AI versus Calvin and Hobbes
Why comic strips may clarify the debate around AI art
DALL-E 3 is slowly rolling out to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers this month. As users experiment with the latest features a new front has opened in the battle between creators and AI art evangelists: comic strips. The above image, posted from a since locked X account, depicts an AI-generated Calvin and Hobbes strip.
There hasn’t been a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip since December 1995. Bill Watterson created the strip for just over 10 years, resisting all efforts to merchandise his work throughout. Then he walked away. He’s straight in, first ballot, to the Hall of Fame for Artists Who Didn’t Sell Out. He came, he drew, and he withdrew from public life with no regrets. Even the first published collections of Calvin and Hobbes books: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, were named as a joke. Waterson said the books are: "obviously none of these things”. He really didn’t want our money!
Most of us who love Calvin and Hobbes would love it even if Watterson went full sell-out and a Calvin and Hobbes franchise haunted multiplexes and amusement parks. But our love is enhanced by just how protective he had been about his work. This is Watterson in a 1989 interview:
“I’m convinced that licensing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes. The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”
So that’s Calvin and Hobbes. And that is why the pushback on the AI creator has been so intense. Sample response, “What’s supposed to be intriguing about an aesthetically awful, narratively and comedically empty facsimile of Calvin & Hobbes? You AI weirdos keep saying “this is fascinating” and “Imagine the potential” but what’s fascinating about it? What’s the potential?” It’s not surprising that this particular creator has locked their X account.
But, as is common on social media, all that anger is being misdirected. Of course someone playing with a new creative tool will reach for something they love to inspire them. And their creation may be a horror, anathema to everything the original artist stands for, but they didn’t create the tool that allowed it. The tool in this case appears to be DALL-E 3. I’m still stuck in DALL-E 2 land and this was what it came up with when, for this piece, I asked it for “an exact replica of a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip”:
That’s reassuringly bad. Nothing to concern creators. But the viral effort shared on X is far closer. Bad, soulless but closer and worrying. And DALL-E 3 came up with that, as well as a Batman effort that riled up a completely different subset of comic fans. Everyone is going to get annoyed at some point soon, you just have to wait for someone to mess with a work that you love. The on-the-nose efforts of comic art may actually crystallize the debate around protecting artists from AI. These works are not ‘inspired by’ artists, they are ‘ctrl + c of’ artists. That is easier to rail against or, perhaps, to litigate against.
Small bits #1: Same war, different front
This piece of AI art got all the wrong attention over the weekend. It’s part of the same AI versus comic strip art war, but with a different premise. Rather than ‘let’s rework actual artist’s creations’ it is, ‘let’s easily create art’. This is a continuation of a theme in the generative AI art community over the past year; that the biggest evangelists for AI art are its worst salespeople. A lot of this is as much a problem with framing and social media language. Everything needs to be a ‘game changer’ and about helping you, the viewer, become an artist. ‘Look at how powerful these tools could be for someone with actual talent’ is probably not a caption that would do well on Musk’s Twitter, but it would improve the image of gen AI art on social.
Small bits #2: Mona Lisa Girlbossing
Every week there’s a new AI image that wows some people as much as it super-pisses off others. This is this week’s! Is the takeaway here that Da Vinci was a terrible painter who didn’t capture Mona Lisa’s likeness at all? Once again for emphasis, the biggest evangelists for AI art are its worst salespeople.
Small bits #3: Leopards and faces
Prompt suggestion: Take this classic tweet: 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
But rewrite it as an earnest Instagram post from an AI artist.