The increased use of artificial intelligence in comics has industry veterans like The Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman very worried. In the previous half-decade alone, artificial intelligence in media has rapidly evolved from a short-term novelty to a concerning form of technology that threatens to overtake the careers of human content creators. Due to this expedited development, creators, businesses, and lawmakers must decide what is or isn’t an appropriate use of AI in the entertainment industry. Understandably, many creators fear the negative impacts AI may have on their careers and creative expression.

In a creator spotlight panel at San Diego Comic-Con this year, Robert Kirkman, the COO of Image Comics and co-creator of Invincible and The Walking Dead, commented on the surging use of AI in art and writing, as reported by Popverse. Kirkman relayed his personal fears that the unregulated use of the technology threatens to steal the creative platform away from human expressionism. “I am terrified [of AI in comics]… I think that AI is not AI. It’s copying and stealing,” he said.

Kirkman has served as a pillar in the comics and entertainment industry for decades, watching the development and use of new technology as a means to augment creative expression. Unfortunately, Kirkman’s stance on AI already has some ground to be rooted in.

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“I am terrified [of AI in comics]… I think that AI is not AI. It’s copying and stealing.”

Robert Kirkman’s quote came in response to a new platform called Lumi, an AI engine supposedly designed to “level the playing field” for new creators to be able to competitively produce content that would otherwise require the resources established writers and artists already have at their disposal. The AI platform, founded by former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, was revealed on Twitter/X this July and announced as a means to “free creators” and that it will “turn every storyteller into their own personal Disney.” However, Kaepernick failed to expand on the specifics of how AI would be used.

Twitter/X users, many of whom are independent artists and writers, quickly took to the comments to express their displeasure with Lumi’s announcement. Some users, like indie comics creator C. Edward Sellner, strongly expressed their disapproval, noting that time and practice are what make promising creatives, not AI.

Others passionately slammed the former athlete’s factually incorrect statement that creators using Lumi would own all of their work. In the 2023 case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell ruled that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted. Already, the platform’s blatant falsehoods help prove Robert Kirkman’s original point.

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Unfortunately, the Lumi platform isn’t the first AI system that has come under scrutiny for its questionable reliability and advertised lies. Last year, a civil lawsuit was filed against Midjourney, a generative AI program developer, that exposed the company’s secretive spreadsheet that catalogs more than 4,700 artists for the AI program to specifically reference for its image generations. One of the artists on that list, Ross O’Donovan aka RubberRoss, spoke on the weekly live-podcast Geekenders about the use of AI in animation and voice acting.

“Artificial Intelligence is being used to replace, not augment, human expression,” he said. “When you have AI that is solely being developed to replace a human being, to replace artistic expression, that is honestly stupid… We will have an economic collapse if we do not regulate, at least a little bit, how certain people and certain jobs can contribute to AI and monetize their skills to contributing to AI.”

Midjourney isn’t the only company being criticized for its controversial use of AI in content creation. Wizards of the Coast came under fire last year for its use of AI in previous promotional work. Marvel Studios faced heavy backlash for its use of AI animation in the Secret Invasion miniseries’ intro sequence. Earlier this year, Todd McFarlane ran a Spawn cover contest where each winner’s art would be featured as a variant cover in future releases. Among the contest’s winners was a known AI-dependent creator.

AI Cannot Create, It Can Only Copy

The Use of AI Must be Second to Human Expression

Even in situations where AI can be used collaboratively with an artist or writer, such as the Lumi platform advertises, distinguishing what can or cannot be claimed and copyrighted within these collaborations becomes complicated. Currently, there are no assurances that creators who use collaborative AI platforms to generate “expressive” materials would even own most of the content they produce. In an interview with Built In, Daniel Gervais, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, had this to say regarding the issue: “If a machine and human work together, but you can separate what each of them has done, then [copyright] will only focus on the human part.”

As it stands, the use of AI in content creation, especially within the comic and animation industries, is a threatening concept with no guarantees of protection for the creators those AI systems rely on to create generated content. As Robert Kirkman said, “It’s copying and stealing.” AI “art” is not capable of originality as it requires prompt-based reconstruction using preexisting human-made art as its basis. Moving forward, hopefully, lawmakers and policymakers may better advocate for content creators’ creative rights and protections when faced with the growing use and dependence of generative artificial intelligence systems like Lumi or Midjourney.

Sources: Popverse, C. Edward Sellner via Twitter/X, Geekenders, Built In