AI-generated imagery has been around since the 1960s, but the recent releases of DALL·E, Midjourney, and other natural language-based AI image generators have unleashed a fresh round of handwringing about “The Death of Art” and the displacement of human artists.
We now live in a world where everyone has been granted a “Green Lantern ring” capable of manifesting any thought (or prompt) in vivid imagery that is either beyond your ability to create or beyond your ability to create in the 60 seconds or less that the AI needs to generate new data based on learning patterns.
On the one hand, it’s all good fun, such as my pal Anders Beer’s prompt: “Will Ferrell in a wrestling match with Paris Hilton”…
Or the dueling banjos-style showdown between my young daughter and an AI on the prompts: “an ant singing on a mountaintop” and “a cat with a robot arm holding a cupcake”…
An IP washing machine
On the other hand, it’s a sea change with disruptive commercial and ethical ramifications.
Artists from Rembrandt van Rijn to Jeff Koons have employed assistants in the course of producing their work, so on the face of things, an AI assistant is merely a 21st century twist on that tradition. Marvel Studios concept artist Karla Ortiz observes:
“I could see myself utilizing AI-generated imagery for initial visual references and inspiration. What if I wish to paint an object in a particular light scheme or require a specific texture in a specific shape? AI would be an invaluable tool to assist me in my artwork. For some artists, AI would be an absolute game-changer, allowing them to have nearly immediate references to further inspire and potentially inform.”
For many creatives, myself included, the prospect of leveraging AI is too compelling to ignore. Incorporating digital and now generative tools into our workflows is a natural progression. The fact that anyone can submit a phrase to an AI image generator and produce a result is no more disturbing than the fact that anyone can walk into an art supply store and produce a result.
But for others, the prospect of machine learning technology being applied by producers to circumvent the costs of dealing with human artists is no longer the stuff of dystopian futurism. The displacement threat is here, now.
Those content producers who may be inclined to brush aside such concerns as Luddite foot-dragging would do well to consider the ethical and legal dilemma posed by AI “data scraping.” While AI image generation is fun for casual users, and promising for tech-forward creators, digital artist Jon Juarez (Square Enix, Microsoft) notes that AI platforms function as “washing machines of intellectual property.” Technology is progressing faster than the law can keep up, and there is no definitive copyright stance on machines producing images synthesized from human art.
“SUMMER ISLAND”
Amid this scrum, I came across “SUMMER ISLAND:” a fascinating 40-page folk-horror comic written by Steve Coulson, with artwork generated by Midjourney AI. I’ve seen a few of these attempts at AI-aided storytelling and felt that Coulson did an outstanding job using AI image generation in a smart way for his short-form horror story. I also appreciated how he summarized his motivation and process in the end notes of the comic, so I contacted Steve for the interview below.
As a storyteller with a history of experimenting with the possibilities of new technologies, Coulson’s insightful observations range from the practical to the philosophical: addressing the promise and the problems, the inevitability and the ethics of the AI-aided creative process. Given the exponential pace of AI technology, it’s worth noting that this interview was recorded on August 22nd, 2022 — a lifetime ago where AI image generation is concerned.
KEVIN: Steve, thank you for joining us. It’s fascinating to see what you’re doing with AI image generation. Why don’t you tell us a bit about your background prior to creating your AI-mediated folk horror comic, “SUMMER ISLAND?”
STEVE: Sure, and thanks for having me. My name is Steve Coulson, and I’m the Co-owner and Creative Director of a company called Campfire, based in New York City. We’ve been around for about 13 years and specialize in creating immersive fan experiences for entertainment, properties, and brands. For example, a TV company will come to us and say, “We have a new show launching. We think there will be a large fan base and need to get them excited. Let’s create an event — an instance of something to immerse them in the story world alongside the show.” So we help launch those immersive experiences and fantasy worlds. We’ve done work for Watchmen, Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Ted Lasso. If you check out our website at www.campfirenyc.com, you’ll see the kind of work that we do: storytelling that bridges the physical and digital worlds.
KEVIN: Very cool.
Simulating authenticity
STEVE: A good example of the type of project that comes under our purview is Amazon Studios’ 2015 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle:” a very dark alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II and America is under the thumb of the Axis powers. We created a radio station called “Resistance Radio” that broadcasts messages of hope from the neutral zone between the German-controlled and Japanese-controlled territories. So you could tune in to this radio station and listen to the DJs talking about their experiences and playing music in an oppressive world where rock & roll never developed. We partnered with Danger Mouse and did a very cool album of covers of traditional songs.
KEVIN: [Laughs] Wow!
STEVE: So that’s the kind of work we do. And I think it links directly into a project like “SUMMER ISLAND” because to create an immersive experience, it’s really important to simulate authenticity. If I send you a box from the world of Game of Thrones, you want it to seem like it’s come from a medieval world: the look and feel of it, the smell of it. I’ve always told my art directors to think like forgers. [laughs] Because if we do our job properly, we’ll forge something so well that you can’t tell the difference between the fake object and the real object — and that’s how you establish and maintain immersion. So “SUMMER ISLAND” is an outgrowth of that exploration of simulated realities.
