A few nights ago, I was looking at the moon through my binoculars and I noticed something sticking out of it. A glimmering piece of string that seemed to wrap itself around the edge of this super-illuminated waxing gibbous moon. I couldn’t believe my eyes: I cleaned the lenses of my binoculars and blinked several times and it was still there. Apparently something called the golden handle: where the light falls on the top of a mountain range and the valley is in shadow, creating this optical illusion. YOU CAN SEE MOUNTAINS ON THE MOON, I texted my friend incredulously. It was a moment I won’t forget. One that I’m sure is going to find its way into my comics and writing.
The things I witness and experience become who I am – part of my blueprint and my unique internal landscape. Standing on the balcony, my feet cold, looking out over the shadowy rooftops – that experience was mine alone. My fascination stemmed from someone who grew up in a city and rarely bothered to look up, my excitement from not knowing such a phenomenon existed, the manic messages I sent to friends coming from my lifelong need to connect and share.
I bring all of this into my work. The mountains on the moon will become part of my lived experience, a story I’m going to tell for years to come, a feeling cemented into my being.
And you, you bring your own blueprint: stories and creativity and a brain that’s been shaped by all of your life experiences. Our biggest advantage is simply that we’re unlike each other – and that finds its way into our art, words, emotion, language, ways of working, relationships, everything.
The flattening
And so when I see cookie-cutter AI-generated content, especially in the creative space, it makes me shudder. It feels like we’re all drifting towards a flattening, a kind of average. And I see it in the words that have suddenly become popular and overused, the illustrations that look vaguely familiar, even website designs that are all starting to look similar. Everything looks borrowed. Well, sometimes it looks very real, and indistinguishable from something a human would create. I’m not sure which one is worse.
Sure, AI is fascinating and I advocate for it in some contexts: it can be smart and efficient and build beautiful things in minutes. I might even call it addictive (hmm, hmm, there’s something there). And I’m someone who loves efficiency. I optimise my days around getting things done quickly.
But in the creative world, efficiency is the last thing anyone optimises (or used to optimise) for. The joy is in the immediate explosion of emotion that makes you do a little jig or play a song or message someone about the MOUNTAINS ON THE MOON. The frustration and slooowwww reward lies in the struggle of finding the right word, or figuring out a drawing style that matches the story you want to say, or writing a script while visualising how it might come to life on stage. The agony is in that search to put something so personal and expansive into the boundaries of words or a canvas, without it losing its sanctity. It’s always about the process: working out chords that fit together, delight when you discover that you can actually draw a cow that looks like a cow (or whatever you want it to be), and surprise when you build something you didn’t know you could. I love that about art: you constantly surprise yourself.
And all our human experiences feed into it. When I see my own work, I know what inspired a specific comic or essay: I know I was sitting on a mountain in the Lake District when I drew this one, or feeling really homesick when I drew that one.
I’ve always believed that the output was less important than the journey. But perhaps that’s easier to say when art is not your sole/main profession. If the goal is to make money or be popular then the trade-off is often being less authentic or careful about what you actually want to say. I know artists who have cracked the formula of what works on social media, which allows them to pay rent and creates space for them to do their ‘real’ work. Creative professions are already under pressure, with the hyper optimisation for specific trends and being part of whatever fever has gripped social media currently. Add to this, work that a machine created with a perfectly pleasing aesthetic – quicker, faster, smarter, better? Authenticity is rapidly being squashed, replaced.
Maybe this is not a new pattern at all. It mimics what we’ve seen in history: automation replacing artisans, the machine-woven saree replacing the painstakingly hand-woven one.
Having all my life resisted sameness, the pressure to accept the flattening, and our surprising willingness to do so, worries me. And maybe the issue isn’t about AI but how we use it – after all it can be argued that AI can enable creativity in some ways, bring to life ideas that you might struggle to otherwise, and act as a great brainstorming partner. Maybe the issue is when we use it as a quick and easy solution to replace our own messy process, rather than using it to empower an already strong or unique idea.
The erasure of signatures
Recently, I received images on two separate instances from friends who sent me comics in the style of The Tap. Stick figures are hardly difficult to imitate and I’m sure AI’s got the hundreds of comics that are already up online. The comics looked so lovely – smooth lines, watercolour texture and nice hair. I’ve always struggled to draw hair.
But those beautiful AI-generated comics side-stepped my blueprint. They deleted the history of me making terrible drawings with a laptop touchpad when I started out, lines all thick and wonky. They solved the problem of the weird hair – a problem that didn’t need solving. It erased my signature.
The thing that I miss most is imperfection. Tools keep offering to cut words for me, to refine, to polish. Stop correcting me! I don’t want polish. I want honesty. And that’s becoming harder to find.
That imperfection is also shaped by the strange beauty in not knowing. I don’t want to draft perfect answers that’ve been fed to me by a machine that knows everything (that we fed to it, lol). I want to draft an answer that’s mine, perhaps flawed and limited, but still mine alone.
A message that I’ve always cared about passing on to young people, especially those who struggle to fit in, is that there’s a place for you. Now, with the pressure to create faster, prettier, and meet a specific standard that a machine can, that message becomes, there’s a place for you, as long as you fit in. Add polish. Trim the rough edges. Make it neat! Quicker, faster!
I frequently find myself to be a misfit yet I’ve also found that being different can be incredibly empowering, often when you least expect it. The world has always been slow to accept the weird, the ‘unlike-anything-else’. Now that genuine human perspective is becoming scarcer than ever, perhaps it’ll be more sought after?
Perhaps we should all resist the Great Flattening. And that’s irrespective of the aids we use, artificial or not, to bring life to our stories. It’s easy to shift accountability to the tools that are taking over, but we get to decide. Our own blueprints need protecting – our accumulation of mad ideas, our inimitable imperfections that we’ve perfected over time, our quirks and silliness, our thoughts, our instincts and impulses. Our signatures, crooked lines and all.
