“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (1996)
I wanted to do something a little different with this edition of the newsletter - instead of talking about the work I have coming out soon, I wanted to talk about an issue that’s been the cause of a lot of anxiety and anger in the comics industry: AI.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news, and the “discourse” on Twitter and elsewhere, you’re probably aware that AI is coming to take all of our jobs. Nobody’s safe - ChatGPT is coming for writers, marketers, and basically anyone who types. Stable Diffusion is coming for artists, even though it can’t draw hands that don’t look like the stuff of nightmares.
And while I do have a lot of talents, I’ve spent a lot of time, effort, and money developing my writing skills, and it’s a little disconcerting to think that some machine could just come along and do everything I do in a fraction of the time and cost. What does it mean for my career as a writer if companies start generating comics, and other creative writing markets with these programs instead of real people like me?
I’ve given it a lot of thought over the past few months, and to be honest, I’m not that scared – at least not based on what I know about how these programs work and the output they produce.
Fun with ChatGPT
I did a little experiment the other day - I wrote a block of typical marketing copy, like I would write for my advertising job. A common piece of feedback when writing copy like that is to punch it up - that is, to try and make it funnier and more engaging.
I pasted my copy block into ChatGPT and asked it to rewrite it, but make it funny.
Well, I for one know that the prospect of sipping Piña Coladas in a shark cage makes me want to book with our fictional company RIGHT NOW. Some other generated responses referenced doing Karaoke with Penguins, taking a dip in a Jello pool in Tokyo, and more!
Now, I’m going to tell you the most shocking thing about it.
It’s actually not that far off.
I’m going to be completely honest with you here, at the risk of my day job. For marketing copy, it’s doesn’t read so differently from how 85-90% of the ads I see on the internet. The examples cited in a real ad would be more relevant, but the structure, the tone… its pretty familiar. It’s the tone taken by most marketing copy out there, spoken by a plastic, smiling face whose breath reeks with the stench of confident mediocrity.
Most of the stuff we read and watch is, well…
Just take a second to think about most of the copy that shows up on your favorite news feed, or web search even - from endless amounts of clickbait articles, to copy-pasted recipes where you have to read an entire essay before you even see the first ingredient, to 21 Hacks that will Totally Change Your Life (if you buy these products), the vast, vast majority of written work on the internet is kind of meh. It’s optimized for search results, optimized to make you want to buy stuff, optimized to give you that little endorphin rush that keeps you clicking.
It’s everywhere, really. Pop songs that all sound the same, because the music and lyrics, and subjects are all written to fit into the rules of what makes a song a hit single. Blockbuster movies that follow formulas laid down decades ago by the blockbusters of yore.
Is any of that stuff bad? I mean, it gets the job done, doesn’t it? You go watch an action movie, you know you’re going to see some explosions, some chases, and some cool one-liners as the hero saves the day and kills the bad guy. It’s Die Hard on a bus, Die Hard on a Boat, Die Hard on a Space Station.
Is it bad? Not exactly. Is it good? Not exactly, either. What we tend to think of as good, or great movies, are ones that take the tropes and themes we are familiar with, and play with them in unexpected and surprising ways.
So, Die Hard, on a boat, but Sandra Bullock is an Alien!!!
WTF does any of this have to do with the AI that is coming for my job, Rich?
Well, just think about what these bots are, what they do. They’re trained on text (and images in the case of AI art generators) from the internet. An unbelievably vast set of data, where fully 90% of it is honestly garbage. Mid at best.
Relax, I’m not talking about your blog. Or most people’s blogs. But there are 600 million blogs out there, out of 1.9 Billion websites. And I’m willing to bet more than a fair number of those bloggers are following some kind of “Make Big Money by Blogging about the Things You Already Love” writing and marketing plan, whether they paid for a course, or read a book, or a bunch of articles about how to make content that sets them apart from those other 599,999,999 blogs out there.
The vast majority of them are following a formula, whether they know it, or not. And all AI is really doing is making the process of following those formulas more efficient. Writing on, and for the internet has become so homogenized that it’s very easy to take advantage of. All it’s really cutting out is the step of having to actually go and learn the step-by-step method of producing effective copy that is guaranteed to get you sales by sounding like everything else.
