to create the art, how can anyone expect Coca-Cola or Sony or Warner Bros to do differently? Needless to say Wacom is taking it on the chin for this.
This is the kind of thing the second category of "People who want to be artists but..." end up doing:
This is a screen capture of a promo video for a book from a series of "How to Draw" books currently being promoted all over the pace online. This is a page from my book "The Mad Art of Caricature":
Look familiar? This is what you get when you have a tool that allows someone to generate images and content through AI. They can "create" a faux product that is really just stealing and repackaging the work of others via AI and selling it to the gullible masses. These books are most likely completely AI generated. No artists are credited. Unfortunately there are plenty of people out there who will buy something like this. We will see this kind of thing more and more as time goes on.
What do we artists do about it? Not much we can do. We just need to keep creating our art and looking for new ways to make a living from it. Maybe the courts will do something to protect the rights of artists whose work is being stolen and used by these AI programs. A recent class action lawsuit against the Midjourney AI program is getting attention after a list of 16,000 artists whose work was allegedly used to "train" that program was leaked online. Other legislation that prevents anyone from copyrighting any images created using AI is another helpful step. That seems apropos to me. If an "artist" uses AI to generate an image, they cannot take legal action if anyone decides to use that image for any purpose. Stealing from the thieves!
The bottom line is AI is here and it's not going away. It's not the first technology based challenge that has impacted the ability of creative people to make a living (I'm looking at you, internet) and it won't be the last. It's just the latest. I think there will always be a market for real artists creating real unique art to make a living doing it. That market keeps changing and evolving. It's up to artists to change and evolve with it.
Yes, very unfortunate about Wacom. The trade-off of using clip art instead of using real artists is such a short-sighted misstep. Did it save them a few bucks? Sure. Did it cost them their goodwill among their community of artists? Absolutely.
Even if they did think it was coming from a human artist (which is what their statement insists) it is so clearly A.I. generated, even a first year art student would be able to see everything wrong with it. Had they shown anyone who makes art before hitting 'publish' they would have flagged it immediately.
The Midjourney Class Action looks a little more promising than it did this time last year.
More discussions from artists on A.I. generated art here for anyone interested: https://jasonchatfield.squarespace.com/blog/replay-of-aiml-media-advocacy-summit-march-10-2023
Great article Tom! I have contemplated all of those points you made but with no answers to it at all. I used to be disappointed about the stock illustration books that were circulated because although the artist's work represented made some repeated cash , in some way it definitely deprived other artists from being considered to do custom illustrations for potential clients. Now after seeing the damage AI can do to the artist industry, those books look like a piece of chocolate cake.
thanks for bringing this up and as always, being so genuine with your feelings about this whole development. I guess all through the ages certain developments have been made that changed the status quo in art and it has still survived as a profession. God willing , We all will still be here using the creative gifts we have been given for a very long time. After all if you have ever read any of the 1960's Gold key comics about Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. , amid a world overrun by robots... there was still a Magnus!!!