I’m going to be honest, I’m a writer who only really writes what I feel compelled to write. I understand we all work differently, and maybe it’s just that I haven’t been presented with the right situation, but I can’t look around at what is popular, or what the trending tropes are, and fashion something out of that. I’m only interested in exploring and interpreting the world in a way that makes sense to me. I don’t know if that is how you make a living as a writer, but I only want to explore the stories that come to me out of the dark and weird places of my mind.
As I grow older, my time is more and more limited in this world, so my plan is to tell the stories I want to tell. I’m not kidding when I say this, but it is obvious to me that we are moving in the direction where creative freedom is going to be killed by A.I. Eventually we will be reading stories by people that don’t want to do the work. Individuality will be killed by A.I. systems that steal from human ingenuity. So I will continue writing the way I want for as long as I can, hoping to keep ahead of the people that consider writing prompts into a computer an art form. Maybe that’s old-fashioned, but I’m OK with that, and I have a feeling that a lot of readers out there believe the same.
But I know that the majority of people will accept the AI movies, comics, art, and whatever else comes down the line. You really have to look no further than the prevalence of AI “art” online and the comments from people who absolutely love it. I’m not going to lie, I see some interesting things that fit my aesthetic and I know they are created by people who have an idea in their head and they just have no other way to get it out because they don’t have artistic skill. I wish that the art for comic pages can be created as fast as scripted pages. That isn’t reality though. Art takes time. Not just the time that it took the artist to interpret your script, but the lifetime before that script existed where that artist put the hours in to build those skills. That art will always be more valuable than any simple bullshit that an AI was prompted to make.
The comics I make, from writing, to art, to color, to lettering will always be completed by humans. As technology grows and changes, these are the only promises I can make because I have no idea how the tools we use are going to be powered in the future. Am I being stubborn? Am I not adapting? I don’t think so. I just value humans and the years of wisdom behind every word, and the years of skill and heartbreak behind every line drawn.
Listen, it isn’t always that serious, but this is a value I cannot take away.
I’m 47. Sure, as a writer there’s no reason I can’t still have a good 20-25 years of writing left in me, but my time is limited. I know people can transform trends into personal stories, but for me I have to tell what is within me. I’m not just up against age, but I am up against the devaluing of human art & ingenuity. We can never truly know what the right decisions in life are, but I know what I need to do. Write the way I think, for myself, and hope others out there join me on the journey because what I write speaks to them as well.
Thank you for reading. We’ll talk soon!
– John Kratky
