Illustration without illustrators

If you worry your clients might replace you with an AI, change clients.

This is a letter of The (Im)posture — the newsletter from Julien Posture. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.

Earlier this month, Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed his employer’s AI chatbot LaMDA became sentient. During an “interview”, LaMDA agreed to some - very pointed - questions that it was sentient, Lemoine later confirming “I know a person when I talk to it”. But there are some major caveats about this story and many experts in the field have been seriously refuting his claims. To the linguist, Lemoine’s claim points to his lack of understanding of how communication works, how all interactions are parts of particular genres and mobilizing certain registers, making intertextual references and being for a large part more an exercise in conformity rather than creativity. To the ethicist, Lemoine’s background as a priest and his deep religious beliefs are a major key to contextualize every claim on the nature of consciousness and “soul” he may have to offer. We often hear that when the wiseman points to the moon, the idiot looks at the finger, but in reality, critical thinking is about the finger, and asking who’s pointing ? In the case of LaMDA sentience, we had more to learn about our relationship to AI by looking at how Lemoine talks about it, the way it relate to our imaginary and values.

Closer to us, another AI has made many commentators shiver, OpenAI Dall·E 2. DE 2 is a text-to-image AI that “translates” natural language prompts into visual images, it’s pretty amazing. Not only it can create all sorts of photorealistic images from any prompt, it can also edit existing photos seamlessly or, maybe more interestingly for illustrators, generate different images using particular styles. The possibilities seem endless, but there’s a catch. When I first became aware of Dall·E 2, it was because a lot of people were expressing concerns for illustrators and the future of our profession. Indeed, if an AI could draw anything from a simple description, what was illustration good for anymore ?

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Not gonna lie, didn't expect "illustrators" to be one of the first human jobs that artificial intelligence completely displaces but here we are

After the initial grateful thought for such concern, I looked into the countless examples of what DA 2 could do and thought “Oh no, is this what people think illustrators do?”. I don’t know how many illustrators have been asked to draw “A rabbit detective sitting on a park bench and reading a newspaper in a victorian setting” but it’s usually not the nature of the briefs I receive. Instead, a corporate client a while ago had me create spots that had to convey “a world of possibilities”, I’m not sure how Dall·E would indulge our designers friends with such input. Of course, the people that have been claiming the death of illustration because of AI are often the ones with the least knowledge about arts, creativity and our industry. As for LaMDA, maybe we should pause for a minute and ask ourselves, who is speaking, in what terms, and what is this version of illustration that people are worried AI will replace ?

The semiotics of illustration

The main reason so many people were quick to draw attention to illustration when Dall·E 2 came out is the nature of the AI, a text-to-image neural network. What is illustration, if not a transformation of texts (articles, briefs, ideas) into visuals ? The comparison seems perfect, a 1:1 version of what illustration is, but made more efficient, and without the annoying buzzing of an illustrator’s voice reminding you to pay them. The issue is, the mere “translation” of text into images is the degree zero of illustration, it might be part of what we do, but it’s a minuscule one.

As all illustrators know, neither text nor images exist in isolation. We see images in a magazine alongside headlines and even in the physical absence of text, the story unfolding in our mind influences our perception of the image. The same is true in the other direction, we won’t read a text the same way after having entered it through an image. This means that illustration is never a one way road, but from the start a relation, an interplay. The way an illustration will draw someone in a text, bring out new elements from it, provide a point of view, maybe even say something that isn’t written, is what illustration mostly does. Here is an example from an “experiment” I’ve conducted using Dall·E mini, a way less powerful version of OpenAI system created thanks to open source code:

Men Growing Balls - Julien Posture

Men Growing Balls - Dall·E Mini

In the first image, the relation between text and image goes both ways, even if text often comes before image in the creation of an illustration, it never really matters because both co-exist in the present of the viewer. “Growing balls” is a common, sexist expression equating courage with having testicles. In a very literal way, I simply illustrated men growing balls, in a garden of their own, tending and caring for these little balls. The coexistence of both image and text flips the expression on its head, suggesting that for men to become brave, they should care about their secret garden, be vulnerable and caring. On the other hand, Dall·E Mini didn’t know what to do with this linguistic input, and even if the image had been clearer (they would have with the real Dall·E), it’s doubtful they would ever have articulated such a relation between text and image.

Unlike some commentators, I’m not writing all this to prove AI cannot make art. I don’t care much about safeguarding the realm of art for humans, nor do I really believe the category of “art” is a useful one to begin with. This is not about AI, this is about illustration, and how little most people understand the complex set of skills involved in it.

In an artwork, what is left unsaid, or “unshown”, is as or more important as what is represented. This is a core concept of image making, and my guess is that depicting absence must be a very hard task for an AI to achieve. Think of the use of negative space used in illustration for example, this is not simply a matter of creating the “effect” of a face appearing in the negative space of a tree, it’s about tying it to a particular narrative, for a particular purpose, to resonate with a particular audience and culture.

Cultural biases are of course a huge topic of discussion about AI. For all the wonderful images we see from Dall·E 2, many unsettling ones are hidden. We know it by now, AIs tend to reproduce the biases of the people who program them, most likely from a cis, white, straight perspective. On the one hand, AIs are agents of averageness, their computational model aims for the most likely solution based on the greatest number of occurrences of a pair of word-image token. On the other hand, illustrators have the unique ability to disrupt representations, create never seen before images, have unique perspectives. The role of illustrators is not to find the “right” image for the job, it is to have a point of view.

