Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 8/19/22
Robot Uprising Readiness Edition
Everyone in Administration is back in the bunker, having traversed several thousand miles in the previous weeks, and we are all settling back into what may be charitably called “Bunker Living.” There is one final excursion to make, a business trip to a convention for theater owners, that will not be in any way as cool and interesting as it might sound, but that should prove to be quite entertaining for all of the non-theater-owning members of the extended N.T.A.B. family. More on that next week.
Field Report: Mineral Wells, Texas
Last week’s medicinal outing was just the thing needed for the staff, as we were able to start a couple of projects in the relative peace and quiet that would have been denied us in the bunker.
The trip included passing through two other communities; Graham, Texas, which boasts the largest town square in the United States (certainly the state of Texas), and Eastland, Texas, which has built the single greatest fortress in anticipation of the Zombie Apocalypse I’ve ever seen, called Eastland High School.
Let me just come right out and say it: when the chemicals are released into the atmosphere and bring the recently-dead back to life (we’re presuming a Return of the Living Dead scenario, but only for illustrative purposes), everyone in the bunker will be evacuating to Eastland High School for the next phase of human existence.
This fortress is located on a massive hilltop, not quite in the center of a city block, and affords incredible high ground positioning for anyone with a ranged weapon. The walls and battlements are made of hill country limestone (there’s even a tower), assuring that no horde can push through. Even the doorways into the school are only accessible by stairs. There are no windows at ground level. There’s even a waist-high stone wall surrounding the parking lot, just tall enough to slow down any zombies that might make it up the hill past all of the gunfire raining down on them from on high.
My god, it’s perfect.
Janice and I drove by, our mouths hanging open. The hill was visible from the main highway, so much so that we both saw it and turned The Spectre around to check out what it was. When we got to the intersection, we couldn’t believe it. The first thing we noticed was the drainage ditch, made of concrete, that ran down the hill like the world’s worst luge. Somewhere there was a “no skateboarding” sign but I guarantee you this: that sign stops no teenager with a skateboard.
As we made the block, we became aware of two things: this building was built back in either the 1910s or the 1920s, when child safety was more of a nebulous concept than a requirement. Several new staircases were built so that children wouldn’t have to use the old, shallow, made-of-crumbling-stone stairs, positioned at the top of a giant hill, in order to get to school.
Also: we were being followed. The sight of a Prius, festooned with N.T.A.B. stickers, casing the high school and taking pictures, was not lost on the local militia, who have evidently called “dibs” on the place when the nukes go off and the mutants arise from the ashes of a sundered world. Hey, I get it. The place is perfect. We shook our tail and continued on our way, but not before taking one final picture of the drainage ditch on the other side of the hill.
Graham, Texas, by comparison, seemed very tame, with little to no post-apocalypse value, but it was quite charming, and their square was indeed quite big. Many squares are roughly one city block, but Graham’s square was two city blocks (more of a rectangle than a square) with a kind of meandering pass-through in case you were in such a hurry as to get to the other side and didn’t have time to drive up to the end of the block, turn left, and then turn left again. I mean, that could take forever.
We found one of only two remaining Gibson’s stores in Weatherford, along with a book and coffee (well, really a coffee and book) shop. We did a bit of paperback rescuing there, liberating a Michael Moorcock paperback and a Neal Barrett, Jr. paperback, so that they might find good forever homes with grateful new readers.
The Midjourney Controversy
You may have seen a lot of people online playing around with Midjourney, an AI powered bot that generates artwork and, if properly prompted and nudged, can do some pretty good copies of other artist’s styles. If you don’t know what all the hubbub is about, google “Midjourney AI controversy” and get ready to go down the rabbit hole.
I have been playing around with it, which may seem needless, because of how many artists I know—and it’s a lot. Both big and small, the famous and not so famous, comic, book, and fine art illustration and all other types of media in between. Animators and digital concept artists. I know a shitload of draw-ers.
I’ve been working with artists for decades—I published my first comic book in 1990, and I’ve done art direction and editing for more than one company and publisher. I do this because I have middling art skills, at best, and I knew that about myself early. I could never be Howard Pyle. Hell, I could never be John Byrne, no matter how hard I worked at it. But I was able to string a sentence together with ease, so, there you have it.
I do have a working knowledge of art theory, mostly from reading books on my own and sitting around spending umpteen number of hours talking comic art, fine art, and even doing art, with other artists. I actually think I’m a pretty good artistic director for all of that. I may not be able to execute it, but I can clearly communicate what I want, or how I want it to look.
In recent years, I’ve taken to creating an art brief, a document full of actual examples of the kinds of things I need drawn, or in what style I need things to be in. Some of this is just to simplify communication. You want a lantern drawn? Here, something like this, with no handle and a little taller. Sometimes I use pictures to show, rather than tell, what I am after. “Make the goblins look like 1970s British working class punk kids.” Here’s three pics of those very kids, all snarls and fingers raised, with safety pins in their noses.
