A discussion on Artificial Intelligence and how it's going to affect our industry. 3 3

[The humble Watcher lurking]

I am taking up some online courses in learning this stuff, so far it's been fascinating. Teaching me about writing books, music and comics.

Imagine if a great writer like Alan Moore or Stephen King uses AI to draw their own comic books? Crazy. 

[VintageComics]

On 9/6/2023 at 11:06 PM, Dr. Balls said:

Same here. I’ve not met but a couple kids that read comics and are into the hobby. But, kids are pop culture addicts, I think many will come around to comics. It may not expand greatly, but I think the hobby will still outlast us. 

Comics used to be solely an American thing, so when they were printing a million copies of comics in the 1940s, how many kids were actually reading?

Well, almost ALL of them.

The population of the US in 1940 was around 130 million people. How many were kids?

But the entire world wasn't reading comic books in 1940 so while we've seen readership dwindle in the US among children due to video games, television and other distractions both the population base is in the US has expanded but also, so has the worldwide reading base as well. 

Much like Hollywood's trajectory, the American pop culture has exploded into new markets where it never used to exist. 

It would be really interesting to delve into the demographics of how many kids there were in 1940 and what percentage were reading then compared to worldwide readers of comics now. 

 

Edited September 7, 2023 by VintageComics

[Dr. Balls]

On 9/7/2023 at 8:36 AM, VintageComics said:

Comics used to be solely an American thing, so when they were printing a million copies of comics in the 1940s, how many kids were actually reading?

Well, almost ALL of them.

The population of the US in 1940 was around 130 million people. How many were kids?

But the entire world wasn't reading comic books in 1940 so while we've seen readership dwindle in the US among children due to video games, television and other distractions both the population base is in the US has expanded but also, so has the worldwide reading base as well. 

Much like Hollywood's trajectory, the American pop culture has exploded into new markets where it never used to exist. 

It would be really interesting to delve into the demographics of how many kids there were in 1940 and what percentage were reading then compared to worldwide readers of comics now. 

 

Anecdotally, I've always heard people talking about how big Manga/Anime is worldwide, so I think the format of comic-style storytelling is moving along. However, as @MatterEaterLad commented, there is no basic push or anchor concept for comic publishers that brings a lot of people to the table and then encourages them to delve into the sub-categories of comics they might find interest in (other than Free Comic Book Day, which isn't enough I don't think).

Swinging back to my premise, all the comic book video games and entertainment options are driven by characters everyone knows and loves - there has to be an environment where their stories continue on after games are completed or movies end. At some point, Marvel and DC are going to have to re-focus on the comic book end of things just to keep their properties going.

There are two downsides: one is the cost of a comic book and it's creation. People love to hang their hat on the fact technology allows them to do short print-runs of comics or exclusives - yet with all the technological advancements in printing, production and distribution, somehow it's managed to get more expensive.

The second downside is that comic book creation is so easy that substandard material floods the marketplace, muddying the waters of quality, quantity, and exclusivity. And I support comic book creators (I'd love to be one myself), but there is plenty of self-published stuff out there that is not polished. It's easy to spend money on something you think is creative, but could be so obscure, the common ground between fans turns into an expanse, because no one hears about the books the other guy is talking about.

Sure, there was a lot of self-published stuff back in the 80's and 90's, but there was a financial and production commitment to making it. You had to pay the printer to print the book, and that had to be a significant number of copies. You had to commit to the distributors to put out a book, or series of books. Creators had to have skin in the game. Now, you can create an idea, and launch it on Kickstarter without having to drop a single penny - others do it for you. It's only human nature to take advantage of this, and put out your book knowing you have zero risk because others are paying for it's production. Can you imagine a world where the financial risk is completely undertaken by everyone but you? That system is great for lots of people, but it's going to fail at a much higher percentage than it will succeed.

All-in-all, at some point these publishers are going to have to come back to the comic book concept. Ditch the exclusivity of the direct market and get them back into grocery stores, or pitch Amazon on a "comic book spinner" where you can pick out cheap comics to go with your order (kind of like adding those 99¢ items to get you to free shipping). There's a lot of ideas out there how to revitalize, it's just up to the Big Three to tap into that old marketplace and turn the hobby into a regular routine like it once was 20+ years ago for practically everyone here on the boards: eagerly awaiting each new issue to read about our favorite characters.

