The club’s committee has decided not to approve membership requests from people who claim to be cartoonists but generate their drawings using artificial intelligence.
This follows receipt of a submission from someone whose sample cartoons consisted entirely of digital work that had been “assisted” by AI (his words when challenged). He almost had us fooled until one of us noted the wrong-number-of-fingers symptom. Once we suspected the hand of AI we realised that there were much bigger problems. For example, in drawings of conversations, the speakers’ mouths were closed. In one case two people chatting in a bar were facing away from each other, and the smoke from one character’s cigarette was drifting in the opposite direction to the steam coming off the other person’s glass of whiskey (yes, steam coming off whiskey).
Our guidelines for submissions will be changed to reflect the ban on computer-generated art.
Interesting. Are we being a bit Canute-like with this approach? When it boils down to it, AI is just a tool, in the same way that Adobe Illustrator is (which we don’t prohibit the usage of). I wonder if a different approach might be to recognise that these tools are growing in usage but to require disclosure when they are. Then it will be down to the audience to determine whether they like it or not. I say this not as a current user of AI but am exploring it to animate some of my drawings because it is a significant time saver from doing it frame by frame. I suspect it is a false comfort blanket to resist its emergence and it may actually be a better strategy to embrace it. Probably a controversial view.