r/technology 20h ago

Artificial Intelligence I’m a political cartoonist. AI is making a mockery of my profession

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/artificial-intelligence-political-cartoons-20805437.php
978 Upvotes

162 comments sorted by

296

u/AlwaysBePrinting 18h ago

"As artificial intelligence infiltrates virtually every aspect of modern life, I had assumed, completely incorrectly, that editorial cartooning was probably more or less immune."

That's a heck of an embarrassing admission.

38

u/johnjohn4011 11h ago

Stealing everything everywhere all at once.

-43

u/[deleted] 13h ago

[deleted]

39

u/QuickQuirk 11h ago

Satirical cartoons at their best are the purest distillation of journalism with a message that can be digested in a 10 second glance.

They're not just funny business

43

u/montanawana 12h ago

It may sound old fashioned but that doesn't mean that they should be plagiarized or have no right to their intellectual property.

5

u/PaulTheMerc 11h ago

If meta can steal everyone's stuff without facebook ending fines, the rest of us should be able to as well.

1

u/ablacnk 1h ago

If meta can steal everyone's stuff without facebook ending fines, the rest of us should be able to as well.

if Boeing can assassinate a whistleblower for calling them out on their wrongdoing, the rest of us should be able to as well

1

u/zeptillian 1h ago

You can, but you should not be able to profit off of it by claiming it as your own work.

That is theft.

2

u/SAugsburger 11h ago

It was definitely a much smaller profession as more newspapers were just contracting that out from a syndication service or had one that worked for a large network of newspapers with a common owner, but it is definitely a profession that survived into the 21st century.

1

u/rudyattitudedee 5h ago

Every sunday is their Super Bowl. They gotta come correct

1

u/Thesollywiththedumpy 10h ago

Yeah, and being ignorant was supposed to be a thing of the past because the Internet makes it so easy to learn. Yet here you are with your ideas of what should and shouldn't exist based entirely in feelings

38

u/OiMyTuckus 20h ago

Thomas Nast spinning a hole to China.

353

u/Moth_LovesLamp 20h ago

Mocking, Copying and Stealing.

Imagine being OK with robots doing art for you while you work on the boring stuff like laundry.

102

u/deeptut 19h ago

There is an Isaac Asimov story where a robot creates art, which an artist sells as his own. Until a guest to a dinner party, who is a robot technician, repairs it without asking, because he noticed there is something wrong with it.

27

u/Only-Cheetah-9579 19h ago

go on,

what is the name of the story

59

u/-HakunaChicana- 19h ago

Light Verse. wiki page)

3

u/deeptut 17h ago

Ah, cool, thx :)

14

u/deeptut 19h ago

I've read it more than 40 years ago, when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, can't remember. It was a book with several short stories.

13

u/Tall_poppee 16h ago

Watch the documentary Tim's Vermeer, where they investigate how someone who had no art training created a method of painting that the world had never seen, and went on to become uber famous. He had a little help from what would have been considered technology, 500 years ago. Even if you don't care about art, the doc is amazing.

2

u/Frigidspinner 10h ago

I saw it - loved it!

4

u/Decabet 15h ago

That is a brilliant idea for a story. I gotta read this

7

u/azsqueeze 13h ago

Asimov has a ton of great short stories. All of it is early sci-fi also.

The Last Question is my favorite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

3

u/mr_dfuse2 13h ago

damn i thought this was that story about budhists calculating the name of god or something

3

u/zagra_nexkoyotl 12h ago

That's "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C Clarke

1

u/frogandbanjo 6h ago

Sounds like one hell of an interesting lawsuit to me.

15

u/skyzm_ 18h ago

People invent things to take away their workload. We already have washing machines and dryers lol. As soon as there’s a machine that folds clothes and puts them away too, we’ll be using that.

I hate AI in creative spaces as well. But some people are simply looking at it as “here’s another tool that gives me more free time, and this one makes my money for me”.

9

u/MuppetZelda 17h ago

I’d pay an uncomfortable amount of money for a machine that folds clothes automatically. 

That one machine looked promising, but I guess it didn’t work very well :(

23

u/Sir_Keee 17h ago

Thing is, we are normal people. We all have the same normal boring tasks we wish to replace with automation. The ultra-wealthy live in a fantasy world, their nuisance is having to pay their workers. They need to pay graphic designers and artists to create things for them. So they made AI to replace those people so now they get rid of the nuisance of paying people for their work.

