Author’s note: I’ve avoided commenting on artificial intelligence up to this point. When I saw an AI-generated comic based on one of my own, I decided it was time to examine my role as a human artist in this AI-addled world. I don’t have many answers. But I have questions.
Can an athlete run a marathon without training? Maybe.
Can a religious person get to heaven without praying? Possibly.
Can a chef fix a great meal without making a mess in the kitchen? Sure—if they’re not the one cooking.
What kinds of work should be outsourced to machines? What kinds of pleasure? What kinds of essential life experience?
Should perfection require a few failures? A hundred? A thousand?
An infinite number of failures before you realize that human perfection is an illusion?
Perhaps humans should strive for mastery, not perfection. And mastery requires a limit to one’s skills that can only be approached, never reached.
The work I make only seems to work when I write and draw from the heart. (AI may have consciousness, but it has no heart.)
At certain points in my career, I’ve tried to cultivate detached sarcasm. I’ve tried to be cynical, political, commercial, nihilistic—it all falls flat.
A certain kind of anti-AI screed like this one is in style right now. So maybe this piece is doomed to fail. Oh well.
Maybe having my life’s work be a joke wouldn’t be so bad.
Other artists have succeeded at this: Marcel Duchamp, for instance.
Jokes make life worth living. Even if the joke’s on me:
Developing my craft over decades, only to see it recreated in moments by an amateur making a few keystrokes.
What if the techno-optimists are right, and it's best to live in a world of pure optimization?
Unfortunately, imagination can’t be optimized.
It’s inefficient. Impossible to measure. And mostly pointless.
Therefore imagination has no real value. Right?
Why chase the latest technological trend? Why fret over the latest AI breakthrough?
If there’s truly an AI apocalypse coming, why not pick up a fiddle and learn a tune?
There’s work to be made.
Messy, pointless, imaginative, important work.
Human work.
Further reading:
My new illustrated novel is a testament to hand-drawn work. Told in sketches, scrapbook pages, and poems, it’s the story of a boy named Adam who decides to give up the thing he loves most: drawing. (I repurposed some of the crumpled pages from the book cover for the comic above.)
Psst: You can pre-order it here!
My original cartoon (a long-time internet meme) and the AI “homage.” Man vs. Technology, indeed. Where did I put my baseball bat?
Artnet wrote about my twin brother Gavin’s debacle with an internet famous artist who snagged Gavin’s original NY Knicks compositions and played them off as his own—possibly with the assistance of AI. Here’s Gavin’s diplomatic instagram response. The other artist has since taken down his versions.
Beth Spencer’s human intelligence badges. I need to make one of these!
Every time I hit send on a new substack post, I notice a few typos. This time I'm tempted to leave them in to prove I'm human!
Everytime I am in a dilemma over AI, I think of what painters must have felt like when photography arrived and print making helped reproduction of art. (there's an excellent article on this by Walter Benjamin)
Looking back we know that painting as an art form not just survived, but thrived. So will we :))