Brotherhood of the Damned

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Since AI became a reality, I have been thinking very carefully about this revolutionary and controversial technology. There are so many questions still to be debated, so many questions still unanswered. Mainly with regard to the copyright of images generated by AI, but also, and not least, about the risk of manual artistic skill becoming irrelevant - an excellence that is only achieved after a high investment cost, both in time and in money, for its full development.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the internet has always been a no man's land, a kind of lawless Wild West. A place that is impossible to have complete control over what is published there. For over 15 years I have been posting my work in online portfolios. Since then, I've seen many of them published, without my permission, on websites and blogs around the world and some even being sold as wallpapers. This is just what I could assess. Without forgetting, obviously, that my work is also being used as a learning base for AIs, without my consent. Perhaps the only 100% sure way to not have your work copied and monetized by third parties is to simply not publish it on the internet. In other words, this issue is not new, nor was it caused by AI.

In order to better understand this new and powerful tool, I have been researching, watching countless videos and reading a lot about it. These authorial character studies that I now publish are the result of this deepening. Despite all this controversy, you can already see that AI doesn't do everything alone. Far from it. The more specific what you want to achieve, the more its limitations and true nature become apparent, which is to serve as an auxiliary tool for the artist. With its use, you can have objects, elements, backgrounds, landscapes at hand, which would previously require access to a photography studio, or an image bank and days of hard work to produce, often without the certainty of having achieved achieve the best possible result.

When I started using the computer to illustrate, people told me at that time: “now it's easy, just press a few keys and it's ready”. This year I complete 44 years as a professional illustrator, it has never been easy and continues not to be.