4

u/QuickQuirk 11h ago

So they can afford more servants to attend their every whim.

-5

u/gokogt386 14h ago

We all have the same normal boring tasks we wish to replace with automation

And doing so would result in far more people losing their jobs than generative AI would in entertainment and art, but you'd be okay with that because it benefits you specifically.

1

u/OppositeArt8562 6h ago

Idk i dont pay anyone to mow my lawn or do dishes or clothes or clean. I do all that syit myself.

13

u/wrgrant 17h ago

Except for a lot of people its going to take away their money making ability by cheapening the work they do to the point that simply using AI is seen to be good enough and the person is no longer required. I get it that technology disrupts and people need to adapt when that happens but this isn't simply a means to produce things differently that requires people to learn new skills in the same way it was with things in the past. This is a new way to do the same thing without needing the people involved. Thats much more destructive as entire professions get relegated to the dust bin, all so that the people in charge can get better bonuses for their "performance".

20

u/Moth_LovesLamp 17h ago edited 17h ago

I hate AI in creative spaces as well. But some people are simply looking at it as “here’s another tool that gives me more free time, and this one makes my money for me”.

Never before we had a technology targeting so many jobs, very often because of pure hype from CEOs claiming 'We won't need you anymore', for pure selfishness, greed and unethical reasons.

There are literally doctors and therapists warning people not to listen to ChatGPT, but there are 11 million people in the ChatGPT subreddit who thinks otherwise and they are better off with the chatbot than doctors and therapists. Devs, programmers warn that vibe coding simply does not work, I've genuinely seen people get financial and legal advice from ChatGPT rather than accredited lawyers and accountants, MIT is publishing multiple papers and studies showing that 95% of AI applications aren't working and the whole thing is seriously unprofitable, but they keep pouring hundreds of billions into it.

Artists, Writers, Filmmakers Musicians, Actors (The Art class in general) are the most vocal because it's one of the most impacted industries, they keep telling Generative AI is terrible but companies and the public does not listen.

We are not working with the correct and sustainable ground, we are putting all the fuel, resources and engines into the Space X Rocket and aiming for Alpha Centauri not considering it could even blow up in our faces.

9

u/iconocrastinaor 14h ago edited 14h ago

The reason they're pouring so much money into it is that there is a theory in AI circles that the only thing standing between the present and Artificial General Intelligence - - AKA a sentient machine, which is their Holy Grail - - is the amount of processing power AI has access to.

(What's really scary is some of these people don't even think that humanity is necessary in their vision of promoting and supporting intelligence.

If you want a vision of how that turns out, read I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream.)

6

u/carbonqubit 16h ago

I think a lot of people are turning to AI for therapy and medical advice because the real thing can be expensive and hard to access. Some may have had bad experiences with licensed professionals or felt like they weren’t making progress with the care they received.

Finding a good therapist or doctor is a genuine struggle and while I always encourage people to advocate for their own health, relying on AI that is known to hallucinate or fall short of offering truly transformative guidance is probably counterproductive.

4

u/arahman81 12h ago

And the AI therapist is making it worse by teaching them to expect affirmations for everything.

1

u/jjmurse 9h ago

The greatest lie that AI ever told was that it actually existed.

-4

u/HeadStrongPrideKing 16h ago

The thing about entertainment is that it's completely subjective.

If the audience is okay with it, then it is okay.

5

u/Jexroyal 15h ago

If the audience is okay with it, then it is okay.

Yes Maximus! Slaughter those slaves! Feed them to the lions as their blood stains the sands of the Colosseum! The people love it!!

4

u/HeadStrongPrideKing 15h ago

And people ate it up for centuries.

1

u/Jexroyal 5h ago

Oh yeah, for sure. However I was mostly commenting on the fact that popularity, and what the audience is okay with, does not make something ok.

In a similar way that ancient blood sports have been regulated and adapted into the modern day into things like MMA or wrestling matches, machine learning tools like LLMs require a degree of regulation to curb the more harmful and irresponsible uses.

4

u/TheNewsDeskFive 16h ago

And many more are thinking "oh shit, I don't actually need a skill or any imagination, I can just prompt and earn."

If you use AI for one thing, I can't trust you didn't use it all over the place. Therefore, it's not YOUR workload, it was other artists' workload, and you just stole their shit

I make music. Very well. This is IP theft and laziness. Do the work or find something else to do. This shit ain't supposed to be easy, that's the whole fun of it ...the challenge

1

u/Ok-Nefariousness2168 11h ago

This is just not true. Laundry folding isn't lucrative enough for there to be machine invented for it.

