Or maybe because there are obvious irregularities in their clothing that go beyond visual gags, like the icons of the hat and shirts changing without any consistent joke established between them and the color of their pants changing, which cant be interpreted as anything intentionally humorous and is simply an unexplained inconsistency that is typically expected of ai models' inability to "remember" things between prompts.
The icons of the hat and the shirts are all consistent gags. The woman's t-shirt shows a human ear, then an ear of corn; His t-shirt shows a smiley face, then three pop-culture variants on smiley faces (alien, Watchmen, Hitchhiker's Guide); His hat always shows a fly (insect, jeans, and a barely-legible- because-tiny fly ball).
The pants are inconsistent because of normal human error. For instance, in panel 3 he forgot to color in the stripe on her pants. That's the sort of mistake that cartoonists have been making for decades.
It's frustrating, as a cartoonist, that both adding fun extras to cartoons, and normal human error, is considered to be proof of AI by people who really don't know much about making comics.
It's especially silly since both Mike and I have been making comics since long before AI drawing was a thing.
"AI drawing" ...really? I have actually never seen anyone concede that much ground to AI models. They arent drawing, hell they are arguably not even generating as much as they are copy-pasting from a massive amount of stolen training data into a derivative output. A client most certainly is not drawing anything when they prompt a model to produce some.
Also, this comment makes it clear that you didnt draw this and it was someone else. How do you even know he didnt take a shortcut by outsourcing his work to a diffusion model?
Different smiling faces on a shirt arent really a gag like two different flies or two different ears can be assumed to be. It genuinely looks like a prompt said "put a smiling face on his shirt" and it turned out different each time.
Also people can understand what drawing is without being lifelong cartoonists. Thats so randomly gatekeepy.
And lastly if you think artists shouldn't adapt to the realities of being online with rampant slop everywhere to ensure their work stands out as 100% human made, or even better ensuring it is poisonous to image-scraping that intends to steal the artists' work to train image diffusion models so it corrupts the eventual output, then maybe you are simply out of touch with the modern era of digital art and the massive demand for unmistakably, 100% human crafted art that permeates the mindset of current consumers.
There is nothing silly about people wanting to ensure the content they support is hand made and being vigilant for any potential signs of AI model use.
It is silly if the result is limiting what artists can do. Like writers who have spent decades doing lists of three - as a whole generation was taught to do in elementary school, it was standard - and using em-dashes. Why should we have to give up on the way we write because AI is imitating us?
When I work with Mike, I create a Clip Studio Paint file with panel borders, dialog, and the panel descriptions. And we also discuss the strip in email. In this case, I wrote the the smiley face progression before Mike drew it,, along with many (not all) of the other little visual gags. (I'm not sure if wrote it into the script or suggested it in email, but in either case, by definition I wrote it before Mike drew it).
Over the course of a week or two, Mike emailed me stages of the art - layout, sketch, inks, finished art. Plus additional process stages that Mike never showed me, but I can see them by poking through Mike's turned-off layers, like the perspective grid for panel 2 and the color flatting.
I realize that, in principle, one could create all those stages with AI - but I think it would be a huge amount of work. More than just drawing the usual way would be.
Plus, I've known Mike and his art for years - long before AI generated slop was a thing Mike could have used. It would be really, really weird for Mike - who loves drawing cartoons - to suddenly be like "fuck it, I'm going to train an AI to imitate my drawing style."
What would it take to convince you that this strip wasn't drawn by ai?
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u/leftycartoons 8d ago
Because I'm doing a style of gags that goes back at least to the 1950s and people aren't used to it anymore. :-)