I’m not as anti-AI as a lot of my cohort (lefty artists). I’ve never been morally against art made by remixing other artists’ work, so it’s hard for me to be angry at the “stealing” AI does to make images. If AI images were only a toy, something people play with but don’t sell, I wouldn’t be bothered by AI images remixing other images at all.

But it’s not just a toy, and I am worried by the economics of it.

AI image generation makes images close to instantly, but it makes those images by remixing work by human artists who took hours, days, weeks to make those images. The styles AI imagery apes might have taken someone decades to develop.

Those instantly-generated AI-generated images then compete in a marketplace against human artists.

That’s not sustainable for the humans.

I have no problem at all with human artists training themselves on art other humans have made. In comics, that’s a primary way most of us learn.

But after I’ve learned from other cartoonists, I can’t instantly produce images. So when I compete with them, it’s on even ground.

When artists are competing with other artists, that can be tough, but the result isn’t that there’s less work for artists overall.

But the more AI enters the art market, the less work is left for human artists. AI simultaneously depends on our work existing to be remixed, and makes paying us  for our work obsolete.

Second thought: I personally don’t feel threatened by AI (although I’m some combination of amused by and tired of people mistaking my work for AI).

But I really worry about the younger generation of illustrators. I think a lot of “entrance level” illustration work that used to exist is increasingly being done with AI.

From a report in Fortune:

AI is actually increasing strain for most employees, as the tools add more time to menial tasks, and actually takes away from deep-focus work. Since adopting AI into their workflows, time spent across every job responsibility shot up anywhere from 27% to 346%, according to a recent ActivTrak report that analyzed 10,584 users 180 days before and after their AI adoption.

The time spent toiling on grunt work like emails increased by 104%, while chatting and messaging climbed by 145%, and using business management tools rose 94%.

There wasn’t a single activity category where using AI actually saved users time, with the report reaffirming that: “The data is unambiguous: AI does not reduce workloads.” Instead, professionals are now multitasking at a greater rate, and spending less of their days concentrating on complex problems.

So that’s not the greatest. The headline in Harvard Business Review summed it up: “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It.”

—

I don’t draw robots often, but cartoonists like Mattias Adolfsson make it look like so much fun that I was eager to give it a try. Here’s the first batch of robot drawings I did for this cartoon:

I had a lot of fun drawing those, but I decided the robots just look too old-fashioned and broken to represent AI, so I started over.

The second draft of robots aren’t quite as wrecked looking, but they’re not exactly slick and shiny looking, either.

Thinking about it now, I could have represented all the AI characters as text on smartphones, with a different smartphone (and hand holding the phone) in every panel. That might have been a better representation of AI than robots. But hopefully the way I did it is more fun for you folks to look at.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has six panels, each of which shows a different scene. The first five panels all feature cheerful robots in office environments.

PANEL 1

A shiny golden robot talks to the viewer.

GOLDIE: Good news! Here are just some of the ways AI saves you time and makes your job better!

PANEL 2

A robot – which seems to be a suit and tie with a smartphone sticking up out of the collar – talks to us. He’s carrying a huge stack of papers.

PHONE: Good news! Because your new AI agent is expected to save you so much time, the company is providing you with extra work!

PANEL 3

A tiny robot that looks like a ball with hands is bouncing on a desk.

BOUNCY: Good news! The AI agent makes lots of mistakes, so you get to do proofreading and debugging! Yay!

PANEL 4

A robot with a head shaped like a Telsa Cybertruck talks to us. A bunch of other robots are in the background.

TELSA: Good news! The company has determined you’ll get more work done with more AI agents doing more bad work for you to check and correct!

PANEL 5

A coffee machine with a screen with a happy face on it talks to us.

COFFEE: Good news! More of your colleagues are letting AI do their jobs, so now you get to fix that work, too!

PANEL 6

A human with a shellshocked look is walking on a sidewalk, carrying a cardboard box full of desk stuff in classic I’ve-just-been-fired iconography. A caption is shaped like a memo on paper.

CAPTION: Good news! We’ve determined that bad work done by A.I. is more cost-effective than better work done by humans.

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is obsolete jargon for what we now call “Easter eggs.”

PANEL 1: A poster on the wall says LESSER EVIL INCORPORATED. “If it’s not lethal, it’s a lesser evil.” A rat sits reading a book, Charlotte’s Web.

PANEL 2: A gigantic ant is climbing a skyscraper in the background.

PANEL 3: A picture of an adorable toddler is inscribed “I heart you Mommy! Always remember if u quit ur job I’ll starve.” A “to do” list says: “-Work -Work -Work -Labor -Toil -Lunch -Drudge -Slog -die.” A coffee mug, decorated with Charlie Brown’s zig-zag shirt line, has a mouse wearing glasses peering out of it.

