During Burning Man in 2022 the CEO of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, Sam Altman sat down with Android Jones to talk about the future of AI and art in a massive neon-lined yurt. Jones, a self-described “digital alchemist and painter” was tasked with presenting, interviewing and debating Altman as they reclined in plastic lawn chairs center-stage.
Sam Altman stood out from the dusty crowd with his unimaginative white t-shirt, lack of snowboarding goggles and two foot goth boots. Despite this he gave the captive, and probably rolling, crowd his pitch confidently. According to Altman OpenAI had “figured out intelligence”, that they had made a tool that created “a new experience in the way we interface with the world.” His overall message was not unlike many you’ll hear from many advocates of AI technology in general and generative AI specifically. Generative AI is simply a cutting-edge tool that makes art creation easier and more accessible for everyone. As Altman says, “As someone with no artistic talent myself, this skill has felt like a new super power.”
Generative AI can, among many other things, create images from text prompts typed into its interface. Without much effort someone with a couple vague ideas can see a facsimile of those thoughts on screen, albeit with extra arms and weird teeth. But Generative AI doesn’t make those images out of nothing. It scrapes billions of images, often without their creator’s expressed permission, to create new images that look like the ones its been trained on. Again, with weird teeth. While most artists, particularly the one’s who’ve seen AI recreations of their style being sold by unscrupulous tech jocks, have objected to the outright theft of their work, advocates of AI like Altman disagree. They insist that these artists are just cavemen trying to hold us back from a bright and inevitable future.
I don’t really know who Android Jones is. I found the video of his debate with Altman after a podcast about OpenAI referenced it. Sitting across from Altman in a long striped tunic, thick Buddy Holly glasses, and raggedy caucasian “dreadlocks” he looked like any number of other “burners” jetting into the overpriced desert festival. As he began to respond to Altman’s claims of AI’s benefits I didn’t have any optimism that he would represent much of a counterbalance.. On his website Jones attributes his success making “psychedelic “ art to “the wonders of technology.” Which isn’t a surprise given his name. He went all in on the NFT craze, selling works through “digital art market” Superrare for tens of thousands of dollars. Before his current career he worked in the video game industry, working on several Metroid titles and founding a game concept art company called Massive Black. It didn’t seem like Altman could’ve generated a more sympathetic artist to debate.
Then Android Jones said, “You are meddling with the primal forces of human’s relationship with the creative experience forever. No one voted [for] you, no one had a say in that.” I squinted at my screen, wondering if me and this trustafarian had suddenly switched places. He continued by saying,“…there was a moment where I did entertain…If I could, go back like Terminator [and] I would potentially sacrifice my life to strangle you.”
If I was in Android Jones’s place, this is where the debate would end for me. What else is there to say? There isn’t a debate to be had around generative AI’s place in art, and if there is a conversation to be had it’s a very old one. Generative AI is not an exciting new tool for artists, nor is it “democratizing”. Generative AI is just the latest way for rich people to steal our work and sell it back under the guise of convenience.
I’ve been working in the comics industry for about the last fifteen years, mostly as a freelancer. I’ve worked for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Inside Magazine, Boom Studios, The Nib, the Believer Magazine, Vice and many other outlets. While doing this job I have spent endless late nights leaning over my half broken drafting table, ink brush trembling in the tired cramped hook that was my drawing hand, so that another four panel gag comic about mass incarceration could be done on time. I’m living a dream I’ve had since I was ten. I spent hours trying to copy drawings from the pages of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn with crayon on construction paper. And as soon as I started tackling all those spiked belts and floating chains Spawn was wearing, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Comics take an extraordinarily long time to produce, much longer than most people realize. But despite this, they don’t usually pay very. It is a form of entertainment in its sunset years that is attached to a dying industry. So to eat a full-time cartoonist needs to be in a constant state of production against crushing dueling deadlines. Unless you hit gold with a title, or come from a gold-having family, you can look forward to a long illustrious career of working hand-to-mouth.
This is by design. If there’s money to be made in comics, it will trickle down to us last. Artists are just part of the production line for outlets that sell our work, and an inconvenient one at that. We need to eat, sleep and pay our bills, in addition to our exhausting need for free time away from work to find inspiration. The people that make the most money from the monetization of our labor, which is to say rich people, have been using all sorts of tricks to bypass us for a long time. In fact, artists not getting paid is part of superhero comics’ early lore. Starting with Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the inventors of Superman. Publishers used legal maneuvering and suspect industry “standards” to dance around paying these artists, and many others, what they were worth. Jack Kirby, the inventor of countless legendary characters and one of the greatest comic artists of all time, went to war with the industry to get his original pages back. Even the pages of Spawn I was trying hard to copy grew out of the industry's history of exploitation. Todd McFarlane, along with Jim “are-these-all-the-same-woman” Lee, Rob “how-is-that-a-chest” Liefeld and others founded Image as a response to the exploitative practices of DC and Marvel. If you look at indie comics, comics in Europe and Japan you will find similar stories. Comics are a business and for business owners human workers have always been a necessary evil. Until now I guess.
I don’t want to talk around the realities of what people like Sam Altman actually think about art. These people do not like art, they hate it. What they know about art is only that the silly masses will spend money to enjoy it. In reality the Altman’s of the world are confused and annoyed by the creative process because they believe everything should be engineered and efficient. They think it should function like any other consumer products they handle, mined by faceless African orphans in a dank hole far away from their view. And, like Android Jones said, no one asked, voted or wanted this approach to art. No one with a soul would think to do this. That this, or any exploitation, is a “debate” is not due to the merits of generative AI. It is a billion dollar industry instead of a burning heap of chips because of the near invisibility the various doe-faced Ivy League money fetishists have in our society. Their necks are all but unreachable, so we end up running through their various rhetorical mazes in order to appeal to their sympathy, decency or sense of humanity. But these are not decent people. They are looming voracious leviathans that gobble up anything remotely beautiful and shit out its remnants on our heads. And the shit isn’t even free, there’s a tier subscription for it and definitely some fucking Wayfair ads.
If I even wanted to debate against Generative AI on the basis of its negative effects on the world, I could. All you have to do is lift your shoes and the filthy realities of AI are there. The amount of emissions pumped out and water sucked up by one year of AI queries could snuff out Denmark, or some other country I would actually miss. The effects generative AI has had on our media landscape has already been catastrophic. We were already fed up with a world of unreliable corporate owned media, but now you can’t even trust that someone’s cat video isn’t a Russian psyop or an obscure racist meme. The scale of theft from everyday people should not go understated, if you have posted anything online, it’s being stolen from you. Both my gag comic about slave labor and the teary late night eulogy you posted about your deceased Nana are being mined so that a vacuous billionaire can pretend he invented something. To debate the merits of AI, to even insinuate this technology has pluses and minuses, is to give it a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.
While Android Jones went on to chat cheerfully with Sam Altman for several hours after threatening his past life, I won’t give this topic that much of my time. For one thing, I have several deadlines. For another, I’ve said over and over that generative AI isn’t a “new way to experience the world,” and there definitely isn’t anything intelligent about it. It’s the same old exploitation with new weird extra teeth.
The post ‘I would potentially sacrifice my life to strangle you’: A Sentiment Against AI Art appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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