Comic creators mourn the death of human craftsmanship as AI slop takes over

Savio Mascarenhas, Group Artwork Director, Amar Chitra Katha 
| Picture Credit score:
BIJOY GHOSH

Keep in mind how final 12 months social media timelines had been flooded with folks posting their wide-eyed cutesy photographs in the distinctive fashion of Japanese animation home Studio Ghibli recreated by ChatGPT. However amidst that craze, a video emerged of Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of the legendary studio, who again in 2016 had shared his utter disgust for such applied sciences, saying whoever created AI work “has no thought what ache is”.

Inside Miyazaki’s scathing criticism lies the situation of ‘inventive labour’ that the use of AI in all types of artwork ignores, artists and cartoonists advised businessline on the sidelines of the Chennai version of Comic Con India 2026.

When prompts take over

Savio Mascarenhas, Group Artwork Director, Amar Chitra Katha believes that whereas AI can produce considerably larger volumes of content material sooner and cheaper, it lacks the ‘essence’ of hand-crafted work. “The individuality that every artist brings, each in phrases of fashion and the tales that they inform – AI can not recreate that,” he stated.

Past simply stylistic considerations, comics are sometimes a labour of years with a number of iterations earlier than the web page reaches print. Rajesh Nagulakonda, an impartial comedian artist, believes that comics or any artform often displays a journey or a fruits of a imaginative and prescient constructed and nurtured over a very long time. “It’s unimaginable to commodify that course of,” he stated.

Not all applied sciences are essentially dangerous, he added. “Once we went from drawing on paper to drawing digitally, it made issues so much simpler. However that’s not the identical as producing content material with no human effort. Equally AI may also have its place, in fringe instances, however the course of of comic-making itself, ought to proceed to be human,” he stated.

Magnificence in imperfection

Artists additionally understand a dip in phrases of the high quality of work itself with the low cost and straightforward AI generated content material. Ron Marz, recognized for his work on titles such as Batman/Aliens and Inexperienced Lantern says that if you take a look at one thing generated by AI, there’s a sense that one thing is lacking. “There’s that uncanny valley that I feel we now have conquered in CGI and different digital results which nonetheless feels very current in AI. I might reasonably have one thing imperfect that was made by an individual than one thing that tries to be good, that’s simply culled from all the things else,” he stated.

Printed on February 22, 2026