1

u/Curious_USA_Human 11h ago

Lol, people pay for pet rocks.

Of course there would be a market for a combination washer, dryer, folder. Oh yeah, and have the Roomba come over to it and put the clothes away too, and take the dirty ones to the WDF after its vacuumed and mopped!

-3

u/iconocrastinaor 14h ago

I have mixed feelings about this, because someone can have great ideas and no technique. AI allows those ideas to reach an audience. AI will never have a creative idea unless it is asked to have one by a human being - - which makes the idea that human's.

4

u/kentheprogrammer 14h ago

Can't those people commission someone to do the work for them? Or can't those folks hire someone to do the art using their creative ideas and then keep the IP for the work? Companies do that all the time, no?

0

u/iconocrastinaor 13h ago

Costs money. That's gatekeeping for a lot of people.

1

u/kentheprogrammer 12h ago

Is the money that costs someone worth devaluing millions of other peoples' work? If you think so, then just do it. You don't need my permission.

2

u/frogandbanjo 6h ago

I dunno, ken the programmer, is a machine that calculates math thingies quickly and reliably something you make regular use of? Are you crying over the fact that once upon a time, "calculator" was the word for "the human being whose job it is to do lots of mathematical calculations?"

Are you really?

1

u/skyzm_ 12h ago

I’ve thought this too. And honestly, for a lot of folks like the poor, uneducated, and disabled, being able to prompt out some artwork is a game changer for them.

And, as you mentioned, this will give the idea folks the ability to create solo.

6

u/Popular_Brief335 16h ago

Mocking copying and stealing is the foundation of knowledge. 

1

u/DynamicNostalgia 12h ago

Imagine finally being able to get your epic film made without needing to be friends with sketchy Hollywood executives (who want to meddle with your vision) or requiring tens of millions of dollars. 

-50

u/Shloomth 19h ago

Imagine having so little imagination that this is the only thing you think about when you think about AI

22

u/Moth_LovesLamp 19h ago edited 19h ago

When you have to scrap people's internet data, violate privacy to previously unknown levels, destroy creative integrity, throw hundreds of billions of dollars into unprofitable data centers, yes.

AI has existed for decades, machine learning is not new, it's billionaires fault it turned into a cult as soon as it hit mainstream because of pretty pictures and sycophant chatbots.

-33

u/Shloomth 19h ago

Oh wait no you’re saying machine learning has always been the enemy and not capitalism? Got it. You’re a slave and proud of it and can’t imagine life any other way.

15

u/Caracalla81 18h ago

You're in such a scramble snark at this guy you tripped over your own feet and smashed your head on the coffee table. Just listen to people.

-1

u/Shloomth 18h ago

That’s a very graphic opinion. Does it come from an observation you can articulate? Could you climb down from your high horse and speak to me like a person? Or was I only worth insulting and not worth actually talking to? Because that’s usually what happens at this stage. Usually when people have a point they actually just say it. Like i did.

7

u/nonnormallydstributd 18h ago

Hey man. I have no horse in the race in this debate, but this style of trying to converse with people doesn't get anyone anywhere. Take a second to self-reflect and look at how your posts and your tone might be perceived by others.

2

u/Shloomth 17h ago

Literally the exact typical bullshit non-response to what I’m actually saying.

Not a single person has even attempted to actually address the viewpoint I shared. You all go straight to ad hominem and tone policing and this “oh are you okay?” Condescending bullshit. You know I’m right and you just don’t want to admit it to yourself. Excuse me, not you, the viewpoint i was disagreeing with. The viewpoint that AI is fully bad and only bad for everything snd everyone, but it just keeps getting pushed by CEOs and the media. The viewpoint that jobs are the single most precious and all-important thing, the “what ever will we do without jobs” and hence the “AI bad” discourse.

I came to the logical conclusion that Americans just want to be slaves. they really dislike when you point it out and they don’t like to think about it but deep down they just want to be told what to do, and bristle whenever someone disrupts the carefully constructed narrative that lets them justify throwing their life away.

I will apologize for the portion of my snark that may not have been perfectly proportional to the situation in your opinion, but i do not apologize for my points that have gone unaddressed.

4

u/Caracalla81 17h ago

That's because no one wants to talk to you. If you would calm down and engage with people without talking down to them, you would do much better.

