I am an independent illustrator and graphic novelist based in Brooklyn, New York. I am primarily working in the publishing and commercial space, producing illustrations for brands, and I also recently published a graphic memoir called In Limbo. I graduated from the CMU Design program studying Communications and Environments Design in 2018. During college, I worked at a few tech companies as a UX intern, and after graduating I was at a tech company briefly. They ended up giving me a lot of illustration projects, which encouraged me to actually leave the company to pursue freelancing full-time.
As it is, illustrators get paid very little in the industry and AI threatens the independent creative workforce even more. There was a guide-book for graphic artists in the early 2000s that said essentially that graphic artists in the early 20th century made around $2000 for a single piece of work, and in the past century that amount hasnât risen with inflation. That comes out to around $30,000 a year before tax, if youâre constantly working. People are already taking graphic arts for granted and pay illustrators next to nothing, and now AI is being used to make that work even cheaper. Anyone can put any prompt into Midjourney and get what you want. What you get from those programs will always be derivative, and while there isnât much awareness on the limitations of AI art, until those limitations are realized there are a lot of opportunities and value that are being taken away from illustrators and graphic artists.
Thatâs all to say I do think AI can and will replace a bunch of artists, but the art that results from it wonât be the same on a human level. And on an ethical level, itâs just in bad taste to try and save money. I just keep coming back to the origin. What problem is AI art solving? What need was there for AI art? It comes from a need for automation, but art isnât about automation. Itâs therapeutic, itâs one of the most wonderful things about being human. Trying to make it a push of a button feels like the antithesis of art.
Most UX jobs are in-house, and ownership of the work ultimately belongs to the companies theyâre situated in. AI in UX may result in the same thing as in illustration and art, you just get the same solutions and the same results. That may be good for some UX applications, but youâre ultimately settling for solving a problem in an existing way, when maybe there is a better solution that simply hasnât been made yet. With whatever problem youâre researching, you could have the same carousel system or card system as your solution. But if youâre just relying on existing solutions that AI can remix, youâll never get anything new.
That being said, I donât think AI is undercutting UX designers nearly as much as it is with independent artists in terms of livelihoods and salaries, but again, if youâre just recycling the same ideas over and over again things will get really uninteresting. You have to use AI very carefully. I saw something online a while ago that said essentially,
<aside> đ âSure, but has this AI model have the same Asian-American diaspora trauma that I have?â
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An AI model can only come up with so much without a human element behind it.
I have actually seen some AI art come out of CMU that makes sense. It came out of the School of Art, where someone took their polaroids of important memories and fed them through an AI art generator to create new âmemoriesâ based on those photos. I think thatâs a really compelling use of AI art. It knows as much as you do, and itâs playing an intentional role in the creating process.
In UX specifically, I think that when you feed an AI generator with your own work, then what youâve created is technically ethical. Itâs the same thing in illustrationâthey say that itâs ethical to closely use reference photos as long as you took them yourself. AI-generated work will give you work that looks like your work, and if thatâs what you need, thatâs great. But itâs not going to be revolutionary. If I was going to use AI art, I would feed it all of my work, press a button, and be done because I didnât want to explore that day. Again, I would never take anyone elseâs work. Iâd source my own pieces, feed it to a generator, and see what happens. Maybe thatâs what I needed that day to get by, but at least then it wonât hurt anyone except me. The whole point of being a designer, or being an artist, is to explore and evolve by actually designing or creating.
AI will be there whether we like it or not and its role in creative fields will just come down to regulation in response to it. Something that has specifically affected me personally is the ownership aspect of AI art. In order to make AI art, you have to train an AI on other peopleâs drawings. I found out recently that someone had taken my drawings and put them through Stable Diffusion to make a large body of pieces that looked like my work, and they refused to tell anyone whoâs work the AI was trained on. Iâm really hoping that current efforts like the class-action lawsuit Iâm a part of thatâs aiming to regulate AI art will succeed so that independent illustrators are better protected from art theft. Additionally, I imagine in response to this there will be a culture shift of illustrators copywriting their work.
Broadly though, I think about this project, Humaaans, by Pablo Stanley, where he commissioned a bunch of illustrators to draw a bunch of stock images, and then made it so that you can mix and match for boring corporate filler illustrations. They definitely work, they look fine, but when you spot a Humaaan illustration being used, you recognize it. You know where they got that image from; itâs like seeing someone wearing the same shirt you got from Forever 21. I think whatâs very likely is that AI art will be like Humaans, where we start to see AI-generated images everywhere. Whatâs different is that AI is developing so fast that really soon we might not be able to tell what is done with AI and what isnât. Long story short, AI will absolutely not only affect the creative world, but every aspect of our lives.
<aside> đ Editorâs note: Learn more about the class-action lawsuit Deb and other artists are involved with here!
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I want people to think about why they are using AI. Why are they so excited about these new technologies, when there are so many existing issues that are demanding our attention in the world? I think about when Facebook became Meta, and they started focusing on the Metaverse. Their main thing was to âchange the worldâ and âmake education accessible to everyoneâ and âmaking society betterâ, but why didnât they start with problems that have already been affecting people? Why arenât they improving textbooks or access to supplies? Itâs almost like they want to make the cool stuff first and make a bunch of money, and then rebrand to be able to be used to help people. But the root of the idea was based on making money, not helping people. The socioeconomic problems in our world, those are an afterthought. Disadvantaged people are used as an excuse to justify technology thatâs actually making disparities between people even bigger than they were. Just look at card-based transactions and digital currency. A lot of places donât accept cash anymore, and that makes the lives of so many people so much harder. A lot of people donât have credit cards, or donât have smartphones. Technology made for money makes it so much harder for people to just get by.
So as people go forward in the hackathon, I hope that they ask themselves: why are you doing this? Is your project starting in the right place? Or are you trying to make something for the sake of making something, and adding a âgood causeâ to it at the end?