Impacts Of AI On Comic Art | a conversation recorded at the Montreal Comiccon 6.6.24

What are AI art tools and how are they impacting the livelihoods of comic artists?

Sequential Magazine Editor in Chief Brendan Montgomery and the Sequential Comics Blog founder and comics creator Salgood Sam explored the lies, labour issues, harm and possible future impacts of AI on the art of making comic books.

We recorded the audio from that and here synced it to the slides that were shown during the event with a few additional illustrative images added.

Links for things discussed in the talk:

First the panelists sites, you’re on Sequential already here but you can buy the print or digital copies of Sequential Magazine here, the latest issue spotlights retailers. And all things Salgood Sam can be found linked here.

A more involved explanation of Neural Networks is here, how Neural Networks and Neurons differ. And a more involved explanation of Stable Diffusion.

Some of the labour issues, and false promises and claims of Generative Image video and text platforms are well highlighted by Ed Zitron, check out his writing on this and other topics here, and his Better Offline Podcast. He had a very good chat with Adam Conover recently, that’s here.

Conover also talked to Brian Merchant about how the labour impacts of AI will be a thing even IF it’s not really capable of doing all that it claims, that’s here. And he wrote about that here as well. Check out the rest of his blog as well, there’s a LOT of good posts about it.

Adam Conover has generally been covering Generative AI a lot, here’s some of those.

If you’re looking to try to ‘protect’ your work online, or just put sugar in the AI developers gas tanks, consider using Glaze and Nightshade.

If you are thinking you’d like to join a guild or union, first think about which might apply to you [depend on your countries labour laws] but here’s a couple of links to check out for Cartoonists, and other working artists: cartoonist.coop; canadianfreelanceunion.ca; graphicartistsguild.org/; conceptartassociation.com. This is far from all of them, just a few I am more familiar with.