The Complex
The debut of Binary Minds: A.I. in Art features an interview with Afrofuturist Tim Fielder. I’ve worked with Tim off and on for several years, his comic capture compelling elements of Afrofuturist cannon. He was on campus during our Juneteenth celebration and debuted pages from his adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Comet that should be out at the end of 2024. In the documentary, he joins a number of MSU experts talking about AI and its impact.
Fielder shared a startling example of how a working artist might use AI to accelerate their creative process. While he in no way ignores the power challenges related to AI, his embrace of it is not shocking from an Afrofuturist perspective. Since the term was coined, Afrofuturist has embraced the disruptive potential of technology as a primary benefit for black people. The logic that the system, as it is, fails people of color and that anything that creates space for a new path, like technology, should be a concern for black people makes sense. It rejects the cultural fiction of technophobia of black people, and it highlights how the speculative has always been a space blacks have been drawn toward because rules and regulations are not set.
The discussion of AI in the context of comics is crucial right now. Tim Fielder has talked about the transformative potential of using AI tools to hasten his ability to produce his work. As you can see in the conversation above, Fielder has adopted many tools to increase his productivity. With AI, the work of creating has been made more complex, and techniques and the ability to produce imagery intersect in the generative engine that is learning how to create images by scanning the work of countless artists on the web to emulate those images based on the prompt of the user.
Fielder’s contribution to this conversation highlights how the productivity question, which is always central to digital tools in the workplace, produces the possibility that creative work might be made faster. Thus, while the challenge that the model learns from the web remains true, the disruption to the many creative fields boils down to how someone with great skill might produce more work while someone with lesser skill may produce better work, and those with marginal skills will be unemployed.
The unemployed part has been looming across every industry over the past year. It was a part of the Hollywood strike. It was mentioned in the recent Longshoremen strike (which, at the time I am writing, has been resolved, but the final agreement has not been signed). So, the challenge for Afrofuturists is to stay ahead of the curve and take advantage of the disruption while the struggle to normalize technology creates this open space where society asks essential questions about labor, power, and humanity. Those questions, which Afrofuturists recognize as constructed in service of the status quo, can only be changed by powerful collective effort.
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