Ugh. Spiegelman has admitted to using AI ‘art’ for the new anniversary edition of In the Shadow of No Towers:
So he’s also included an anniversary present of sorts: a cover sticker ironically depicting the burning towers as candles on a birthday cake. The sticker marks Spiegelman’s first use of AI-generated artwork. “I wanted it to look like an old engraving, and I was lazy,” he told PW. “I said, let’s do it with AI and see what happens.” Mouly lent a hand with the prompts: “She’s good at Claude whispering,” Spiegelman said.
As Gretchen-Felker Martin says:
if you’re at the top of your field and you don’t even want to try anymore, then get out of the way and let someone else take the wheel for a change. jesus christ.
More importantly, is it good when the art director of the New Yorker uses AI because her artist husband is too lazy to make new art and too cheap to get another artist to do it for him? And how does this reflect on her work for the magazine? That casual aside that Mouly apparantly uses Claude enough to be a “whisperer” makes her role as art editor immediately suspect to me. How much else she’s had commissioned for the magazine was AI or AI ‘enhanced’?
Returning to Spiegelman, I would say it’s disappointing but honestly if there was one éminence grise cartoonist I’d expect to embrace AI sooner or later it was him. Him or possibly Crumb, though I doubt the latter’s paranoia would allow it. With Spiegelman, if you look at his work honestly, only Maus and the work that led up to it (e.g. “Prisoner of Hell Planet”) is truly first rate. Everything since has been okay at best. In the Shadow of No Towers is his most important work after Maus and it’s an incoherent, overwrought mess. As Noah Berlatsky put it in his original review:
This might form the subject of an amusing, low-key ‘zine by some happy-go-lucky slacker, but it hardly has the epic interpretive sweep we’ve come to expect from the great Art Spiegelman, an artist who claims portentously that “disaster is my muse.” Even Spiegelman seems to realize that, in this instance, the familial approach wasn’t quite working; according to the introduction, he scotched several more pages focusing on the tribulations of his daugter and son. Instead, Spiegelman resorts to padding. Huge panels are devoted to illustrating clichés (“waiting for the other shoe to drop” and “sticking your head in the sand.”) One entire broadsheet is devoted to his triumph in a battle of wits with a deranged homeless woman. Another half a page is devoted to his triumph in a battle of wits with a television interviewer. And then there are lots and lots of pictures of Spiegelman himself, bitching about the President, New York’s post 9/11 air quality, and the fact that he draws so slowly that some Iraqis and G.I.’s will be killed before they can see his finished work — surely one of the most solipsisitic reasons for opposing the war on record. Spiegelman is also very upset by New York’s ban on smoking in bars.
This is exactly the sort of person who’d embrace AI to do the difficult bits for him.
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