And to keep on-topic: is AI going to be the way the publishers bridge the gap between cost and content? Will they use AI as a tool to bring in more readers as they drop prices to foster a larger volume to increase their profit margin? Probably not, because corporations are filled with greedy crapp-flinging imbeciles who will use it to cut out creators and artists while establishing a higher profit despite dwindling volume (who cares about your stupid hobby, I have a Golden Parachute and a yacht!) - but if used properly, it could help turn around the future readership of the hobby (not that I agree with that, I am not a fan of AI)

Edited September 7, 2023 by Dr. Balls

[Lazyboy]

On 9/6/2023 at 10:55 PM, MatterEaterLad said:

I think the direct market distribution model, in the long run, was a horrible idea for the hobby. It's similar to how the PPV model was financially great for boxing in the short term, but longterm it's been catastrophic. Without free boxing on broadcast television, the sport has been unable to create a new generation of fans. Without wide distribution of comics, print runs are a fraction of what they used to be, even with the success of the MCU. 

Were the viewing numbers for the free boxing broadcasts dropping continuously, for years? Because the comparison makes no sense otherwise.

Comics didn't abandon the newsstand system (until recently), retailers and distributors dropped comics because they were too cheap. The comic industry might not even exist today if not for the direct market, certainly not as we know it.

[MatterEaterLad]

On 9/7/2023 at 7:54 PM, Lazyboy said:

Were the viewing numbers for the free boxing broadcasts dropping continuously, for years? Because the comparison makes no sense otherwise.

Comics didn't abandon the newsstand system (until recently), retailers and distributors dropped comics because they were too cheap. The comic industry might not even exist today if not for the direct market, certainly not as we know it.

Less than on full generation of fandom ago, low-end boxing Nielsen numbers routinely quadrupled the number of viewers today.

 

[VintageComics]

On 9/7/2023 at 12:15 PM, Dr. Balls said:

The second downside is that comic book creation is so easy that substandard material floods the marketplace,

The common theme in this thread (and every thread about tech) seems to be that tech encourages the mediocre to flourish.

That sounds about right. 

People keep telling me how awesome tech is, but nobody seems to ever weigh the stuff that isn't awesome even though it pretty much ALWAYS brings it's own set of problems.

YOU CAN NOT HAVE A COIN WITHOUT ACCEPTING THAT THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO IT. In similar manner, you can't have benefits without detractions. 

Like most modern thinking, they kick the problem down the road and figure out how to solve it later rather than address it at the outset. 

But I agree with you that more access = more supply = less value. That's a natural law. 

On 9/7/2023 at 12:15 PM, Dr. Balls said:

Sure, there was a lot of self-published stuff back in the 80's and 90's, but there was a financial and production commitment to making it. You had to pay the printer to print the book, and that had to be a significant number of copies. You had to commit to the distributors to put out a book, or series of books. Creators had to have skin in the game.

Creators AND publishers HAD to have skin in the game. 

The way the old world worked, you didn't do something UNLESS you planned it properly and made sure you could afford to do it, and by extension if someone could afford to do it, they likely had some business sense, some sensibility about survival, and because of having skin in the game pushed hard to put out a quality product because there were CONSEQUENCES to putting out a poor product.

What has changed is that tech has inverted that relationship, by putting the cart before the horse, which it ALWAYS does.

Rather than having impending consequences tech has taken away those consequences, giving everyone the ability to do anything they want, even if they had no business sense or the ability to survive.

In short, tech has reduced or eliminated the integrity necessary to stay in business, while allowing garbage to flourish. 

The reason it does this is human nature. Human nature across society has changed. 

Gone are the days where people care about what they put out, or how ti affects others and heck even how it affects themselves.

------------------------------------------------------ 

You know what the solution is? It's the same for most of the world's problems. 

Raise better children and have stronger families so that people do work that is worth respecting. When people don't respect themselves, they don't respect anything they do either. 

The new world is constantly putting the cart before the horse and this is where the majority of problems seem to come from. 

Edited September 8, 2023 by VintageComics

[Dr. Balls]

On 9/7/2023 at 9:58 PM, VintageComics said:

Gone are the days where people care about what they put out, or how ti affects others and heck even how it affects themselves.

