Yearend fizzle
I hate summarizing a whole year so I didn't
This is a Substack letter. I joined the platform 6 or 8 months ago. I don't make a living as a writer but I know a lot of writers who attempt this magical feat. I just received one of a couple of emails from the folks who run Substack. The one that just aggravated me was by Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack and chief writing officer. He's foolish. The subject he wrote and then sent out to everyone who is on the platform was a positive hype piece in favor of embracing AI. It might as well have been written by the hedge fund that started Chat. Not once did he mention his own job would be replaced by AI. Not dwelling on what the impact on actual writers will be. Instead it was full of crap about this will lead all of us to this fantasy world that will bring humans together somehow after their livelihoods have been taken away. One writer will be able to create a whole movie. To what end? If everyone can “make a movie” how does it get distributed? Who will see it? What if everyone decides to make their own movie? Will AI watch it for us too? McKenzie had the defeatist attitude that it's here and there's nothing we can do about it so we might as well work with it. It's a replacement tool, not a “give you an extra hand” tool. To not recognize this is foolish. Every writer who promotes AI obviously doesn't write for a living or doesn't realize the impact it will have on those that do if not completely controlled and regulated. Artists have a similar plight.
I really love to paint. Over the last five years I adopted the iPad as my main tool to make illustrations for a living. It's nice and it makes traveling easy. I don't have to bring all my paints and papers and other implements of art making on a trip. Ipad, stylus, and a charger all pack easily in a bag. Do I like working on an iPad? It's OK. Do I like painting a physical piece of art? I love everything about making a painting. It's a full experience. It engages more of your senses, more of your mind, and has more stimulating tension that working digitally just doesn't have. Explaining why this is better to someone who hasn't developed the skills to make art or invested their life to making art... also making a living from that art, is like trying to explain what the color red looks like to a blind person.
I'm older now so I think it's time to “draw” some observations between the experienced life and before dementia starts to creep in. I went to college before photoshop came in and transformed the commercial art world. I lived through it. I was working at Marvel and DC Comics as a penciler and an inker when the computer coloring took over. Editors lost their minds. Suddenly you had to leave more open space and not as much flat black spaces so the colorists could inject more color. The problem was a lot of the colorists were not painters. They didn't understand light sources, textures, and color theory! They might have some art back ground but they didn't always use it... especially on the books I worked on (eye roll emoji) Computers got better every year. Better every year. Colorists got better too. Editors who had some art intuition rolled with it and everyone figured out where they belonged.
Now we have a program that can do all the jobs with little human oversight. But Fred, they aren't perfect, look how creepy some of the faces are, look at the extra fingers on that one... Computers got better every year. The first generation iPhone came out in 2007. It was amazing when it came out. It has gotten more incredible, complex, expensive, and intrusive ever since. One doesn't need to be a tech expert to realize AI will get way better, way quicker, and be way intrusive in everyday life. My simple solution would be to “unplug AI” until we can solve the obvious problems it will bring but hedge funds that have invested billions of dollars don't want to hear that. They want AI to determine our futures and not us.
I read a science fiction story in high school. The idea was this advanced society had developed and had moved to living on the moon or something but they still had this archaic royal bloodline thing going on. The king sent his oldest son and next in line to be king back to Earth to live among the common folk. It sounded like a medieval farming community. It was probably written in the 50's or 60's so I guess they thought Ren Faire was paradise compared to these new transistor radios, punchcards, and 3-D glasses, everyone was raving about. The son is to be tested by the Earth folk to see if he will be a good and just ruler. Spoiler, he was an asshole and gets killed by the loyal servant appointed by the king because the servant said the kid would be a tyrant if he ever ascended the thrown. The king was remarkably cool about it. This story came to mind because of all the talk I see online of AI being inevitable. It's not, or shouldn't be. We as people who have wisdom and a sense of history should determine if this new thing should exist. Not the other way around. Billions of dollars and a lack of foresight will skew things a little bit.
2024 is upon us. I suppose I should acknowledge this in some way. 2023 was not my favorite year for a number of reasons. The main one being loss of steady work. I'm in a dying industry. I was told it was dying my freshman year of art school and yet I made a living in art for over forty years. I hope to continue doing this but 2024 looks wacky. I have a big comic book project starting in February, I'm teaching another class at Art Students League Feb. 5-9. Please sign up if you want to learn some things about caricature in person from a goof like me. I have art in a group show at Brassworks Gallery in March, and other potential things are still moving around. I hope everyone can make good on their New Year's resolutions!
Happy New Year!!!
Happy new year, Fred! I can’t wait to see your next comics project. One job at a time is really all we can do, in a perpetually dying industry.