Daily Cartoonist: AI Now Scraping Signatures As Well As Cartoonists’ Styles

 

Above: AI is not only taking cartoonists' styles and generating images, but it's also aping their signatures. Above on the left, an AI generated image of an Emily Flake cartoon. One of her actual real cartoons on the right. This side by side visual is from D.D. Degg's DailyCartoonist article "AI Now Scraping Signatures As Well As Cartoonists’ Styles."

 

I was reading this week about a comic book illustrator (I forget who, but it was on a social media platform) who uses "just a little bit of AI" for their work. "Just to help out," was the excuse. 

I also read a WSJ article about the artist Taryn Simon, whose new show at the Guggenheim used AI for part of her show. (I don't have a link. I was reading the actual paper.)

 AI was created by big tech, which scraped images off of the internet to "learn" how to "create." It was theft, taken without the permission of artists, mashed into a program, and sold back to people who, as one fellow posted online, "never had the time to learn to draw." Fellow artists, this comic book artist and Taryn Simon and others, are normalizing the use of AI. I feel angry and that they are not just wrong, but betraying the nature of creating.