The creative process
When oil painter-turned-award-nominated cartoonist Carson Grubaugh submitted a prompt into Midjourney, and the first image it spits out was “stunningly good,” Grubaugh messaged his friend and publisher Michael Robinson.
“’Dude, check this out. We are f***ed,’” Grubaugh said. “He responded, ‘We need to make a comic with this ASAP. Someone else will if we won’t.’”
AIPRM predicts that the first AI-generated movie will come out in 2030, but Grubaugh and Robinson established the comic industry one step ahead when they published the first AI comic in 2022.
Grubaugh knew from Luciano Floridi’s “Philosophy of Information” that to make something out of this market, he needed to be the first and best to do it. The comic needed to have substance.
Grubaugh decided to make a statement and use Midjourney to interpret C.S. Lewis’ essay, The Abolition of Man.
“The essay is a powerful piece of writing that has influenced much of my thinking and art. It argues that mankind has a historical tendency to want to conquer nature — to make our lives easier. Science is entirely about that pursuit,” Grubaugh said.
Grubaugh finds Lewis’ point about blind progress very convincing. In the philosophy of science, blind progress is the idea that scientific progress has no moral framework. In other words, all progress is good progress.
“If we treat progress as blind progress, as science and many social movements do, we are very likely to drive ourselves off a cliff. True progress is towards a goal, and if you realize you aren’t headed towards your goal, turn around,” Grubaugh said.
In the first volume of “The Abolition of Man,” Grubaugh explores the potential results of this blind progress.
“There were four more volumes of the book that explored my own personal ideas about a banal, content apocalypse, in which it is too easy to make new content, so due to option-paralysis, all content becomes basically worthless,” Grubaugh said.
Many artists and art appreciators find refuge because they don’t believe AI will ever be able to replicate the creative process that goes into art.
AI may not be able to replicate the human creative process. But it certainly has a process. During the creation of “The Abolition of Man,” Grubaugh experimented with Midjourney to get different results.
“We used Midjourney as stupidly as possible. The less I tried to be good at prompting the AI the easier it was to see how it thought. A good AI artist is, in my opinion, kind of like a bully or a micromanaging boss, forcing the AI into what they want. I found it much more fun to let the AI do whatever it wanted to do,” Grubaugh said.
Grubaugh points out that the results became less original as human biases influenced Midjourney’s data.
“Unfortunately, now that the general public is using the tech we are now teaching it our preferences. The general population is always going to head toward the average, so the images have become sadly more predictable over time and the newer work looks far less creative to me than the stuff we were getting back in 2022,” Grubaugh said.
