Facing The Enemy. (Patreon)

The other day I randomly tried Grok on Twitter. I tried it mainly because Deviantart is absolutely inundated in AI garbage. That might sound counterintuitive but I found myself wondering what I could do with it since these people seem to be making money creating very unimaginative things. I have said it before, but I'm going to hammer the point again: I don't support AI, I accept that it's not going away unless legislation stops it. I don't think artists have what it takes to do that. Also China is already making AI that can simulate reality since they aren't bound by things like laws. I bring it up because someone always pitches a fucking fit whenever I do anything like I'm the one who is causing the state of the world. I'm already not well liked in the "art community" so I can't just hope that AI goes away. I need at least some idea of what I'm up against. Anyway, I'm going to share with you things I made with AI using MY art. These weren't generated out of nothing. I fed the robot my art and told it to do things. I feel like I need to stress this: I am not going to remake my comic with AI or switch over to it. I mean, if at some future time AI gets to a point where it could do that I would probably do it for fun, but I'm not going to suddenly not draw for you anymore.

I know that many of you think my art is very good, and I'm extremely glad you feel that way, but I have never felt like I was good enough. The version of the comic in my head is very different from what I can make and what you see. These AI images are like looking into my imagination and it strikes me with awe and terrifies me simultaneously.

Sometimes the robot understood exactly what I wanted and sometimes it took a swing and only clipped it. Alex's hairstyle took several tries and isolation from other characters to get it to work. It never understood Nina's teeth. It sort of understood what Ed is supposed to look like. It more or less understood Jo as a concept, but wanted to make her white and a boy a lot of the time. It couldn't figure out Maddison having light hair and darker skin in group shots at all. In a couple of images it absolutely nailed Rulette. For some reason Jess's glasses made it always try to render her as a real person more than the others. When it figured out the actual hairstyles I draw I was shocked. Seeing them rendered like that, in a way I barely understand in 3 dimensions, was something else.

Anyway, as you all have probably read at some point by now, I was in college at the dawn of Photoshop. My professors were terrified of it and refused to entertain teaching about it because they didn't understand it themselves. It crippled me in my career when I finally embraced art again. AI gives me those same feelings but it's even worse. Every aspect of society is going to change so much in the next decade. It will be a time of strife for most of us. Only jobs grounded in reality will hold out for longer.

If at some point someone buys the rights to the comic from me it won't be rendered in the style of my actual art. It will be something like this AI CGI, or something along those lines. A day may even come where I can show the pages to a robot and it will just make it a movie. I guess we'll see, if we survive the robot wars.