Recently, Canadian comics scribe Jim Zub was interviewed by the Economic Times during a visit at Mumbai’s convention in India, where he stated that AI doesn’t offer anything original:
Canadian comic book writer-artist Jim Zub, known for his work on “Skullkickers”, “Wayward”, “Dungeons & Dragons” and “Conan the Barbarian”, does not consider AI “alone as competition” as he believes the technology is just regurgitating ideas without telling anything new.
Most recently ChatGPT’s new feature gave its users the tools to create memes and photographs in the Studio Ghibli style, the Japanese studio famous for its animated movies like “Spirited Away” and “My Friend Totoro”.
While many on social media were quick to get on the trend, the feature sparked outrage among fans and artist communities that saw it as an insult to Hayao Miyazaki, who popularised the animation through his hand-drawn images.
Of course, let’s not forget Miyazaki himself insulted intellects with stories like the Wind Rises, which sugarcoats the Japanese aviation engineer who built the warplanes used against Pearl Harbor in WW2.
Zub, who has worked on many Marvel and DC comic books, was recently in India for the Mumbai Comic Con and spoke about the many iconic characters he has created and whether AI is a threat to creators like him or not.
“Well, here’s the way I look at it, tens and thousands of people didn’t come to Mumbai Comic Con to meet a computer. They didn’t come here to celebrate content. They are celebrating specific art and specific stories and specific interactions.
“They want to meet me and they want to meet other artists, storytellers, voice actors, musicians or cosplayers because those are people and those are real things that they have seen. The mistake that companies have made is they think that an audience just wants to waste their time with content,” he told PTI in an interview.
According to Zub, people want to have an experience and they hope that there is some sort “soul and idea” behind what they are consuming in the name of art and entertainment. “AI is regurgitating ideas, it’s recycling it in all sorts of ways. But it’s not necessarily ever telling you something new. It’s just mashing together existing kind of ingredients. So I don’t think that AI alone is your competition. It’s a tool and some people are going to use it well and some are going to use it poorly. But at the end of the day, you still need a person to make selections, filter, think and build. Not just bulldoze material,” he added.
I did think some AI illustrations I saw were basing their art designs far more on existing film performers than that of veteran artists with serious talent like John Buscema. And to be sure, even text-based stories don’t get very far within the confines of AI. What good is that? Zub’s got a point, but even so, he himself isn’t exactly telling anything new as a comics writer, and he got into the mainstream far too late to matter. If there’s any content not worth celebrating, it’s most of the mainstream output today that’s built on a shambles of what was once continuity.
Near the end, he said:
Zub said he never takes the love that fans have for certain characters for granted whether it is Samurai Jack or Rick and Morty.
“I never try and take that for granted. I don’t want it to ever feel like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is just what I do’. I know how much it means to me growing up on this stuff,” he said.
That would’ve made a lot more sense if he’d show the courage to say Marvel under Joe Quesada did something terribly wrong by getting rid of the Spider-marriage, and that DC was wrong to force quite a few characters into the atrocity that was Identity Crisis. Not to mention force veteran white creations out of their roles in the most repellent ways possible in order to make way for woke replacements, something Marvel also did the following decade. Now, we’ve got whole situations where both publishers are unwilling to abandon specific woke directions they’ve taken up, if at all, and it’s led to considerable loss of audience. Stuff like that is exactly why they should’ve closed down 2 decades ago, which could’ve minimized the damage, and then we’d have less of the PC embarrassments we’re seeing now.
In addition to the above, Insider Gaming reported one of the producers of Nier: Automata is worried AI will replace video game designers:
There’s one game director that thinks AI is coming for your jobs and will make creators obsolete. In a new interview with Famitsu, Nier: Automata creative director Yoko Taro was asked about AI in game development and where he thinks it’s going to go.
“I also think that all game creators will lose their jobs due to AI,” he told the outlet (translated). In 50 years, game creators may be treated like bards.”
He continued: “Eventually, I think we will change from an era where people imitate the style of their favorite creators to an era where they can generate their favorite scenarios. AI judges the user’s preferences and successfully generates route branches that the person wants to read, and the ability of recommendations is developing more and more.”
Personally, I wonder if this view stems from concerns regarding Japan’s sad birthrate decline, and the guess AI will serve to fill in roles when there may not be enough employees to take them. Obviously, that will be bad if it comes to that, but that’s why they should try to encourage people to have more children in time. And maybe it’d make a perfect story for a manga tale too. For now, perhaps artists who care should make clear it’s wrong to reject people as contributors just to save money, and that maybe the best answer is to lower prices of products instead. That way, life as we know it could be more affordable.
Originally published here.
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