Skip to content

Listening to two acquaintances argue about if AI art is "art" is not a new experience for me, the now eternal debate between Doomer and Boomer. In this particular context, I'm listening to it as I wait for my surprisingly expensive iced latte in downtown Copenhagen. This coffee shop is one of my favorites, a small hole in the wall where the shop starts on the second floor. Everything is hand painted in a way I associate with the hippie roots of Copenhagen. They have an older golden retriever lying on the floor in the heat with a sign on his crate telling people not to bother him if he's taking a break. "Sometimes he needs his alone time". Me fucking too I think as this conversation drags on.<br>There is a certain irony to the people having this conversation. One is a well-off tech worker, telling the much less well-off artist that the thing he has made through a prompt and the thing she practiced for years to make are functionally the same thing which is a classic AI Boomer argument. "I'm not saying I would sell mine, but isn't the point of art the emotion it brings out when you see it?" The artist seems somewhat baffled by the question, which I understand because she doesn't see the world as a machine that inputs ideas and outputs profit. I use some LLM tools while programming but I would argue I am still more Doomer than Boomer.<br>As someone who straddles these two worlds, both working for large corporations and interfacing with these borderline sociopaths in business casual pants and expensive watches and also as someone who finds the joy in their life through the celebration of the artistic output of others, I understand them both. One sees it as a capacity problem, a barrier broken down so that now he can do everything and no choices have cost. The other sees it as a baffling attack on her passion. You could always learn to draw, nothing was ever stopping you is her refrain. Which is true but doesn't resonate with him, in part because I suspect he believes he could do anything.<br>But I hear this argument enough that I thought we should talk about it, if for nothing else than to give me something to think about as I stare at the dog crate and hope the dog comes out to say hi.<br>The Smell of Ink and Nerds<br>So I love books of all sorts, including a lot of very trashy books. Nothing I enjoy more than a Space Marine ripping the head off an alien. One medium that I really like as an adult with limited free time are comic books. I love everything about them, the feel of the too slippery covers and the rub-off on your fingers of old comics. I love how weird they are, how stories that don't work are dropped on the floor and never mentioned again. It's like watching someone build a railroad as the train rides down the tracks.<br>My routine for years was to go pick up my pull list and then wander around for a bit while they assembled it. This is how I found great series like Sandman and countless others that ended up being some of my favorite reads. One of these pull list discoveries I made while standing around surrounded by the delightful acidic smell of a comic book shop was The Black Monday Murders. You can find it here.

The story of The Black Monday Murders is genius and I won't ruin it. You can read the first issue for free at the link above. My friends and I still text each other "All Hail God Mammon" when the stock market goes way up or down. The basic concept was "what if money and magic were related and banks were basically worshiping the god of greed". I consumed this series and fell in love with it.<br>I mean come on what's not to love about that.<br>So the first issue comes out in 2016, we get a....very slow drip of new releases through 2018. 2018 is when I got issue 8 and then that's it. Since then we have had teased new issues, every year or so someone posts on social media "oh there's a new one coming". There is a lot of media like this but for me, this is the one I think of most often as "what-if". I think it is a genius idea that is especially relevant in today's world and I am sad that we may never get another one.<br>So I was expressing this to a boomer friend who casually responded with "why don't you just make your own"? LLMs allow us to generate lots of artwork like this now, you can maybe cobble together a story, wouldn't it be fun to make your own issue for your own personal consumption? To him, this is the perfect use of this technology, allowing a fan to make more of the thing they love. To me it feels like if someone said "if you are hungry, there's a puppy over there, just pop that bad boy in the oven for 2 hours and have yourself a snack".<br>To me that's not a tribute or the act of a fan. It's making a forgery. The thing has no value to me as a reader if I removed it from the entire creative context of its creation.<br>What value does a forgery have?<br>There's a great short essay by the philosopher Denis Dutton from 1979 called Artistic Crimes. It's about forgeries, not AI, but every...