But here’s the good news.
I can write homogenized copy. Homogenized stories. I can write a comic, or a show, or an ad that does the job, ticks all the boxes, and that you might actually like despite the fact I didn’t put a lot of effort or inspiration into it.
But I don’t have to. And more than that, I don’t want to. I want to surprise you, excite you, and engage you with my work. I want to play with your expectations, flip everything upside down, give you that twist you never saw coming.
And look, I admit fully that I never saw sipping Piña Coladas with sharks coming, for an ad about a travel service, but that’s what happens when you ask a generative copy engine to produce something funny or emotionally resonant. Why?
Because it’s basing it’s word choices on probabilities, and it has no other context to base its decisions on. It understands that in most similar marketing copy, the writers juxtapose two different experiences into one, and this is classified as “funny”.
It scans it’s oceans and oceans of copy and determines that swimming with sharks is correlated with unique vacation experiences - it’s mentioned in millions of exotic travel articles that are so similar they might as well have been copy/pasted. Also, Piña Coladas are mentioned in 99% of Drinks you Have to Try on a Tropical Vacation articles. Bingo.
And if it’s not actually funny, no big deal, because it can generate thousands of more examples and eventually brute force it’s way into something that’s actually relevant and possibly clever. But the funny thing about that is, the machine itself will never know it, until one of us tells it to. And that’s the one thing we have over them, at least for now.
We know what’s funny.
Because we laugh at it. We have an immediate, visceral reaction to it that we almost can’t control. Same with other emotions. We feel happy. Angry. Sad. Even if they’re just buttons getting pushed in some organic machine in our heads, we feel them deep down in a place no algorithm can touch.
That’s what I always strive for in my writing - evoking emotion. For superheroes I want to evoke hope, joy, and inspiration. For ads, usually I want to evoke laughter (because then you might not feel so annoyed about my work interrupting your favorite show). And for horror, I want to evoke fear, uneasiness, disgust. Like, with the liberal use of centipedes.
I know I’m on the right track if I’m feeling those things myself during my writing process. If I’m feeling those things while I’m writing, then the job really becomes about nothing more than translating those feelings to you, the reader, in the hope that you will feel them yourself.
I don’t always succeed in that translation, but I at least know that it’s coming from somewhere.
AI doesn’t have that. It never will.
The best it can do is mimic what it hears from the rest of us – in the same way that Parrots say “Polly want a cracker.”
The parrot doesn’t say that because it has a working grasp of grammar, or because it understands that it is a phrase in a language that some humans speak called English, but because they’ve learned that combination of sounds is more than likely to get them fed than a simple squawk.
AI will feed us all the homogenized crap we can handle. So it’s a good thing I do my absolute best to not write homogenous crap. And if you’re out there writing, drawing, creating, that’s good news for you too.
Because that’s what this is really about - a battle between the most efficient, market-tested, sponsor approved voice, and every unique, human voice out there. AI content is an escalation of that battle, but it’s not the heart of the struggle, really.
What we, as creators, need to fight isn’t so much the technology itself, but rather the impulse we, as a society and culture have to make everything sound, look and feel the same. Because that’s the impulse that gives technologies like AI the possibility of taking over in the first place.
We can take heart in the fact that McDonalds hasn’t put great local burger joints out of business. Multi-platinum pop music has not killed punk rock. And by-the-numbers Hollywood blockbusters haven’t killed independent cinema (though it feels like they’re doing their best to, sometimes.)
We might never win. But neither will they… because as much as we, as consumers, enjoy the familiar, we absolutely crave the new and unexpected. And today, at least, we humans are miles ahead of the machines in that department.
OK, that’s it for the ramble. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, and please join us in a couple of weeks for our next installment for your regularly scheduled hype about upcoming projects from myself, and people whose work I dig.
Until then, keep writing, keep drawing. Keep creating. Fill your work with heart, and soul, and believe me, ChatGPT won’t have shit on you.
Well said. You basically beat me to the punch re. the biggest reason I am not worried about AI stealing my writing gig. There is no recipe for a quirky space comic about anthropomorphic kangaroo rats & cave spiders. Ha!
Excellent TedTalk. A computer program can do a lot of things, but it can never possess a soul.