Mike Dawson
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A Year of Making Comics - Update #15
🕑 Added 2023-05-19 12:47:29 +0000 UTCA sneak-peek at an upcoming piece.
Recently I submitted this cartoon essay to The New York Times Book Review. Happily (because I put quite a lot of work into this pitch draft!) I heard back from them this week that they love it. I am guessing it will run in a few weeks, after some revisions and copyediting. This is the strip as I pitched it, it will be slightly different once it goes to print.
One thing, among many, that's alarming about AI is how fast it's all happening and how quickly things are changing. I feel like as artists and writers, we're barely starting to get our heads around all the implications, meanwhile media companies are already making big shifts towards using the technology, and it's shaking up all kinds of other things. I heard my teenager talking to her friends about someone at school being suspected of using ChatGPT to write a paper. I barely even know what ChatGPT is!
This piece scratches at just one aspect of AI in image making, but it in no way sums up all the conflicting thoughts and feelings and worries I've got brewing about it.
I saw yesterday somebody invented an AI that writes novels. We're getting to a real existential cliff here. Can you imagine, reading a book written by a computer program (one that scrapes existing author's works, and Frankensteins them back together into what seems like something a human might write)? What are we even doing here?
I believe the power of art and fiction is to connect us. Media execs are likely excited to save money hiring humans to write and create, but once we're no longer connecting to one another, we're just connecting to a facsimile of what seems like the sort of story or image we have connected to in the past, where will we be?