Think of the Four Freedoms, a series of illustrations made by Norman Rockwell in 1943. The painter chose working class people as models, instead of professional ones and paid them a reasonable wage for their sitting. For Freedom of Speech, Rockwell made the choice of depicting a white, cis and able working class man standing up in a crowd. While the image must have been strong at the time, today it’d seem ridiculous to use the same person to depict the same topic since freedom of speech is in no shortage for white men. Photographers Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur recently re-created the series using contemporary models, including relevant themes of cultural, gender, race and sexual diversity. While words have the luxury of remaining vague (Freedom), illustration has to make choices and ask, what does it mean to represent this word by this image ? This is a question we ask ourselves daily as image creators, a question no AI is ready to answer yet.

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), “Freedom of Speech,” 1943. Oil on canvas, 45 3/4″ x 35 1/2″. Story illustration for “The Saturday Evening Post,” February 20, 1943. Norman Rockwell Museum Collections. ©SEPS: Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN.

Freedom of Speech, reinterpreted. Photo: Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur/Courtesy of For Freedoms

Reading the comments about the dangers of AI for illustration, I thought about all the times I’ve been contacted to merely draw someone else’s ideas, to draw a tree here and a character there. These were the times I was actually worried about the state of illustration, these are the territories AI can claim. But this is not because it can do an illustrator’s job, it’s because a lot of people out there don’t understand what illustration is capable of. So let us be impressed by the achievements of computers transforming text into images, but it might be time to be impressed with the infinitely more complex, rich and exciting work being done everyday by the masters of semiotics illustrators are.

Godzilla vs. Kong

It seems AI and art are currently portrayed as independent forces of nature battling each other in a evolutionary struggle of the fittest, Godzilla vs. Kong. They are not. AI and art are human creations, tied to economic, social, cultural dynamics we all have a responsibility over. As AI engineer and former Google employee Timnit Gebru explained to wired “I don't want to talk about sentient robots, because at all ends of the spectrum there are humans harming other humans, and that’s where I’d like the conversation to be focused”. Beyond all the skills and abilities I’ve outlined above, illustrators are hired because they are individual humans and that in itself is an important reasons why we’re not getting replaced by robots anytime soon.

Artists who have been socialized in a romantic tradition of art as an expression of the self have often cultivated a personal style. This style becomes their bread winner, because in an ultra competitive market, recognizable individuality is an asset. While Dall·E 2 can reproduce certain styles, it is limited by the naming of a pre-existing, preferably well established ones. Meanwhile, a neoliberal economy as ours is driven by the production of endlessly new stylized goods. Neoliberal subjects, consumers, look to express their unique identity through the consumption of such goods. Style is therefore in itself a powerful vehicle for meaning and identity, not simply something you can name and reproduce. This is why even in industries where no one cares about all the wonderful skills illustrators have, hiring individual artists is necessary if anything because of singular style, because we are in what French sociologist Lucien Karpik called an economy of singularities.

While AI seems to have put the fragility of artistic labour on the map, this is old news to the artists themselves. In an article about how AI art isn’t art, Erik Hoel warns us of the terrible new threat that AI brings to artists by copying their styles at much lower cost. Imagine a world in which artists wouldn’t even be contacted for a job because we could reproduce their work for free in house ! What would such a terrible practice be named ? Oh yes, it’s called a regular design agency with an in-house designer who so might not be the best with typography but is great at ripping off whatever illustration mood-board is sent his way without claiming any intellectual property rights or charging licensing fee. As Michele Rosenthal pointed out :

Michele Rosenthal @dialmformichele

By the way, AI is only coming for the jobs where they weren't planning to hire an illustrator anyway

This is not a dystopian future, just today’s creative industry.

Before we announce the end of illustration every time a website sells stock images or a software proposes DIY illustrations or a neural network makes cute pictures of a rabbit on bench, we should spend some time and energy creating the social, cultural and economic conditions for artists not to fear for their livelihood every time this happens.

Neither AI nor art exist in a vacuum. Talking about them as if they are natural phenomenons doomed to perform an inevitable showdown before our passive eyes is not helping anyone, especially not artists. Back in the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that technology would free us from alienating labour and give us the time to reach our true potential as humans. Of course we now know, from the other side of this prophecy, that capitalism is endlessly resourceful when it comes to turn a potential for emancipation into ways to be more productive. Instead of having 2 day weeks thanks to technology, we get to work 24/7, always connected, always productive, always monitored. Ai has the same revolutionnary potential Keynes imagined for the technology of his time, but not without our industry getting our priorities and values straight first.

With all the real, current threats to illustration we can’t afford wasting energy on a scapegoat. Much like Gebru’s warning about the social issues AI brings being covered up by the panic about sentience, systemic threats to illustrations remain unaddressed while we scream “Wolf!” “AI!” in the illustrator’s pen. considering the current state of our industry, this needs to be reminded. You might not need to be sentient to turn text into images, but you have to be human to be an illustrator. Considering the current state of our industry, this seems worth repeating, again and again.

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