AI Illustrator Job Posting "There is no time or bandwidth to sit around waiting for 6 months for anyone to hand-illustrate a comic."

 

Hayao Miyazaki reacting to a presentation of Artificial Intelligence. Link to video below. 

 

 My friend John Klossner forwarded this to me. It's an ad that's currently at LinkedIn:

Role Description

This is a fully remote role for a solo comic writer/artist. You will be working on comics in our IPs only, original content, and storytelling and you will be given full freedom to craft your storylines and series from a narrative standpoint inside the world building that we have done in our IP development.

The AI usage

Using AI to do the illustrations instead of doing it manually is mandatory. The comic industry from a profit point of view is heavily dominated by the Japanese Manga industry even in the west, now accounting for 2 out of every 3 comics sold. To compete effectively, we need to be both fast and good at delivering products to market. There is no time or bandwidth to sit around waiting for 6 months for anyone to hand-illustrate a comic. That is not the reality of jobs in the comic industry anymore.

Compensation

This role is envisioned as a full-time role. We will expect you to deliver one full comic a month. A comic in our world is 32-64 pages. A strong comic narrative designer fluent in a top-tier AI illustration tool should be able to do this comfortably.

Yipe! I saw this yesterday and thought it was made up! But it is a real ad from WRKS Games, based in Singapore.

So nasty. I never thought of all of us as "hand-illustrators" before. I didn't know that there's just no time for that sort of thing any more. At least at WRKS in Singapore.

Aside from the nasty morality that AI is based on theft from real people, it's not copyrighted work. At least, that is, according to laws in the US. And I don't think that there are people clamoring for the latest piece of media that AI has done like they would for, say, Mayazaki. 

 

Alex Zalben at Comic Book Club Live has this to say:

 

AI Illustrator Job Posting Comes Under Fire:

A job posting for a Comic Writer/AI Illustrator has come under fire.

Posted for WRKS Games, which calls itself “a transmedia game developer and publisher based in Singapore,” the posting calls for a writer/artist to work on their IPs, and noted that AI usage was a must.

Said the posting, “Using AI to do the illustrations instead of doing it manually is mandatory. The comic industry from a profit point of view is heavily dominated by the Japanese Manga industry even in the west, now accounting for 2 out of every 3 comics sold. To compete effectively, we need to be both fast and good at delivering products to market. There is no time or bandwidth to sit around waiting for 6 months for anyone to hand-illustrate a comic. That is not the reality of jobs in the comic industry anymore.”

As you might imagine, nobody on the internet was having it. Responses ranged from “there is no profit in AI comics” to “people who use AI for comics don’t understand composition, paneling, storytelling, just comic making in general.”

The job listing has subsequently removed the functionality to apply, presumably because real humans were spamming responses. And a reminder that what WRKS Games and others are selling is flat-out wrong. AI is not inevitable, and it’s not mandatory. It delivers poor results that is plagiarized from other people’s work, looks like garbage, and drives away customers. That’s not to mention the negative environmental impacts. AI is bad and unnecessary, from art programs to ChatGPT. Cut it out of your life, immediately. And certainly out of your comics.

 

Seconded!

EDIT: Here is a short video of Hayao Miyazaki reacting to a presentation of AI that was posted on YouTube some eight years ago now.

“I am utterly disgusted, if you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.

 

“I feel like we are nearing to the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”