Any halfway decent artist can take one look at that and make that cognitive leap from photo to finished artwork. It doesn’t take much; artists tend to think in pictures to begin with. But that’s just the thing—their imaginations work best if you prime the pump a little. Give them parameters, to help them narrow down their visual catalog to the thing you’re after.
As I was putting keywords and phrases and prompts into Midjourney, I was struck by what I was doing—essentially art directing the AI. The difference is, the AI is an idiot. It’s also not a very good artist to begin with. It’s great at sampling color palettes and brush strokes and textures, but it’s terrible at faces unless you are very specific and name a celebrity to appropriate. And it’s random, too, producing strange artifacts in the art that, at best, might be a stylistic flourish, and at worst, a bunch of random and chaotic gibberish.
Midjourney seems to be very enamored of Japanese painters and anime artists, because a lot of the people generated have that kind of stylistic touches, even if you don’t want them. This might be great for fan art (I watched one user burn through all 25 of their free trial images typing “Sith Lord Jessica Rabbit,” and “Sith Lord Spider-Man,” and so on and so on), but for serious, commercial and ostensibly original projects, that won’t cut it. In all other capacities, people are represented by dark, vaguely humanoid blotches that look like an artist’s thumbnail sketch in a layout (which it pretty much is). I mean, you can train the AI to make a fully-rendered human figure but Sweet Baby Jesus, the effort you have to put in and the hoops you gotta jump through—for me, anyway—isn’t worth it, especially when you don’t want to crib directly from another artist’s work.
Is Midjourney useful? Yeah, kinda. Sorta. It depends entirely on what you need and how you plan to use it. Some artists are generating prompts with it, and then finishing up the piece digitally (which seems to me the best use for it in the hands of someone with those talents). Treating it like a background plate, the AI does a lot of the heavy lifting for someone who can manipulate digital artwork with a tablet or in a graphics program of some sort. Some writers, too, are creating art that they like and then writing a story to fit it—shades of the old days of the pulps, where an ambitious word smith could make good money walking into a publisher’s offices and being selected to write the story to go with the cover art they just received. Funny old world, ain’t it?
My friend John Picacio, himself an incredibly talented artist, wrote a small but very prescient thread on Twitter recently. He said,
If you’re wondering whether AI art is a danger to your art career, ask yourself how replaceable your work is in the marketplace. If your work can be replicated by AI so that consumers can cut you out of the equation, it’s not necessarily game over. But it is time to evolve.
The key will be how individual artists maintain a level of differentiation and recognizability apart from the AI glut. Audiences will soon accept AI art as no different from non-AI work (possibly already have in some deprived corners).
In response, I see some illustrators who are becoming more performer than painter. I see some who are becoming artist/writer hybrids. I see others who are creating more work with traditional media. I see others who are creating their own brands. In the end, the key to career longevity will be how an artist’s work resonates with an audience in ways that a program or casual can’t replace. Same as it ever was.
I think this is spot-on. As a writer, an editor, and a publisher, I don’t want to work with the robots. AI scares me. Always has. I grew up in the 1980s, so there isn’t a movie nor a book I watched that didn’t show computers taking over, running amok, trying to kill us. I subscribe to that interpretation whole-heartedly; after all, I’m in the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, right?
But there is a place for this tool, in the hands of someone who can make the best use of it. And from the other side of the drafting table, as a writer who might need an artist but doesn’t have the budget to pay my friends what they are worth (as if I ever actually could), this might be a means to an end for things like Proof of Concept projects, or small press projects or ‘zines, where there’s not a lot of money changing hands to begin with. It’s one thing to call in that “remember when I held your hair while you puked at the Dallas Fantasy Fair in 1991” marker and get the “friends and family” discount for some artwork, but that’s not a sustainable supply line for graphics. It’s one thing to use friends for projects and it’s quite another to abuse a relationship.
Right now, these AI driven art generators are free to try, but quickly become monetized to play around with. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you have $30 a month to drop on an AI subscription, you can save up six months of that and buy artwork from a young, talented artist eager to build up their portfolio. ArtStation and DeviantArt are full of them. And I don’t mean this in a snarky way, but you are going to get exactly what you pay for, but you will at least have the satisfaction of paying a person and not a bot. For now, I still think that high quality, professionally-produced artwork, remains one of the many hurdles in front of publishing at any level.
So, a high school that’s totally inaccessible to students with neuromuscular disabilities? How quaint.
School architecture is fascinating. My high school was built to be riot proof and as a result looks like a county jail. Eastland looks like could sub in for either a castle or a version of Shawshank.
Meanwhile, my younger son’s school feels like a wonderland; flooded in natural light, high ceilings, the works. And no stairs to get into the building. You only need to navigate a curb from the parking lot.
I agree with you and your friend both on the role of AI for both art and writing. A good writer will always find a place to land. Someone churning out fodder for content mills should probably start looking over their shoulder. Charlie Warzel had a pretty good article this week about his use of AI, and the ensuing firestorm it caused on Twitter.