Welcome back to The Little Island🏝️. In this edition, I’m sharing a short essay about creative pursuits and AI, along with a cartoon I drew and painted to accompany the piece. Thanks as always for reading.
As someone who pursues illustration and songwriting work while also juggling a day job in IT, I find myself constantly thinking about the industry's future impact on the things I love to do during my downtime.
Of course, painting, songwriting, poetry — these things aren't going away as long as there are people around who want to do them. But these crafts will (and in some cases already do) face competition from AI output.
However, I remind myself that there are a hundred examples of how a human-forged creation will always be superior to one that's spit out from AI: novels rooted in deep personal experience, songs salvaged from a broken world, a letter of apology from a child to an aging parent…
Even something like this cartoon — a simple, imperfect watercolor sketch filled with details culled from a lived human experience — can stand out from the AI image slop.
Skill-wise I’m far from a pro. Perhaps, though, now more than ever, our collective lived experiences (the good, bad, and ugly) and even our middling talents are the currency we have to dilute an oversaturated, AI-centric view of the world.
As kids go back to school, as the summer wans, and as the specter of AI domination fills our news feeds (among many other scary things), I think it's important that we continue cultivating skills and passions for which AI has no compelling answer.