This week the argument about Ai and the creative spaces reared its ugly head in two places with real budgets behind them, a Hollywood cutting suite and a literary prize committee. Different worlds, same quiet trick. Each one let the people at the top say the right thing out loud while someone further down carried the actual risk.
Start with Warner. This week the studio put out a behind-the-scenes featurette for its Supergirl film, a clip of the director Craig Gillespie flicking through concept art for Lobo on a laptop. Within hours fans had frozen the frame and clocked the tells of Ai-generated designs, and by the next morning the whole video had vanished from YouTube. TechTimes tracked the timeline. What makes this more than another gotcha is how loud Warner and DC have been on exactly this point. Jim Lee, who runs DC, said “Not now. Not ever” about Ai artwork last autumn. James Gunn had publicly mocked Ai Batman designs. And still it walked into official promo. The reason is the part worth sitting with. Concept art comes from contracted illustrators and vendor studios several steps below the executives doing the disavowing, freelancers with no union behind them and no duty to declare how a picture was made, feeding a pipeline with no provenance checks at all. The policy lives at the top. The exposure lives at the bottom. Nobody upstairs has to lie, they just have to not look.
There’s a passage in the book that reads almost like a rehearsal for this. I imagined a near future where the publishers who spent years laughing at creators’ rights suddenly, urgently need “a human artist they can put on the cover,” because rivals are eating their lunch with hand-drawn work and scarcity has turned the human hand into the premium product. I pictured a rival releasing a comic “deliberately, ostentatiously, drawn by a human, with all the visible imperfections of an actual hand.” A studio quietly leaning on Ai concept art while its bosses swear they never would is that story arriving early, and from the wrong end. The value sits in the visible human hand. That’s the exact thing that got bypassed to save a few days in pre-production.
The second room was a prize committee, and this one I’ve been tracking for a few weeks, because it’s the same rot from another angle. The Christian Science Monitor pulled the threads together on the 12th. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize spent the summer fielding claims that some of its winning stories were partly machine-written; one, by Jamir Nazir, got flagged as a hundred percent Ai by a detector largely on the strength of one clumsy sentence, “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” The Commonwealth Foundation went back through the drafts and the working documents and found nothing to it. Around the same time Hachette cancelled Mia Ballard’s horror novel over similar rumours; Ballard says it was her editor, not her, who used Ai, and that the suspicion stuck to her regardless. Here’s the part I can’t shake, and I flagged the leading edge of it a fortnight ago with the Minotaur case. Ballard and that debut novelist, Falade, are both Black, and both have said plainly that Black authors keep being made to prove their own humanity more often, and more harshly, than their peers. A detector’s false positive is bad enough on its own. A false positive that lands hardest on the people already least likely to be given the benefit of the doubt is something worse. Christian Science Monitor has the fuller picture.
So that’s the week. Two rooms, one mechanism. The executive holds the line in public while the freelancer and the flagged writer do the actual bleeding. I don’t have a tidy fix, and I distrust anyone selling one, but I keep landing on the same two words, provenance and credit, knowing who made a thing and being able to say so out loud. Both of this week’s messes were, underneath, a failure to do that. If you’d been on that Supergirl crew, would you have said something about the laptop?
Further reading
Warner pulls the Supergirl “Lobo” featurette after fans spot Ai concept art that bypassed DC’s stated policy: TechTimes
Book publishers face mounting questions on Ai, from the Commonwealth Prize to the pulled horror novel Shy Girl: Christian Science Monitor