The Irony Of Showing Yourself "At Work" As An AI Caricature

A while ago there was a trend going round. Artists generating an AI caricature of themselves "at work." Brush in hand, cartoon version, a bit of fun, a bit of engagement. My feed was full of it, and it made me really uneasy.

But what is generative AI actually, when you strip away the fun filter? It's software trained on millions of real images, scraped from real photographers, real illustrators, real artists, most of whom never agreed to any of it, and then used to generate something new on command. Every "just for fun" caricature is built on someone else's actual work, taken without a conversation or a credit.

That's the bit that gets lost when it's dressed up as a trend. It feels harmless because it's quick and it's silly and everyone's doing it. But every time we use it for a laugh, we're normalising the exact thing that could be used to replace us properly, further down the line. We're teaching the algorithm, and everyone watching, that this is just how things get made now. A meme today. A job tomorrow.

Because if we're willing to produce this, just for a trend, what is it actually saying about the future of our jobs? The irony of "showing ourselves at work" might be that soon we don't have work to go to anymore.

AI has crept up on us so insidiously in our everyday lives. Not in one big moment, just quietly, in small doses, until it's normal. And it might feel like we don't have much control over the world around us at the moment. AI is everywhere and most of us didn't get a vote in that. So maybe the better question is what we can actually control.

And that's not using AI to replace our own creativity. If you want a caricature of yourself so badly, pay an illustrator. There are real artists out there who'd love that commission instead of a machine doing it for free. It's not a joke, and it's also genuinely bad for the environment.

I'm not completely against AI, to be clear. I don't think this is that black and white. We're not by nature the most organised people in this industry, so could it help us organise our busy lives, build storyboards, manage our diaries? Yes. Is that as damaging as generating silly images for clicks? No, it's not even close.

We should be saving our free time for using our creative brains. Exercising that muscle. Proving to the world that we're still needed on jobs, to create the realism of real human characters, the thing no prompt can actually do.

Because that's the actual job. Not a filter, not a generated face. A director needs a character to age forty years and still look like the same person underneath. A wound needs to read as real under studio lights, not just look convincing in a still image. A face needs to hold up in motion, under different lighting setups, across twelve hours of filming, in a way that's consistent take after take. That's built from years of understanding real skin, real bone structure, real light. No prompt can do that. It can only ever fake a single frame of it.

HMU Collective won't be using generative AI to create anything. That's a promise. Let's do what we can to remind everyone the value of our craft and our jobs, and why it matters, before you open ChatGPT for a quick win on your social media engagement.

Example image retrieved from Google image search results.