PANEL 4: One of the robots is a toaster. The robot puppy has left poo (a steaming pile of nuts and bolts) on the ground. The cybertruck robot’s head is on fire, and if you peer closely at the passenger window you can see a screaming person trapped inside.

PANEL 5: The coffee cup has a picture of Bender from Futurama on it. There’s an electric outlet with two “faces”; one of the faces is the standard, the other one is smiling and winking at us. A poster says “NOTICE: Cups must be cleaned after death.” A cannister is labeled “82% real Sugar,” with an adorable granny mascot saying “What you don’t now won’t kill you, probably.”

PANEL 6: The box of stuff from the fired employee’s desk includes a coffee mug; the mouse from panel 3 is still in the mug. A jar on the sidewalk says “Background Juice” on the label.

And there’s graffiti! “BG” (for background) is written in a few places. Someone has written a list of jobs: “Priest Poet Lawyer Marine Squire Grocer Vicar.” (Let me know in comments if you know where that list comes from.) A game of “hangman” is in progress: “A_S_ER.” (You see the answer, right?) More things written on the wall: “Filler.” “Who reads this?” “PP + Marcie 4EV.” “E=M.C. Hammer.” “Mary + Charlie + Frank.” Finally, a poster on the wall is partly blocked by the caption, but I can tell you it says “Secret Hidden Text! Because you can’t read this text: At last, I’m free to say it: Basketball is BORING! Bite me, b-ball fans!”

Good News About AI and Work! | Patreon

Yes, this comic was inspired by evil non-genius Elon Musk. No one better epitomizes money cosplaying as competence.

As Richard Carrier wrote:

He fell ass-backwards into big money, and our system protects big money. …Literally everything he touches gets fucked up, from self-driving cars to Twitter to the government, or almost anything at all; even PayPal—that’s why they fired him. He was so bad at it that his own staff revolted and insisted he be canned. Indeed, nearly everyone who has ever worked for him says he is a shitty leader who has no business running companies. But alas, like other rich people who fail upwards, Musk’s contracted severance package for being axed from (what was then) PayPal for incompetence launched his entire career as a moneybagged gunknozzle.

Musk hardly stands alone. Private Equity’s business model is for people who know nothing about an industry to buy out existing companies and often destroy them. Although with private equity, it’s often more like piracy than actual incompetence.

Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole.

And of course, Donald “six bankruptcies” Trump is a tragic example of how inherited wealth (to the tune of $413 million) and a staggering ego can give an utter incompetent a rep as a business genius. Trump’s actual talents in are self-promotion and dodging taxes, not in creating value.

The challenge of drawing this cartoon was the factory setting, which is a zillion miles outside my comfort zone. I doubt I’ve ever drawn the interior of a factory before, and I wasn’t sure how to begin. I looked at photos of factories online and they seemed impossibly complex, and my attempts to streamline them just didn’t look good.

What finally got me over the “factories are too hard to draw! Waaaah!” wall was looking at the graphic novel Factory Summers by the brilliant cartoonist Guy Delisle. I didn’t directly copy Delisle’s drawings, but I took a lot of instruction from how he simplified factory interiors to make them work in comics.

Once I got started, it was fun. A factory setting in two-point perspective provides so many ways to fit in little visual gags.

I was worried about panel four. For the gag to work, readers definitely had to notice the burning factory disaster in the background, but a lot of readers kind of skip noticing the backgrounds. I asked Frank Young, who colored this cartoon, to make the conflagration in the distance impossible to miss, and I think Frank really delivered.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels, plus a tiny “kicker” panel.

PANEL 1

Two workers in reflective vests and hard hats are on a factory floor when a man wearing a blazer over a t-shirt walks in, arms spread wide.

BLAZER: Greetings, workers! I just bought this weezotski factory.

WORKER: Oh, uh… Welcome! So you must have lots of experience with weezotskis?

PANEL 2

Grinning, Blazer keeps talking, looking very smug.

BLAZER: None! But success in an unrelated industry has made me freakishly wealthy! And that makes me a business genius who can run anything!

PANEL 3

Blazer puts his arm around the worker and makes a grand “envision the future!” gesture.

BLAZER: I’m gonna disrupt this company so hard! It’ll be amazing! You’ll see! (Not you personally. I’m firing you.)

PANEL 4

CAPTION: SIX MONTHS LATER

Blazer, still grinning, flees from a burning factory building.

BLAZER: Another business brilliantly saved!