KEVIN: Did your current creative experimentation with AI come out of your day job, or was this something percolating on the sidelines? How did you get into it?
STEVE: My team and I are all dabblers. We like to be ahead of the curve and experiment with different technologies: virtual worlds, NFTs, etc… and see if there’s creative opportunity for us. I’ve been using Midjourney for a couple of months on a variety of projects — photo essays and so forth — just trying to push the limits of the technology and see what can be done.
KEVIN: I think you made really smart use of AI image generation technology on “SUMMER ISLAND,” which is a great graphic novel, by the way…
STEVE: Thank you.
KEVIN: …and I read in the end notes that it indeed began as a faux photo essay exploration that evolved into the story of a photo journalist visiting this mysterious island and getting in way over his head, literally and figuratively.
STEVE: Yes. I’m much more interested in sequential storytelling than in creating static pieces of art. So I started creating a photo essay that was inspired by “The Wicker Man” — with that particular early 70’s folk horror look and feel to it. I was really interested in exploring that aesthetic. Could I create a photo essay in Midjourney that felt like it was shot on location with a particular stock of Kodak film, with certain camera lensing in a specific aspect ratio? It’s that idea of thinking like a forger again. So I had a lot of fun with that photo essay, and when I finished I thought to myself: “I wonder if I could reroll the project and tell the exact same story in a completely different visual style as a test for what the system can do?”
KEVIN: Mmm.
STEVE: And I’m a life-long comics fan. You can see I have comics pages here on the walls behind me, and I have over 60 boxes of comics in my collection. So I wondered if I could tell this as a comics story. I’ve seen people on Midjourney — there are quite a few creators or “prompters” there — pulling together comic books. Most feel like European comics and take advantage of Midjourney’s sci-fi leanings…
KEVIN: [Laughs] You get a lot of establishing shots, moody close-ups and so forth…
STEVE: [Laughs] Yes, and that’s great. But I wanted to move beyond that and see if I could make a comic book that looks like a comic book — not like an AI trying to make a comic book. Can it feel hand-illustrated? Can it feel authentic? There are things about “SUMMER ISLAND” which I feel are very important. The aspect ratios of the images are the same as in American comics. It has all of the elements that we traditionally associate with comics. So when you read it, it feels real… but then there’s that moment of dissonance where you realize: “Wait a minute… no human hand drew this.”
KEVIN: You know, as a life-long comics fan myself, I was very impressed with what you achieved compared to the other attempts I’ve seen being made at this. If I didn’t already know that “SUMMER ISLAND” was an AI-mediated comic, that’s not the first thought that would have come to mind while reading it. The type of story you told, the way you told it, the way you applied the technology… demonstrates a high level of creative thought and design thinking, as reflected by your observations here. And I mention that because I’ve seen questions in some of the discussion threads where people have literally asked if you just give the AI your text and it magically spits out a full-blown comic for you [laughs].
STEVE: [Laughs] Uh, yeah… no.
KEVIN: It reminds me of the remarks that CG artists and animators such as myself got, and still sometimes get, where people think that the machine does most or all of the work for you. I think anyone who’s reading your comments in this interview can hopefully recognize the amount of insight, analysis, conceptualization, and design that’s required to apply AI image generation in a way that’s productive and supportive of your storytelling goals.
STEVE: Yes. I mean, look… I’m not tooting my own horn here, but I think if you’re going to spend some time on a project, it might as well be worthwhile. There are a lot of people who go on Midjourney and say, “Give me a gnome in a car” [laughs]. And they’re thrilled with the result and it’s fantastic, because it’s like magic. Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently-advanced technology will seem like magic, and Midjourney absolutely feels like magic. In “SUMMER ISLAND”, I told the story of a community embracing a monster, and that was specifically chosen as an allegory for where Midjourney is today.
Embracing the monster
KEVIN: So what was it like working with this monster?
STEVE: [Laughs] You mean the process of making the comic itself? Well, I knew the story of “SUMMER ISLAND” because I had worked it through with the fake photo essay. I knew the tone, the pacing, and so on. I knew that I wanted to create a narrative within the comic — as any great comic has — that establishes beats with splash panels. Every three or four pages, I wanted a huge splash page.
KEVIN: Yes.
STEVE: Now at the time that I made “SUMMER ISLAND,” Midjourney had — and I said “had” because there’s been an update just in the last couple of days that addresses it — a problem with consistency. Midjourney is such a simple interface. You tell it what you want and it returns its best effort as to what that could look like. But there was no connection between images, no consistency. However, that continuity issue has just been addressed [laughs]
KEVIN: But at the time that you created “SUMMER ISLAND,” you were struggling to tell a sequential story with an AI image generator that wasn’t designed to support the graphic throughline necessary.
STEVE: Right. In Midjourney at that time, you could tell it what your character looks like, but would get different results from image to image. This was very difficult to get around. It’s one of the reasons why I designed a story with an unseen protagonist, so I didn’t have to worry about that.
KEVIN: Smart.
STEVE: And photojournalists are always unseen components of the story anyway, so this was an easy way to get around the limitations of the system.
KEVIN: What was the AI prompting process like in terms of tweaking your requests to get results you were happy with? You mention in the “SUMMER ISLAND” end…