AI, Witch Hunts, and Receipts

AI art and animation aren’t going away. We can argue about it, love it or hate it, but here we are.

Some artists are embracing it as the future, mostly rooted in time-saving. The creator who spent years learning storytelling and animation developed the skills to know how to select the right things AI might suggest. Over time, those skills will atrophy. And the next generation, the one that grows up with AI, will never develop those skills in the first place.

I won’t be surprised if, in the not-too-distant future, articles come out reporting that the human brain can’t tell the difference between running a search in Google and giving Grok a “prompt.” Functionally they’re the same. You’re searching for something and keep typing the search until the engine returns what you’re looking for.

That’s consumption at worst and curation at best. What it is not, is creation.

On top of all that, we now have the witch hunts. The artist purity tests. Did you mess up that hand? Then you will be accused of using AI. (Hands are notoriously easy to mess up, that’s been true forever.)

Did you animate something? It will be dismissed out of hand as AI.

So suddenly after decades of refining a craft artists are finding they have to save the receipts. Capture works in progress. Document the creation. Time-lapse that drawing.

I started drawing and animating because I saw those things early in life and thought, “I want to do that.” I didn’t see those things and say, “I wish I could tell someone (or some bot) what I want and not have to do it myself.”

I don’t hold it against anyone if they want to use AI. That genie is out of the bottle. All I can do is what I’ve always done and try to slowly and steadily improve.

And at the end of the day, maybe the tortoise will beat the hare.

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