this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Comic Strips
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Other Comic Communities of Interest
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Just make a comic with stick figures. Cyanide and Happiness literally became famous for doing it and turned into a semi-refined art style. You don't need AI if you got a good joke on your hands.
So did xkcd.
or sprites from a video game
please dont remind me of loss comic
edit: ok...i think i need to drop some context with what im saying
Speaking of loss
You just lost The Game
Exactly, the art style doesn't matter if the written content is good. But this doesn't need to exclude AI at all, because as you mention the art style is not the critical piece. I don't care if the art is made by AI, as long as the written content is good.
My biggest problem is included in the "but they also devalue the hard work of the illustrators and artists who contribute original content here" part of the original post, especially since the AIs are trained on copyrighted work.
Thereβs a difference between βlow qualityβ and βsimpleβ. Cyanide and Happiness, to use their example was simple, not low quality.
XKCD also a great example
yes. Yes. it is.
Because I believe stick figures are of a higher quality than AI. An AI generated comic shows me that you cared so little about it that you couldn't even draw stick figures. And this has nothing to do with effort, but artistic intent. It shows that whoever did it had no desire to inject themselves into the comic and would rather have it look generic and bland. Fidelity does not equal quality.
Because AI "art" being posted around isn't even consistent throughout the panel, and is often devoid of effort and context so even when it's not that interesting, it's not even pleasant to look at.
Comic artist like C&H and Oatmeal, while having terrible art, at least are funny and with context. There's human in it, and they can call the style their "own", even if it's stick figure it's stick figure with distinction. AI art just make you think "is this made from AI?"
You want people to appreciate AI comic? Sure, do the touch up first and make everything consistent.
Oatmeal is actually pretty well drawn. Not a good example. Xkcd would have been a better one.
Fair point. XKCD, Casually Explained, and MinuteScience all are stick figure but they still have some distinctive way to do their thing.
Absolutely! AI comics just lack soul.
Because generative AI is a lazy shortcut for the untalented or dispassionate. If you give half a shit, put in minimum effort and draw a damn stick figure in MS Paint.
because AI is lazy
ai isn't lazy, it opens up the art industry to people who cant draw, and people who are worried about their art careers need to remember that ai cant make physical art, and there's already enough hate for ai that will definitely still be demand for human made art, so just draw or paint on a physical canvas, or find the people who have a demand for human made art
Disagree on that first bit a lot, drawing is a skill you have to learn, Jumping to AI right away because you don't want to take on the hours of learning is just lazy.
i don't understand why people don't like ai, its just a very new and advanced tool, it makes peoples lives more convenient and can intelligently solve problems, we used to have manual long range communication like mail services, it would take days or weeks for people to send short one paragraph messages to each other (in this analogy this is equivalent to the pre ai art industry where you could either learn to create art yourself or commission an artwork.) then we developed telegraphs and radio and telephones and eventually smart phones which among other things can allow to people on opposite sides of the world to communicate with almost zero delay (in the post ai art industry almost anyone can create almost anything in a matter of minutes or seconds, something that used to take hours days or weeks to achieve has been streamlined, made cheaper, and more available to the general public)
in both industries automated systems replaced most of the workforce. lots of people were put out of jobs because it was economically more efficient to automate the process for the most part. just like how there are still people in the mail industry delivering packages and of course physical letters, there will still be human artists in the future. the industry will just be smaller and people wont create art for the sake of looking the best, or for the sake of making money, people will personally create art because they want to appreciate it and share it with other people.
so i really don't see why ai is a bad thing, all its doing is streamlining the industries it can be applied to.
You don't even have to draw the stick figures yourself.
It differs from AI in that it's completely unintelligent and doesn't try or pretend to be intelligent or creative in any way. It leaves all the intelligence and creativity up to the user. It involves no "training" on large quantities of scraped data. It won't do anything it isn't explicitly told to do. The exact placement and pose of every stick figure, the precise layout and size of the individual frames, the exact content of every chunk of text is all explicitly and precisely specified by the user of codecomic. (In a source code file.) Also, a given source code file will only ever produce exactly the same webcomic whereas generally with generative AI, the exact same input can be used to generate a bunch of candidate images from which the user must select the "best."
With something like Stable Diffusion, it does rely on lots of training data and the user's only input into the content of the "generated" output is to throw a word-salad of keywords at it and tell it to "discern roughly something that fits these keywords". The user doesn't specify the exact location of anything in the resulting image. The user doesn't have control over what exact text appears in the resulting image (and typically AI can't even do text that's sensical). At best the user can "influence" what's output by tuning the keywords and hope with their fingers crossed that the Stable Diffusion model does roughly what the user has in mind.