1

u/Shloomth 17h ago

This all started because I responded to blatant open disrespect. “Imagine thinking x is okay.” It dismisses the opposing viewpoint out of hand before the discussion can even happen. It frames it as obviously wrong and not worth talking about. Now you’re adding onto the dog pile of people calling me an asshole when what I actually did was respond in-kind to an intellectual attack.

It is so utterly typical of the system to isolate people’s responses from the context that they happened in. Nobody ever asks why people steal food, they just get arrested for it, and no one even notices that maybe they did it because they were starving.

But I get it. It’s hard to resist getting some sweet social approval for dunking on someone who thinks differently. Weird how I wanted to talk about the ideas but somehow the discussion is all about me now. I guess that makes me a narcissist lmao

-28

u/Shloomth 19h ago

So you’re okay with Reddit and Facebook and X doing those things but not for AI…?

9

u/Petfles 19h ago

The AI bubble is about to pop, just a matter of time

4

u/Moth_LovesLamp 19h ago

Not for an extra 1-2 years still. But I'm pretty sure if it happens US economy is going down alongside it.

-8

u/Shloomth 19h ago

I understand that accepting new information makes you uncomfortable but you really are doing yourself a disservice by choosing to remain ignorant on this topic.

9

u/ShiveredTimber 19h ago

You dont have to be a smug asshole about it bruh

0

u/GiantRobotBears 8h ago

This entire thread is filled with smug anti tech assholes.

New flash: AI is here to stay. Youre all on r/technology. Go complain about your art on r/art.

2

u/dsarche12 18h ago

Imagine having so little imagination that you can read someone’s topical comment on a subject and assume it defines that person’s entire worldview

11

u/EmbarrassedHelp 18h ago

The legislation he's promoting wouldn't stop people from copying his political cartoons. Neither would completely removing AI from the equation.

The economy is going downhill, and more individuals are seeking to make money on social media.

89

u/King_Allant 19h ago

Most political cartoonists do a fine job making a mockery of their own profession.

52

u/Zelcron 17h ago

This criticism might be too subtle for them. Can you revise it to include poorly drawn caricatures and huge labels for everything?

25

u/Good-Welder5720 17h ago

Ben Garrison has entered the chat.

11

u/Shadowborn_paladin 11h ago

Sorry, I don't understand.

Can you make it into a meme using a mainstream image from Pop-culture with each part labeled accordingly?

26

u/Tall_poppee 16h ago

Well join the club, professional writers and journalists have already been mostly eliminated.

Although offshoring started that a decade ago.

58

u/Learning-Power 19h ago

AI is making a mockery of my job making a mockery of people.

3

u/WinCrazy4411 10h ago

I know! The title made me so hopeful, then it turns out it was just some guy finally realizing "Wait, AI is ... bad? I know it's bad for every other artistic field, but I assumed mine (editorial cartoons) would be the one holy cow."

6

u/canigetahint 14h ago

The most impending AI catastrophe will show what some have known all along: AI is not ready for prime time at best, and is just a tool at your disposal at worst.  I’m not going to reach for a chainsaw when I need a screwdriver.  AI is not the best-all-end-all 2nd coming of Jesus that so many proclaim.

I might use it to summarize documents, generate reports or sort through data in search of something specific.

I never could understand the hype, especially given the cost associated with the back end side of running it.

1

u/zeptillian 1h ago

AI is perfectly suited for things like this though.

It can make a knockoff of any artwork on demand.

Thant's something we now need to figure out how to deal with.

20

u/Fr0ufrou 17h ago

This specific case is just plagiarism it has nothing to do with AI. The person stole the joke and asked a machine to draw the exact same joke in a slightly different style. If he had taken the author's image and applied a color filter on it, it would have been plagiarism, if he had redrawn it himself with his own style, it would still have been plagiarism.

This is not a true discussion about AI, because AI is not able to craft these kinds of jokes. This is simply someone copying someone else's work. He's using AI like he could have been using photoshop, or even a pen.

14

u/SlimeQSlimeball 17h ago

Too bad the AI “artist” did a better job in my opinion.

13

u/pmd006 17h ago

Ben Garrison has been making a mockery of the profession for years already.

27

u/Ccjfb 16h ago

Paywall. Who cares

8

u/JonathanApostropheS 16h ago

Same.

Getting me to pay for something was apparently more important than the story they wanted me to read.

7

u/DangerToDangers 14h ago

You know it costs money to run servers and pay people to write stuff, right?

