I found this questionable Mortal Kombat Little Portrait set on Facebook this morning.  Firstly, the image displayed here is not my work.  Secondly, the image displayed here is AI-generated.  I know this because it was stupid enough to credit me at the bottom, which human imitators rarely do.

Obviously, I’m staunchly anti-AI.  I’m not here to rant on about why this is awful and must be stopped, as other, more erudite people have done so before and will do so again.  However, as this is the first time, to my knowledge, that someone has used AI to directly rip me off, I felt it was a unique opportunity to pass comment on what this means to me on a personal level.  Overall, it’s left me equal parts angered, amused and weirded out.  I was initially flattered that someone would want to imitate my work like this - I’d always said before that my work was unlikely to be bothered by AI as it is a little too naive and shonky.  I’m way too small-fry to be under threat. Yet, here we are.

I should note that, based on the context of where I found the image, I don’t believe this was created for profit, and as it credits me at the bottom it clearly isn’t someone claiming my work as their own.  So I don’t feel victimised here, beyond the icky feeling of someone creating suspect work in your name.  That doesn’t make what they did okay though, just to be clear.

It is fascinating, though. Looking beyond the obvious structure and surface-level style I can see where it’s directly lifted elements from my work, such as the ponytail on Sonya, which is spot-on how I do them.  And the top from Raiden is Luke’s from my Star Wars set.  What is hilarious though is that it’s clearly looked at the awkward way each of my characters are posed and went “no, it would look much better at a slight angle towards the viewer”!  And I’m sure it’s right!  But tell that to 2012 Andy who was just mucking around doing a few Batman doodles and had no idea he was constricting himself to this format for the next 13+ years...

The whole piece is a bit more polished than my work, which I’m sure will appeal to some people, but personally I feel it lacks any soul.  The faces are too repetitious, for a start (rather than the stripped-back caricature I’ve worked towards) and there’s none of the little details - Father Jack’s brick, Mr Pink’s little violin playing, or Ron Weasley’s broken wand - that I pride myself on.  People are always going “you should do a set based on [insert video game]” and “you should do a set based on [insert anime]” but there’s a really good reason I haven’t done a Mortal Kombat set before - I don’t care enough about that video game to do an illustration of them, so the love and attention to detail wouldn’t be there.  And if the love and attention to detail isn’t there, then what the fuck’s the point?  And while I don’t want to portray myself as a victim, by popping my name at the bottom (as hilarious as it is) it is saying this is my work, on a piece I want no part of and had no control over, which is not on.

I am self-aware enough to see the potential underlining hypocracy of me whining about having my IP ripped off when this very endeavour has been about creating (and selling) art inspired by other people’s IP.  I get it.  There’s a fine line of ethics that go with doing this stuff and I will happily wax lyrical about it.  However, there’s a phenomenal documentary called 24X36: A Movie About Movie Posters where they debate official licenses (around 55min in) and some of the opinions outline my stance on this stuff more eloquently than I ever could.

I will say this though: the fundamental point is that when I create art inspired by a film I love, I am creating a love letter to that film, I’m flatterbombing that film with my artwork, I’m kneeling down and praying at the altar of that film.  What I’m not doing is insulting that film and the filmmakers involved by getting a computer to create another film that looks a bit like that film, but a complete dogshit version.  That is the difference between what I do and this piece of crap.

So much anti-AI focus is on the AI itself, but ChatGPT is not going around self-awarely ripping off my work like Skynet with a fineliner.  A human did that.  And that’s where the real problem lies, and always has done.  It’s the fundamental lack of appreciation for the time, effort and artistry that goes into being creative (even if it’s just a set of twelve crude black and white drawings of things from films and TV shows) that’s been abundant since long before AI was a problem.  It’s the exact same attitude that causes a client to cancel an illustration job because they’ve “decided to go with photography instead” meaning they’re getting Dave from the office with the digi-SLR to do it instead of paying a professional photographer.  “Can I do this quicker and cheaper?” Yes.  “Are the results passable if you don’t study them too hard?” Yes.  “Then go for it”.  Until that attitude changes, and people keep reducing artistic endeavours down to the lowest common denominator, then there will always be a problem.

I updated my Little Portrait preview set - this will be included in all future orders of my prints.

Happy (slightly belated) 30th Anniversary to Father Ted! This was much-loved by teenage me, and is still quoted daily in our household.   In terms of my sporadic attempts at writing comedy, this is up there at the top of my inspirations.  Every episode is sublime, not a duff one among the lot of them.

This is my 49th Little Portrait Set and I couldn’t think of a better one to do, especially with the anniversary occurring this year. I’ve been toying with doing this one for a while but was initially put off by issues concerning one of the creators.  However, they were just one part of this show, and I would hate for this show to be dismissed or cancelled too.

Update:


Lovely comment from Arthur Mathews on Instagram. Made my birthday!

Happy (belated) 20th Birthday to Shaun of the Dead!

I started work on this Shaun set last year, in plenty of time for it’s anniversary, but other stuff came up and it got sidelined.  I always like to get a creative project completed before the end of January so here we are, unfashionably late to the celebrations.

I was (and still am) a massive fan of Spaced, as well as zombie movies in general, so when Shaun came out it was a dream come true. 20 years on I think it stands up very well indeed. And like the Romero movies it pays tribute to, it says more about human nature in the face of otherworldly threats than all the episodes of The Walking Dead combined.

This is my 48th Little Portrait set (not including the Halloween ones) so I’m thinking hard about what comes next.

This is a short comic about intergalactic diplomacy that I did nearly a decade ago for the now sadly defunct app-based comic anthology Scrawl. The magazine folded before my issue could be completed, so this just sat on a hard disk for years hoping to one day see the light of day. I found it the other day and it still made my laugh so here we are.

All Scrawl comics had an interactive element to play with the digital format and this one was intended to have a sort of game-based approach to the handshake in the middle (hence why the artwork is so repetitive). I’ve had to make it more linear in this version, but I think it still works.