Drawn to Extinction, Weekly 0001
The week in Ai and the creative trades, with my two cents.
Comic-Con spent a week working out something a lot of artists already knew. You can't label your way out of a consent problem. The convention tried a tidy little compromise on Ai art, the room rejected it inside days, and the speed of that rejection tells you more than the policy ever could.
Start with San Diego. Comic-Con International had quietly decided that Ai-generated work could hang in its 2026 Art Show, displayed but not sold, clearly marked with how it was made. That lasted about as long as it took people to read it. Karla Ortiz, who's spent years in the copyright fight, put it plainly; the show should be a celebration of illustrators, comic artists and writers. Ron Marz, Evan Dorkin, Greg Pak and others said much the same, some hinting they'd pull their tables. The con reversed to a full ban. What strikes me is the leverage, more than the outcome. When the people who actually make the thing move together, the floor shifts under the organisers. That complicates my own gloomier chapters. The ladder has defenders, and this week they won. You can read Comics Beat on how fast it turned.
Except the rung that got saved is near the top. An Art Show protects established names, the ones with a table and a reputation to withdraw. The rungs that vanish quietly sit lower down. Dylan Teague, one of the artists in the book, watches Ai eating the early-stage work in television, the comps and the roughs, the kind of job a younger version of him would've cut his teeth on. Twelve months, he reckons, before that field's gone. I wrote that the rungs are being sawn off in real time, and nothing in San Diego changed my mind. A ban on the gallery wall doesn't put a junior back in a studio.
Then there's the fight nobody at the con had to have on a panel, because it lands on anyone with a public account, not just working artists. Meta rolled out Muse Image, which lets people generate pictures using the likeness of anyone with a public Instagram, on an opt-out basis. You're in unless you go hunting for the switch. CAA demanded real consent, Public Citizen called it an egregious invasion of privacy, and SAG-AFTRA told its members to turn the thing off. Meta says it's receiving a lot of feedback. Opt-out is the tell. It treats your face as raw material you have to actively reclaim, rather than something anyone thought to ask you for. Axios has the shape of it.
The neatest story of the week is also the messiest. Midjourney, sued by Disney and Universal for producing Superman and Scooby-Doo and Bugs Bunny on demand, has asked a judge to make the studios hand over their own Ai homework, their training sets and their board decks. The argument is blunt. You lot do this too, for storyboarding and early ideation, so spare me the lecture on fair use. Disney's lawyer called it a fishing expedition, and maybe it is. It's also the question this whole beat keeps circling back to. If the studios suing over stolen material are quietly building on the same stuff, the line I keep trying to draw between craft and theft runs straight through the people signing the cheques. ARTnews lays out the filing.
On the writing side the rot's gone further in. A Forbes piece this week walked through how much machine text has crept into books and research; one estimate put machine fingerprints on more than a tenth of recent biomedical abstracts, with a heap of hallucinated citations now sitting in the literature like quiet little traps. Publishers are drawing their lines after the fact. And Poynter made the uncomfortable point that even when you're sure a book was written by a machine, proving it is close to impossible, and the detectors throw false positives that can end a career on a hunch. That's the quiet damage; an erosion of trust that turns every honest writer into a suspect.
The people drawing the hardest lines right now aren't the platforms or the courts. They're small outfits like Broken Frontier, running a flat zero-tolerance policy and saying so out loud. I keep wondering whether that holds as the tools get cheaper, or whether the holdouts just get lonely. Next week I want to see what actually happens on the Comic-Con floor, once the press release has worn off.
Further reading
San Diego Comic-Con reverses course on Ai art: Comics Beat
Meta's Muse Image and the opt-out consent row: Axios
Midjourney asks the court to reveal how Disney uses Ai: ARTnews
The Ai-written research reckoning in publishing: Forbes
Why Ai-writing scandals are so hard to prove: Poynter
Broken Frontier's zero-tolerance stance on generative Ai: Broken Frontier