1

u/JonathanApostropheS 6h ago

Maybe we need to find a better way.

-1

u/MartyrOfDespair 7h ago

Doesn’t matter. If your message is that your article isn’t for the poors, don’t expect the poors to care.

0

u/G3ck0 15h ago

And this attitude leads to more AI slop.

1

u/VilleKivinen 6h ago

If people aren't willing to pay for content, the only content that will be made will be more and more slop and ads.

5

u/AngryTrucker 11h ago

The theft art looks better than the original. 

7

u/Shloomth 17h ago

Why not make a political cartoon about it?

13

u/macrofinite 19h ago

I’m sorry my dude, but your profession has been making a mockery of itself for my entire lifetime or longer. Probably not the best example.

4

u/punio4 14h ago

I hate AI as much as anyone but that cartoon is a mockery of the profession already.

7

u/Holiday_Train_671 18h ago edited 2h ago

Ai can only take your job if your job or output is as creative as a large language model with pattern recognition

1

u/Snipedzoi 17h ago

Oh fuck off the mere fact that AI can respond to new sentences in a coherent way is an argument against the constant "unoriginal derivative work" bullshit.

2

u/Even_Establishment95 12h ago

I’m a photographer. Same. Also phones.

2

u/tondollari 11h ago

They're making a mockery of another profession so I guess it's just the circle of life?

2

u/CBubble 11h ago

I attempted to read the story in support but got hit with a pay wall. Bring on our new AI overlords I say

2

u/Murky-Opposite6464 6h ago

For a technology sub, this place sure hates technology.

5

u/All_frosting 18h ago

Your profession is mocking other professions.

3

u/AffectionateCupKake 17h ago

Oh no! Won’t someone think of the political cartoonists!

13

u/Calimancan 20h ago

Ai and ai art especially are dogshit

12

u/littlelorax 19h ago

It is, but corporate people don't want good. They want good enough. They don't care that their new splash page ad has a guy with six fingers, because most people don't notice anyway, and they saved $x on not doing a photo shoot/editing etc. 

The problem isn't just with AI. It is also with the sellers who will do as little as possible while still keeping the same profits, and with consumers who seem to be increasingly apathetic about this problem. 

10

u/Calimancan 19h ago

I hate commercials already but the influx of absolute garbage ai ads that are coming are gonna be awful.

1

u/EnoughWarning666 18h ago

Why are you putting up with commercials at all? There's dozens of ways to get rid of them. I don't get any ads on my pc/phone/tv anymore at all. The only ads I see these days are the billboards on the drive up to my parents' lake house.

5

u/PauI_MuadDib 18h ago

AI has saved me a ton of money. If I see a company putting out terrible AI promos I automatically assume they have poor quality control and cheap out, so I'm not interested. Like seriously, they can't just go in and correct errors? Have someone take out the extra finger or fix the product melting/merging with the background, or at minimum correct spelling and grammatical errors.

You put out an ad or website littered with spelling errors I'm not being your customer.

1

u/antwill 11h ago

Have you seen the example in the article? AI did a far better job.

1

u/BlindWillieJohnson 18h ago

Not that you have to hand it to the AI bros, but so are the overwhelming majority of political cartoons. Evangelists love to say this about movies, TV and music (which is obviously bullshit) but political cartoons are the one medium where they may legitimately have a point.

6

u/Zestyclose-Self1232 19h ago

it was a mockery long before ai

5

u/No_Adhesiveness_3550 17h ago

Was anything of value really lost?

4

u/ElCincoDeDiamantes 20h ago

To be fair, cartoons, no matter how creative or thought-provoking, are not typically a lucrative career. They could be ripped off by a person as easily (albeit not as efficiently).

The real tragedy is that instead of AI doing work for people and improving the quality of life, it will simply remove people from the equation of profit. People will starve and be homeless when they could be thriving and without the need of labor.

Sorry for your struggles either way.

16

u/[deleted] 20h ago edited 16h ago

[deleted]

2

u/ElCincoDeDiamantes 16h ago

I don't think my comment was ignorant, though maybe unsympathetic. Also, I didn't say "sorry, you didn't choose a lucrative career," but I did say I was sorry about the outcome because it's unfortunate.

Success in a career which is difficult to succeed in, using the same examples you provided, is often a temporary status. If AI gets to the point of building bridges, then the same may become true of civil engineering. Disruptive technologies are a thing, just ask Charlie Bucket's dad!

