The Downside is the Objective

Anti-AI Luddites fail to understand the situation

A reader fails to grasp that disemploying artists is not a bug, it is a feature from the perspective of the producer of entertainment products.

Your position that AI equalizes is incorrect. AI does not make "the average person" an artist any more than a photocopy machine does. You sit an artist down next to someone who is not an artist, let them draw something, then explain to me how they are equal. Benioff just fired 4000 people because he was able to replace them with AI. Those people are permanently unemployable in their chosen profession. Those jobs are gone forever. That is not an improvement for them or any other human being.

That’s not my position. That isn’t anyone’s position. AI doesn’t magically transform the average individual into an artist. And thank God it doesn’t!

What these anti-AI lunatics fail to understand is that the larger part of AI’s appeal is not having to deal with artists anymore. Yes, it’s nice that it costs less too, but for the most part, producers and publishers and developers would be happy to pay artists for their work if they would simply deliver what they promise to deliver.

At Arkhaven Comics, I have employed dozens of illustrators, colorists, and letterers. Precisely four of them can be considered professional and reliable. That’s less than the number of artists who have literally committed theft by never delivering anything that they were paid to do.

The ability to quickly create variants is invaluable to the producer.

When we first launched Arkhaven, I felt genuine pity for the artists who were apparently being abused by Marvel and DC Comics. I didn’t see why they shouldn’t receive advances like authors did.

And then I had multiple illustrators literally disappear after being paid four-figure advances, in one case only delivering two of the 64 pages he’d been paid to deliver. I also learned that paying an advance was an absolute guarantee that the illustrator would NOT work on our projects, because all that pre-paying him accomplished was to incentivize him to focus on work for other publishers who required delivery before paying anything.

AI is going to eliminate at least 90 percent of the comics illustrators once it can deliver reliable characters, not because it is less expensive, but because it is far more reliable. It’s already capable of accurately recreating the style of even the best illustrators, as has been repeatedly demonstrated here.

This is not an illustration from MIDNIGHT’S WAR but it easily could be.

And don’t get me started on musicians. For the average producer or songwriter, getting a temperamental guitarist or drummer to simply do what he is told to do can be like pulling teeth. The appeal of AI-generated music isn’t due to the cost of session musicians, it’s due to the speed with which one can get 50 different guitar riffs from which to choose instead of three variations on the same unusable theme.

This is why the “pity the poor artist” attack on AI utilization is even less credible than the appeal to the Marxist labor theory of value. Because, in the eyes of those who are actually responsible for producing content, getting rid of the artists once and for all is not merely a side-benefit, it is one of the most beneficial prospects offered by the adoption of AI.

And I say that with confidence despite being a songwriter, an author, and a novelist with far more genuine creative credits than the average anti-AI artist. The ability to remove the artist from the production process is the very reason that the adoption of AI art is absolutely inevitable.