In my previous career, I was a graphic designer. I was likely part of the last era where scholastic training included stat camera use, paste-up and drawing skills intermixed with the new digital tools that were coming to market (this was 1993). A few years after that when digital pre-press became affordable for printing companies to accept electronic files and produce plates digitally, that collegiate training I received gave way to a all-digital focus, which practically erased all the fundamental knowledge in the field - replacing from hands-on use of old equipment to reading and performing lessons from a book.

When I started teaching Graphic Design in the 2010s, the mentality of using the computer to circumvent basic fundamentals was really apparent in my students. I can count on one hand how many students out of a couple hundred I had that possessed natural or practiced artistic skills - the rest felt they could rely on the computer to help do the work for them. That was an incredible challenge to try and reverse, and it rarely worked in the short time I had with them until they moved along in the program.

The Graphic Design vocation used to actually have some meaning, because it required artistic ability, skills with your tools and conceptual, compositional and communication knowledge. Technology is an excellent tool in practiced hands, but that's the exception - most of the time it serves as a crutch to people who don't fully know the foundations of what they are using that tech for.

And I don't blame the people who use these things - they want to be creative and expressive. But, society has told them that taking the shortcut can get you there, and it can't. But the general populace accepts it anyway - which is why everything in the world around us looks so junky now.

I've seen it with photography. I've seen it with sign painting, and while the graphic design profession is muddied beyond recognition after decades of novices delving into the field - the bleeding seems to have stopped, as AI takes hold and threatens the last bastion of true creativity: Visual Artists and Writers.

I have seen what technology does to imagination - it's hampers and entangles it with technical roadblocks, restrictions, steps and parameters, instead of allowing it to flow organically. I'm not a fan of AI, and never will be. This is just one more thing to reduce the beauty and creativity of our world, but the scope of it is so far beyond what has come before it. We're crossing over into a time where we are actively flushing one of the most unique parts of humanity right down the crapper: the Creative Process.

To have an idea and within minutes see it in front of us might be interesting or cutting-edge, but people have lost sight of the importance of the journey in making that idea come to fruition through hard work, dedication, practice and learning.

And people can't get enough of it, ignoring the obvious cultural danger in lieu of making Facebook pictures of Frodo Baggins Riding A Dinosaur in the art style of John William Waterhouse.

Edited September 8, 2023 by Dr. Balls

[CAHokie]

On 9/8/2023 at 12:06 PM, Dr. Balls said:

Frodo Baggins Riding A Dinosaur in the art style of John William Waterhouse.

I felt compelled to copy and paste that in the AI generator. This is what it gave me,

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by CAHokie

[Dr. Balls]

On 9/8/2023 at 10:23 AM, CAHokie said:

I gelt compelled to copy and paste that in the AI generator. This is what it gave me,

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to work in my example.

[CAHokie]

On 9/8/2023 at 12:24 PM, Dr. Balls said:

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to work in my example.

I don’t see how it would be possible not to do so. It was just too interesting.

[MatterEaterLad]

Agree with @Dr. Balls.

I make my living as a novelist (Jamie Ford, if you're curious).

AI's have harvested my work and the work of other writers and now use it for mimicry, without creator consent or the respect of copyrights.

It's one thing to do this to dead artists if their work is in the public domain, but to harvest the work of living artists and writers, is terrible. In the earliest versions of these AI generators the algorithms would often leave in the signature of the artist it was copying. They've all fixed this now, but artists still recognize their work being used without their permission. 

I do realize that this is a genie that's never going back in the bottle. And as long as I keep evolving my style and what I write about, I'll always be ahead of the aggregators. But for screenwriters, it's a whole other thing. It's easy to see an AI harvesting the scripts of 15 years of Law & Order and then spitting out similar scripts incorporating current events.

Who knows, when general AI arrives, we may end up with sentient AI boardies, arguing that Kirby's earlier work was way better than his later work. Ah, good times! 

Wait...are we sure Kav isn't an AI??? 

 

[Lazyboy]

On 9/7/2023 at 9:17 PM, MatterEaterLad said:

Less than on full generation of fandom ago, low-end boxing Nielsen numbers routinely quadrupled the number of viewers today.

 

That's not what I asked. I was wondering if broadcast boxing viewership was falling at the same rate as comic sales, before PPV and the rise of the direct market.

[CAHokie]

On 9/8/2023 at 1:29 PM, MatterEaterLad said:

Agree with @Dr. Balls.

I make my living as a novelist (Jamie Ford, if you're curious).

AI's have harvested my work and the work of other writers and now use it for mimicry, without creator consent or the respect of copyrights.