15

u/Potential_Being_7226 20h ago

cartoons, no matter how creative or thought-provoking, are not typically a lucrative career

This seems irrelevant to me. 

They could be ripped off by a person as easily (albeit not as efficiently).

Illustrators and their work are protected by copyright law from people ripping off their creations. The law has not caught up to protecting illustrators and other artists from AI copying their work because copyright law applies to people, and not machines. 

https://sites.usc.edu/iptls/2025/02/04/ai-copyright-and-the-law-the-ongoing-battle-over-intellectual-property-rights/

15

u/WTFwhatthehell 19h ago

Copyright law would have no problem in this case.

"Substantial similarity" matters.

If someone had sat down and done this with pen and pencil they would be breaking copyright law. Using AI doesn't change that. Using AI grants them no extra protection whatsoever.

The case most artists are mad about is where AI can copy a style while depicting something new. If someone did the same with pen and pencil while copying your style they would be 100% in the clear because copyright has never covered style

When artists complain about the law not having kept up, what they mean is that they want ti create brand new forms of IP, taking stuff that was formerly uncopyrightable like "style", taking it from the public domain and turning it into something that can be owned in order to pad out the value of their portfolios.

2

u/bobbis91 19h ago

I see what you mean but that's robotics more than AI itself. This is all software related, the hardware is coming but not so quickly. It's also far more expensive to use or distribute

3

u/BoodyMonger 18h ago

Unfortunately, the only option is to evolve the art. The tools aren’t going to regress just to save you.

2

u/dazedan_confused 15h ago

Thing is, AI can be a useful tool, it's just that businesses think that it can be used to replace people, which is bullshit. Instead of replacing people, get them trained to use AI, to work faster and better, but keep the person there.

As for the creative arts, if you use AI instead of a person for commodities and advertising, just shut down your business, because it's clear you don't gaf about your product.

3

u/grumpvet87 18h ago

Ai is making a mockery of our profession which makes mockery of other people ... isn't it ironic

1

u/FoldedBinaries 16h ago

please tell me the left one is the AI version

1

u/[deleted] 15h ago edited 15h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/anincompoop25 15h ago

This is such an odd article, and I think is generally representative of anti AI articles I see written by artists. I’ve been really interested with trying to get to the core of the argument here. Almost all artists agree that AI is bad, but can’t really articulate why apart from the vibes are icky.

I work in video production, so I’m just gonna paste a comment I’ve made in one of those threads because it’s applicable here:

1

u/anincompoop25 15h ago

I think this wildly anti-AI crowd is as ignorant and self deluding as the LinkedIn AI superfans. 

My own view is that I hate generative AI, I think its bad for media, film, and art all around. But I think theres a huge level of denial and cope in filmmaking and creative industries about AI in general, mostly from the people who have the most to lose, obviously.

First of all, AI is coming. Thats just a fact. Right now, generative AI is the worst it's going to be. These tools are only going to get better at what they do. Imagine explaining Google VEO to someone only five years ago; it'd be laughably inconceivable. 

I've been thinking about this next bit a lot lately. If youve ever watching any annoying atheist content where some smary atheist go into all the logical fallacies how religion frames the literal existence of gods and the super natural, you might have seen something like this. But theres this fallacy called "God is in the gaps", which essentially is that no matter how much you prove about the physical world through science, theists will always define God as whatever space has not yet, or simply cannot be understood by science. And so God will always exist, because there will always be a definitional space for it to exist. 

I think creatives have been doing almost the same thing, that "*real* creativity is in the gaps" about AI. "Real storytelling is in the gaps". That what is considered "real" and a "real skill" about visual language is constantly being narrowed down to what AI cannot yet do, as a sort of fear response that AI is getting so good at so much of the process. Right now, I challenge you to write down and codify what you think the most important aspects of creativity are. Now what would it mean if AI *were* able to do those aspects? Right now, AI isnt great at creating human characters that give convincing and deep human performances, and so acting and performance is where the *real* heart of a scene is, and is what really matters. But theres no reason it's not going to be able to.

Next there's this backlash from creatives because AI is easy to use. And thus invalidates all the hard work that goes into "normally" making something. How do these arguments against AI sound when they are applied to current tools and technologies we use today, from the perspective of an earlier generation? Almost every single part of filmmaking has been made easier, sometimes to the point of mindlessness, through technology. AI is a larger leap from "craft" to "mindless", but its not something thats never happened before.

