What can I say? Life is busy. The day-time job is essential to pay the bills. Play time is a must to keep the head sane. Extra work requires energy that isn’t always there. Updating the blog and website was not a priority.
Then AI came and my personal work came to a halt.
Suddenly social medias got flooded with pet portraits as good as the ones I could create. And they cost nothing and took a minute to produce. This was so discouraging and upsetting, I had to take a break.
There was an idea for another kid’s book. It got written and storyboarded. But AI began “writing and illustrating” kid’s books within a day or two, again, at no cost. I halted the project and went back to playing outside and pretending the machine take over was not happening.
As more and more elements of my creative job slowly got replaced by the bot, I began to feel a deep sadness. What was the point of spending hours and hours (and hours) drawing a lovely illustration when the machine could do it in a minute. For free.
Suddenly everybody and anyone became an “artist”. I felt I was no longer needed. So I stuck to the government day job and gave up and the fun creative drawings I loved doing. I suffered in silence as the “Art Terminator” threatened and continued to take over my creative universe. It’s hard to describe the feeling of having the talent you define yourself by being taken over by a machine. And to see the world embrace it (mostly) with open arms.
But then last summer a friend re-visited the idea of the storybook and convinced me I should still do it. A project purely for fun. No money earned. Something that would get many of my island neighbours involved. Drawing and creating for the pure enjoyment of it, with no deadline or expectations. A story about dogs. And the biggest mystery on island.
I pulled the iPad out and looked at the storyboard and script that were left untouched for over a year. And I got excited and inspired again.
I picked up my stylus and said fuck AI.
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