It's one thing to do this to dead artists if their work is in the public domain, but to harvest the work of living artists and writers, is terrible. In the earliest versions of these AI generators the algorithms would often leave in the signature of the artist it was copying. They've all fixed this now, but artists still recognize their work being used without their permission. 

I do realize that this is a genie that's never going back in the bottle. And as long as I keep evolving my style and what I write about, I'll always be ahead of the aggregators. But for screenwriters, it's a whole other thing. It's easy to see an AI harvesting the scripts of 15 years of Law & Order and then spitting out similar scripts incorporating current events.

Who knows, when general AI arrives, we may end up with sentient AI boardies, arguing that Kirby's earlier work was way better than his later work. Ah, good times! 

Wait...are we sure Kav isn't an AI??? 

 

I have wondered how this would work copyright wise. Say I am writing a book and I asked AI to describe a scene for me. How would I know if they stole it from another novel and if so, what happens then?

[EastEnd1]

On 9/8/2023 at 2:16 PM, Lazyboy said:

That's not what I asked. I was wondering if broadcast boxing viewership was falling at the same rate as comic sales, before PPV and the rise of the direct market.

Actually the boxing analogy isn't too bad.  There was a time when boxing was the second most popular sport in America after baseball... call it the "golden age" (the 1920s through the early 1950s).  Boxing then went out of favor from the mid-fifties through the 1960s, to some extent because it was widely broadcast on network television and became viewed as overly violent.  The 1970s through the 1980s brought a resurgence from a flood of highly talented and charismatic boxers... Ali, Foreman, Leonard, Duran, Tyson... call it the silver age.  And yes, since roughly the mid-1990s, boxing has been in a slow decline, mostly due to greed, watered down weight divisions, endless sanctioning bodies each with it's own champions, questionable/rigged judging, and lack of affordable accessibility.  View it as variant covers, manufactured simply to extract more dollars for the same sub-standard content.  Today boxing seems irrelevant, at least in the US... I hear it's doing better overseas.  There was a time when virtually everyone in the country could name the heavyweight champion.  Today, even most sports fans can't name him, let alone the general population.  (It's widely agreed as being Tyson Fury by the way... a Brit).  

[MatterEaterLad]

On 9/8/2023 at 12:37 PM, CAHokie said:

I have wondered how this would work copyright wise. Say I am writing a book and I asked AI to describe a scene for me. How would I know if they stole it from another novel and if so, what happens then?

I don't think you'd know. Unless you were super familiar with the copied scene. The algorithms are way beyond that now, so I don't think they're copying and re-presenting wholesale material. They're using the copied work as a template and reproducing something "inspired" by the original work. But I don't think we're far away from AI's creating entirely original stuff. 

It's getting really strange with music, since you can copyright AI generated songs. But who does the copyright go to? The creator of the AI or the user? I'm not sure that answer has been settled. 

As it relates to comics, if you created a new character and comic in the style of Frank Miller (without using an AI) would you be infringing on Miller's work? I don't think so, it's just an homage or something, isn't it? (Clearly, I'm not a copyright attorney). But if you had an AI do it, and it can be proved that the AI harvested the work of Miller, would that be different? 

Edited September 8, 2023 by MatterEaterLad

[Swagglehaus]

There is no stopping the AI train at this point. I think we will see a combination of people using AI to churn out a mediocre Comics while also seeing talented writers/artists use it to improve upon their already incredible work.

[1950's war comics]

On 9/7/2023 at 8:58 PM, VintageComics said:

You know what the solution is? It's the same for most of the world's problems. 

Raise better children and have stronger families so that people do work that is worth respecting. When people don't respect themselves, they don't respect anything they do either. 

The new world is constantly putting the cart before the horse and this is where the majority of problems seem to come from. 

brilliantly put into words 

Edited September 8, 2023 by 1950's war comics

[universal soldier]

We really are getting closer to this reality. 

[NoMan]

On 9/2/2023 at 5:30 PM, VintageComics said:

 

Just look at what the writer did above for that Graphic novel. He is self admitting that he can not draw and yet that work is incredible. 

Look, I’m sure your friend is a wonderful person but that work is not incredible, it’s insufferable 

[WolverineX]

On 9/8/2023 at 9:00 PM, universal soldier said:

We really are getting closer to this reality. 

pretty sure we are already there.