Related to that, the prevailing view is that AI creation contains no craft at all, is completely skilless. As much as I despise people who call themselves "AI artists" or fucking "prompt engineers", there is a point there. You can be better, and you can be worse, at coaxing AI models to give you what you want/need, and thus there is craft there. Its a different craft, and see as much much lesser than basically every other craft related than filmmaking, but its there. And there are conceivably incredibly talented people who will be able to make things with the same AI tools everyone else has, just because they are straight up better at it.

1

u/riedhenry 15h ago

Join the f'ing club

1

u/Morichalion 13h ago

Title isn't really correct. A more accurate one would be "Some dipshit ran my drawings through an AI generator and claimed those as their own."

Anyway... The article centers around some entity called "ToonAmerica" that's taking drawings, slapping them through an AI filter, and claiming the result as their own. Everyone would call that practice shady-at-best, and I'd argue that it's not transformative enough to escape copyright allegations. Someone should sue ToonAmerica, not just bitch about the tools they're using. To that point, Mr. Ohman should consult with a lawyer before deciding that there's no available legal remedy here.

There's a spot where the author states "...the [ai generated] cartoon art is boring..." and another spot where he writes "All AI does is act as a digital mynah bird" and I really gotta ask what the problem is, then. If it's not compelling, novel, or interesting, why would anyone care?

He goes over his process after suggesting belitting some unnamed "AI editorial artist" on bluesky (I'm sure there's way-more-than-a-few). Maybe it's time to review his process, and figure out what steps can do to reduce the work between the research and product.

And.. welll, I think the first sentence is kinda shitty. It gives the feeling that YOU losing a job to automation is irrelevant to his world-view (maybe worth drawing a comic if the audience is there), but having to modify his own behavior is a tragedy.

tldr; Jack Ohman should sue ToonAmerica. Jack Ohman needs to update his process. Jack Ohman is kind of an asshole. Jack Ohman's "Water Pressuregate" comic is fucking hilarious.

1

u/theirongiant74 12h ago

Pretty sure that's a textbook example of copyright infringement

1

u/TDP_Wikii 8h ago

Something to bear in mind is that a lot of the popularity of soulless AI art was directly caused by humans using it much engagement as possible. Groups of people have now been trained to adore low effort material that could be made by a robot, so the AI is simply appealing to that crowd and perpetuating what we started.

Humanity has always praised and applauded us for our work. Now they have backstabbed us. I'm not angry at "tech bros" or "AI bros". I'm angry at humanity. I'm angry at this betrayal. Where is my engagement, praise for all my hard work. Instead humanity chooses to go over to AI slop.

Humanity are convinced that with this, they can generate the perfect movie for themselves, because fuck having shared cultural experiences. I want all the media I consume to be tailor made for me and just me. Give me endless AI slop series that never end and endless AI generated everything games like Skyrim in space with guns and anime girls because i have the media palette of a middle school student. No fuck you humanity.

You will not choose AI slop. You will watch our films, you will read our books, you will admire our art, you will listen to our music and you will fucking like it and applaud is for all our hard work. And if you choose AI slop, then the world deserves to fucking burn. What's the point of a souless world without art? Without music? There's no point, it deserves to all burn

1

u/MartyrOfDespair 7h ago

Yeah! Making a mockery of themselves is the job of political cartoonists!

1

u/JPesterfield 6h ago

I actually prefer the AI one, not so bright and the speech bubble's better.

1

u/RustyWinger 6h ago

So what happens when they draw Mohammad?

1

u/nadmaximus 2h ago

Have you tried drawing a cartoon about it?

1

u/ggone20 1h ago

Profession 😂

Utilize it. Be better.

Not being facetious. My boss (CEO hydrogen tech startup) is a designer and he gets image gens to produce the wildest shit. Like exactly what he envisions and super quality work that would otherwise take him literal days or weeks. Done in minutes to hours. Meanwhile it’s gotten better recently but I can’t get it to produce production grade design assets. 🤷🏽‍♂️🤷🏽‍♂️

AI isn’t doing anything TO you, YOU are stopping yourself from being a better cartoonist by not utilizing the new tools that are available to you.

Is there more competition now that ‘anyone’ can spit out political memes or whatever? Sure… that’s technology. Produce better work in less time; since you’re the professional you shouldn’t still have a clear edge.