KICKER PANEL

Blazer, looking smug, is talking to Barry the cartoonist.

BLAZER: Maybe I should run the government!

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is long-obscure cartoonist talk for fun but unimportant details in the art.

Panel 1: A limp hand is sticking out a hole in the huge factory machine. A panel of the floor is missing, and a corpse in a funeral suit lies within. The box the worker is carrying is labeled “Caution: Irrelevant Prop.”

Panel 2: In the background, in supervisors windows, are Homer Simpson and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

Panel 3: An opening in the side of a big factory machine contains Brain, of “Pinky and the Brain.” A vent hose has a distressed face on it. In a window in a machine in the background, a grinning stoned person hands upside-down. The paper on the clipboard says “this text is way too small to be read, sorry”.

A sign says “URGENT: Always complete your shift and clean your area before fighting demonic forces.” Another says “WARNING: Studies show that most people’s largest deathbed regret is time not spent working.” A sign on a large red button says “NO. Do not press button. Nope.”

Panel 4: The dark cloud in the sky, if you rotate it 90 degrees to the right, is an enormous face in profile.

The tattoo storyline: In panel one, the worker has a tattoo of a snake on his right arm, and a tattoo of an apple on his left arm. In panel two, the snake tattoo has crossed to his left arm and is examining the apple. In panel 3, the apple has been eaten, and the snake – no longer merely a tattoo – is crawling out of a hole in a big factory machine.

The Business Genius | Patreon

This cartoon is drawn by new guest artist Jamie Sale, who did a terrific job.

I’d originally written the script so the camera would pan out until we saw that the speaker was in a giant bubble. Then I realized that sends the wrong message, because it implies that the people pushing A.I. are putting themselves at economic risk. But that’s not it at all; they’re gonna be fine.

I mean, no doubt some of them will be downgraded from “inconceivably wealthy” to “stupid rich.” It’ll be a blow to their egos and maybe even their social standing. But at the end of the day, none of them are facing any real risk; their lives will remain secure and comfortable.

It’s the rest of us they’re putting at risk.

So I did a last minute rewrite. Jamie had already done initial sketches of the cartoon, but cheerfully went along with my third-act change of direction.

Hedge fund manager Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman ran the numbers:

Simply put, at the current trajectory, we’re going to hit a wall, and soon. There just isn’t enough revenue and there never can be enough revenue. The world just doesn’t have the ability to pay for this much AI. It isn’t about making the product better or charging more for the product. There just isn’t enough revenue to cover the current capex spend. …

At the end of the day, this AI cycle feels less like a revolution and more like a rerun. I’ve seen this story before—fiber in 2000, shale in 2014, cannabis in 2019. Each time, the technology or product was real, even transformative. But the capital cycle was brutal, the math unforgiving, and the equity holders were ultimately incinerated. AI will be no different. The datacenters will be built, the chips will hum, and some of the capacity will eventually prove mind-blowingly useful. But the investors footing the bill today will regret ever making the investment. That’s how bubbles end—not with a bang of innovation, but with the slow, grinding realization of negative returns, for years into the future. When shareholders finally wake up to the fact that AI isn’t generating cash flow, only burning it, the guillotine will fall—on management, on the stocks, and on the broader market that bet its future on a fantasy.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. Each of the panels shows a businessman in a suit grinning as he speaks to us.

PANEL 1

A close up of a businessman grinning. In the background, a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds.

MAN: A.I. Is the defining tech of our time! Microsoft and amazon and facebook and google have spent almost a trillion dollars on A.I.!

PANEL 2

The camera has pulled back a little. We can see the man is holding a bubble blower, bubbles streaming from it.

MAN: Has A.I. made a profit? Not yet, but… Someday we’ll figure out something A.I. can do that actually makes money! It definitely might could happen!

PANEL 3

The man continues grinning, pumping his fist, as the air around him turns gray and forbidding and the bubbles stream out.

MAN: In the meantime, We have to prepare! By spending more billions building more A.I. data centers so we can spend trillions more so that someday A.I. can do… Um…

PANEL 4

We can now see that the man is talking to a huge bubble floating in the air. The bubble has been packed fill with ordinary looking people, shoved in like sardines in a can. They looked panicked and unhappy.

MAN: Anyway, A.I. is certainly possibly maybe not going to pop and take down the whole economy! You’ve got nothing to worry about!

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is old-fashioned cartoonist lingo for little extras in the art.

Panel 2 – In a tiny window in a cloud is a tiny, teeny silhouette of a spy with binoculars.

Panel 3 – One of the bubbles has a mouse in it.

Panel 4 – One of the bubbles has a “for rent” sign.

The A.I. Bubble | Patreon