David Mattingly, a prolific illustrator and professor at SVA and Pratt, writes about AI in this piece from his Facebook page. It's being shared by a lot of people there. I saw it on Joe Jusko's page. Some
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Art by David Mattingly
I don’t want to sound all doom and gloom about AI but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried. We may be watching the early stages of something that brings about the end of civilization as we know it. AI may ultimately have a bigger impact on this planet than the atomic bomb, and unlike the bomb, which was contained by deterrence, and the sheer terror of mutual destruction, AI seems to be spreading in every direction at once with no meaningful way to slow it down.
The job losses alone are staggering. Not just the gig workers, the data processors, but the creative class. I was a cover illustrator. That career in the form I knew it will never come back. It’s not just that the market has shifted, it’s that the ground beneath it has been removed entirely.
Much of what’s accelerating this is a reading culture in collapse. Fewer people are buying books, fewer are discovering illustrators through the covers on bookstore shelves, and the art directors who once championed original artwork are now discovering that they can generate a passable cover image in twenty minutes without hiring an illustrator.
And it’s not just visual art. Music, writing, screenwriting, voice acting, visual effects, the creative economy is being restructured from the ground up. We are building our own replacements. In ten years, The Terminator may look less like a thriller and more like a documentary.
AI is remarkably good at generating images. It is far less reliable at generating vision. In some ways, this mirrors what happened when photography arrived or when digital tools flooded the market and made every amateur a “designer.” But the economic threat to creative work is only part of what troubles me.
AI has turned Facebook into a cesspool. I had a friend forwarded me a post in which a well-known celebrity was apparently announcing they had discovered a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. It looked convincing enough, but the celebrity had absolutely nothing to do with it . The whole thing was fabricated with the image generated and the quote invented. Someone had constructed an elaborate false hope for desperate people for no reason other than clicks and money. I ask myself what kind of person does that. What do you tell yourself at night when you know that somewhere out there, a family caring for a loved one with dementia saw your post and felt for one brief moment that there might be an answer?
We will see vastly more of this. The tools to generate convincing fakes, images, videos, voices, entire personalities, are now available to anyone with a laptop and bad intentions.
Facebook was supposed to be a way to stay connected with friends. It’s become something else entirely. It is a marketplace for lies, a distributor of fabricated videos, a radicalization engine dressed up in the language of community. Shame on Mark Zuckerberg, who has had many opportunities to address this and has instead optimized for outrage. He keeps getting richer. The people being misled keep getting poorer, in money, in accurate information, in their ability to trust what they see. I paid more in taxes last year than Jeff Bezos. I try not to think too hard about that while he’s somewhere out on his private superyacht, with his surgically enhanced wife, flying around in a penis rocket, living a life utterly insulated from the consequences of what his industry has done.
I’m afraid of what the next political season looks like. Deepfakes, fabricated speeches, manufactured scandals, all of it arriving at volume and velocity that fact-checkers can’t match. The people most eager to exploit these tools are those who have built their power on the fear of anyone who looks, loves, or prays differently than they do. AI creates hatred, gives it a megaphone, a printing press, and a film studio all at once.
The real danger, in the end, isn’t that a machine can generate an image. It’s that AI slop is everywhere now, undifferentiated, unlabeled, indistinguishable to the casual eye, flooding every platform, every inbox, every feed. We are losing the shared ability to agree on what is real. And without that, it’s very hard to have a civilization at all.
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