Rick McKee Opens an AI Pandora’s Box

Comments ⁶

1. Clay Jones

   This needs to stop. I think it’s cool that Rick says he’ll never do it again but why do it in the first place if he didn’t use it to make a point?
   We have cartoonists who trace photos for caricatures. We have cartoonists who are placing clipart into their cartoons. We have cartoonists who repurpose their previous drawings to the point that their new cartoons required no drawing at all. We have cartoonists who don’t draw anymore.

   We’ll soon see cartoonists using AI to create cartoons. Will they do like the tracers and clipart thieves, sign it and not tell anyone they cheated?

2. Jason Chatfield

   The NCS stance on this is clear:
   The National Cartoonists Society values the hard work and skill required to create original art.
   The copyright of our members’ work should always be protected to the fullest extent, and we oppose any attempts to diminish those protections.
   The NCS always encourages the exploration of new ways technology enables our members to create their work. We do, however, oppose the commercial use of AI-generated images that have been trained on copyrighted works, and will not allow any artificially created art to be submitted for consideration for membership, nor any category of our awards.

   You can read more in today’s Washington Post about the ethical guide rails we’re pushing to be built into these technologies:
   https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2023/02/14/ai-in-illustration/

3. Neal Skrenes

   I am not a cartoonist, but I am a photographer.

   Do photographers create art?

   Doesn’t Rick own the original concept? (A special cartoon partially created by AI) He tinkered with the AI until he got the results he wanted.

   How is that different than experimenting with a digital app. like Illustrator, Corel, using pencils, ink and pens , or lenses, filters & light?

   1. Alex Hallatt

      “How is that different than experimenting with a digital app. like Illustrator, Corel, using pencils, ink and pens , or lenses, filters & light?”

      Because artists’ (photographers, painters, cartoonists….) works have been used to train the AI.

      All art is derivative, but when that derivation is accelerated and weaponised, we have a problem.

      I want to use AI generated art more in my work, but there needs to be consent and compensation for artists’ works to be used to train AIs.

4. Lost in A**2

   Yeah, *how* the AI is trained is the problem. Training one exclusively on your own works probably wouldn’t achieve the desired results.

   1. Alex Hallatt

      But I’d love to be able to do that. 15 years of daily and Arctic Circle comics is a LOT! 🙂