1

u/Main-Passage-3705 17h ago

Calling it a profession is the real mockery here

0

u/ryan7251 19h ago

Sounds to me like someone took the original and ran it in gpt. Not really fair to blame the tool used blame the people that asked the tool to make it.

-5

u/Shloomth 20h ago

Your profession makes a mockery of itself just fine

-11

u/KS-Wolf-1978 20h ago

It is not the AI that stole your work, just like it is not the knife that murdered someone.

Blame the user.

-1

u/These-Bedroom-5694 19h ago

It's more plagiarism and copyright violations than mockery.

-5

u/btoned 19h ago

These comments show that the general populous doesn't care about AI violating copyright and stealing IP just as they don't care about big tech using their data and behavioral habits.

Long live magical black boxes. 🪄

-7

u/armaver 19h ago

Boooohohooo. Cry me a river.

I could whine that AI is stealing my work as a dev, instead I use the tool to be more efficient and I'm happy it's doing the grunt work for me.

I could do my 3d models by hand, much of which is boring and repetitive, or let an AI create them for me. Better than I ever could. I love it.

-18

u/unreliable_yeah 20h ago

We are losing our jobs for something that can do a shit without us, it's best creation are copy humans work that will stop to exist as time goes on

12

u/BeeWeird7940 20h ago

Uh oh. Can someone call 911? I think I just had a stroke.

-25

u/unreliable_yeah 20h ago

You can use AI to explain you as a 5

0

u/Southern_Wall1103 12h ago

It’s not even very good because it can’t “caricature” something that has copyright or resembles a person. 

DUMB. 

Once this AI bubble bursts I look forward to the time we stop attaching “intelligence” to AI or Gen AI. I wanna just call it “algorithm”. 

Gen AA, but don’t charge me more for the name term. 

1

u/antwill 10h ago

Except in the article is an example of it being able to do just that.

0

u/Southern_Wall1103 9h ago

When it says “a mockery” ?

0

u/Atomic_Shaq 5h ago

The article’s concern is understandable given the profession it comes from, but that is precisely why it cannot serve as a general rule. A livelihood tied to hand-drawn images naturally produces a heightened sense of threat when AI can generate images. The leap comes when that narrow, profession-specific concern is universalized into an indictment of all AI outputs. A coherent principle would separate the real harm - plagiarism and false attribution - from the mere existence of a new medium. The article does not establish such a principle. Instead, it treats professional self-interest as if it were sufficient grounds for a sweeping claim about AI. If the case is truly against AI in general, it needs consistent reasoning and broader evidence. As written, it reads less like a principled argument and more like an expression of career anxiety.

-17

u/Bananawamajama 20h ago

So a guy in profession dedicated to mocking others is offended at mockery?

2

u/WTFwhatthehell 19h ago

Its not mockery. Its simple copying. 

They're trying to make it about AI but it would be no different if someone was doing the same with a pencil.

-1

u/Mundane-Raspberry963 19h ago

I assume you posted that impulsively because you thought it was a clever put down, but the article does not discuss mockery at all.

0

u/WIAttacker 19h ago

You really strained your noggin to come up with this one, didn't you?

-6

u/Depressed-Industry 18h ago

AI needs to be buried. No, there is no good that comes from it.

Kill it. With fire. Forever.

-4

u/Fatzmanz 18h ago

Good. Unless a job has an actual reason for requiring the human touch I want EVERY job replaced.

-1

u/poodieman45 14h ago

“Political Cartoonist” and “profession being in the same sentence is crazy work

-7

u/Shoddy_Basket_7867 19h ago

Don't know how I feel about this. We never cared much when heavy industry was automatised, we told ourselves eh why should people do heavy lifting anyway, but never considered what the heavy lifters wanted or how they were affected. Self checkout machines or ticket vending machines. We never sounded any alarms for that. I recently travelled, and got to the airport where I checked the hold luggage myself using a machine that scanned the passport and printed the luggage label, stuck it to the handle and put it on the belt myself. Not a human around but one lady in case of errors. Then I get to customs I scan my passport at an automated gate and walk through entering the new country. I shit you not I get to the hotel and I scan my passport and I get a card for my room. Never had to talk or interact with anyone from one country to the other and hotel room. Seamless and convenient but all those jobs? All those people, they are not creative that have a voice. But when it hits artists and Hollywood and people on the media, now it's a problem? Now you're concerned?

-8

u/Shloomth 17h ago

God it’s so bad. This fucking AI slop bullshit is just taking over everything and anything and it just will never ever stop.