March 2023
Where the hell did this month go?
Remember how I said I’d be staggering posts out this month? Welp, what a total fail on my part. It’s been a super busy March and somehow it’s already about to be spring and I’m still trying to find time to take down some last remaining xmas decorations, so that’s where I’ve been mentally. 🫠
I have been working on a ton of projects that can’t be shared just yet, but I have been going through my backlog and posted a bunch of art that I never officially shared here (or in some cases, anywhere, lol.) I even snuck in a little spicy Tifa sketch for club members 👀🔥 so if you have a minute, please check out the archive on jenbartel.club for all the new posts!
I hope you all had a good March, and that you’re hanging in there. I’ve been trying to limit my time on social media (read: twitter) lately because the platform just continues to get worse and worse, and on top of that there’s just been an overall sense of anxiety and doom regarding the role AI will play in creative jobs moving forward. I did write a post about my thoughts on this a while back, but with how quickly the technology is evolving I’m considering following up on it.
As a person who graduated from college during the height of the Great Recession, I can tell you a thing or two about persevering in the face of (seemingly) insurmountable odds in the job market, but it’s definitely going to be tough for a lot of different types of workers in the coming years, including artists. I’ve seen some really disheartening posts from fellow creatives about how all of this has been affecting their mental health, and I just want to express solidarity without also descending into total doomerism. We desperately need worker protections and at least some level of regulation around data protection and privacy ASAP.
How are you guys feeling about AI and the challenges ahead on the horizon for creatives and workers in general? Do you think it will be impacting your line of work? I think it would be good for folks to chat about this stuff, just… not on twitter.
On a more positive note, I’ve got some really fun covers coming up, and the people have spoken re: my next set for JB After Dark 🌙 (lol) so keep an eye out for that on the horizon..!
Finally, here’s a snippet of a super secret thing for you guys! Thanks for sticking with me. 🙏✨
When I hear people say “I used ChatGPT to write a cover letter for this job application” or something like that, I get the feeling that the person doesn’t really understand or want to employ the power of writing. It’s like writing is just some series of inscrutable incantations for them and they’re happy to let the computer do it for them. I don’t think they even consider what a reader might think when they read whatever generated text the model spit out.
Recently Microsoft announced some sort of similar AI integration in the Office suite and people were joking that you’d puff up some banal work communication with paragraphs of automatically generated corporate-ese and then the recipient would use their AI to summarize it to what you’d actually meant to say in the first place.
There’s something really cynical and insincere about all of these AI models coming out recently. It’s like a lot of people only want a facsimile of human connection because it’s faster and more predictable.
Holy moly the Captain Marvel image looks FANTASTIC! Re:AI, I’m a social scientist whose research builds interventions for how people can connect and empathize with each other across difference; most talk on AI in my field is just about how students may use it to cheat for classes. I don’t feel the anxiety quite as much, but I also tend to stay away from social media pretty well.
My thought is: people have a need for authenticity (which I also study), and they haven’t yet seen AI creations as authentic enough to what they’re looking for. Human artists aren’t in danger--don’t believe the doom!