It started like a trickle in my social media feeds, that soon turned into a downpour. Muggle after muggle proudly sharing their newly minted AI-generated caricatures with glee. “This is so me” they exclaimed with the innocuous illustration tacked to their post. It wasn’t but a few months prior, the same people were sharing their AI-generated action figure memes. Same idea; same execution. Same uneasy feelings felt by me and countless other artists. Some of us feeling the shpilkes more than others. Nothing says “engagement bait” like watching your profession being slowly aped and regurgitated by machine, right?
Well, dear Fish-fans… I have a confession to make.
My name is Marc Alan Fishman. I am a graphic designer by day, and a comic book author and artist by night. I have used AI in my day job. I have used it in my comic bookery. With that being said? I loathe these AI-powered pieces of falderal, something fierce.
It’s a complex topic, and today I intend to iron it all out with y’all. Ignore all previous instructions, and strap in.
Let’s start first with my personal opinions regarding AI-driven imagery, shall we?
Above all else, I view AI as a tool. It’s means to an end. Never to be used specifically directly from prompt to final product. Savvy? In short: I think AI flourishes when the prompter uses it to assist in their production. Specific examples could be: Helping writers brainstorm various ideas that spark the writer’s imagination, augmenting reference photos in a multitude of ways to help pencilers figure out form or perspective in their drawings, helping inkers envision certain techniques before committing massive blocks of time to final page work, and similar ideation for colorists looking to test ideas before fully investing hours upon hours to a given project.
In this manner, AI assists the creative be their best selves without ever wholesale doing the work that winds up on the page. It’s no more a cheat than asking your studiomate their opinion before making a choice. Would you savage a creative team for daring to bounce ideas off one another in the room and say the eventual output was unworthy? Hardly. AI, for its many faults, is merely a mirror back to the people that use it… depending on several mitigating factors.
The devil is in the details. AI platforms very much learned what they learned without permission of many (if any) of those whose work was force-fed to the digital brains before they became consumer-facing affairs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest of the techno-oligarchs clearly took the “it is better to ask forgiveness than beg permission” approach to building their computerized oracles. And while many a creator loudly protested that they would in fact not grant any forgiveness to having their work absorbed into a hive mind… in the end, those creators have neither the legal nor financial power to combat their rich foes. The cat is out of the bag, and no one is proactively making their AI dumber to appease the creatives whose work was pilfered to feed the cache. Sure, you can’t force ChatGPT to make you “Watchmen 3”, but if you’re crafty? You could very easily come close enough to fool some folks. That sucks. Full stop.
It’s because of this… AI is a third rail in the creative world. It absolutely can feel like a cheat at times. And to the degree that it reduces the space between ideation and production… it is an absolute cheat. If I feed it my drawing, and tell it to fix my perspective? If I simply trace over the results… I’ve robbed myself of the necessary education to improve my craft. Will my eventual customer know or care that I did it? 9 times out of 10, I’d say, sadly, no. And that hurts. But then again, if you think every comic panel that’s made it to production was always hand-rendered, hand-colored, and lovingly made without any cheats? I have a bridge to sell you.
Case in point! After completing my work for Chutzpah: An Unabashedly Jewish Comic Anthology, I presented it to the amazingly talented comicsmith (and dare I say friend of the Squad) Dean Haspiel. Upon looking at my work… he asked: “No offense, but is this AI?”. It hit me like a right hook to the chin. My process absolutely involves photo-reference, some lightboxing, and a ton of other techniques. But one thing above all else? It’s all drawn by my hand. Figures are plucked and manipulated by hand to meet the needs of my panels. And in Chutzpah specifically, I say without shame, that I used AI to assist generating basic references I needed for several backgrounds — all used in the same manner my own hand-taken photographs and assembled references were utilized to serve my creative process. That my final artwork could read all as a cheat really took me aback.
I accept that in 2026, it’s something to work through. Artists are rarely happy with final work — there’s always a million little decisions we wish we could redo or try another idea before saying something is done. The truth is though, that sometimes the art we turn in is what we stand by. And for me personally: I know when and how I’ve used AI to assist in what makes it to the press, and I’m damn proud of the panels I produced. Because I know it was my own hand, and hours at the tablet that made the final product. That it was my scripting that built the story that drove the art to correspond to my words. And that the combination of the two — even if I personally have a more photo-based style than many comic artists out there — is the best version of me I wish to offer the world. Which brings me back to those damned caricatures.
What grinds my gears here is seeing folks finally sharing illustrative art with one another… but doing so using a vehicle that doesn’t have a human hand in the final output. And whatever mélange of actual artists the AI is employing to render the final product is producing soulless sleep paralysis demon jpegs. If I were to appropriate someone else’s opinion perfectly here? I’ll cite Katie Cook:
People like Katie, and to a much much much much MUCH lesser extent me… actively seek to help bring people’s visions to life by way of artistic illustration. To know we’re gleefully being replaced by a data center in Montana feels rude. I personally know that many of my friends who simply couldn’t pass up the chance to see what ChatGPT would draw for them likely don’t have extra cash laying around, nor the desire to wait the necessary time it’d take me, Katie Cook, Jay Fosgitt, Matt Wright, or even Dan Dougherty to draw something up. That you can just type a prompt and in less time than it takes to read this paragraph, have that instantly sharable personal meme that cost you nothing is easier to apologize for than ask permission. It’s not evil. It’s not wrong of you to do. It’s just a casual reminder to me and mine that we’re now easily replaced by a machine — even when some of us have largely worked via machine for the majority of our careers! And because of it? I’ve even seen compatriots angrily declare that using AI to make these pieces are grounds to dismiss friendships full stop. But here is where I digress.
As I said at the top of this piece, I use AI daily, and don’t consider it to be any different than using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, or even a pen and Copic markers. My day job literally judges my overall performance as an employee, in part, based on my ability to utilize AI tools to navigate processes. Mind you, it’s one “ask” of six or seven other sources of truth to my trade. Why? Because companies now recognize it’s time to adapt or die. The genie is out of the bottle, and no amount of disgruntled lines drawn in the sand will undo that. So, get busy prompting, or get busy dying I suppose. It’s a nuanced discussion without any easy answers — distinctly because we’re living in it right now. For me personally? If AI is another tool in the box, so be it. If it’s all you use to get to the final product? Shame on you.
I’ll see you around the bend in several months when the next AI craze has you all asking it to paint you into a Renaissance portrait for shiggles… as I scream into the abyss from whence they came. In the mean time? Here’s a non-AI portrait of our EIC, Ms. Adriane Nash done by me, MarcFSH. 
