He’s been doing this same art style for many years, certainly before LLMs were launched.

His Pepper & Carrot series started in 2014, all freely released under a Creative Commons license, by the way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%26Carrot

I like his art, and have been reading his comics before AI flood, but one thing I find very annoying now that I didn’t notice before: AI slop tends to draw characters staring intently at nothing, completely missing an object they are supposed to look at, so now it irks me whenever I see that even if it’s a human made art. Edit: and to be fair, here the character looks at a parrot instead of painting, which is valid but feels off at a first glance, maybe I just need to go touch some dry grass left. end edit

Same thing to a lesser extent for when a character does an action like chopping a PC monitor with an axe, but it looks like a slap instead, which I also have seen made by humans. I get it, action poses are hard, it’s just now I’m more sensitive to those because of all the slop 😩

The same happens to people who write a lot and pay attention to their style, such as this gentleman. The way LLMs generate text is strongly influenced by what used to be considered a high-effort eloquent style. Varied sentence lengths, triplets, typographically correct punctuation, yada yada yada. Until recently, that stuff used to be the hallmark of professional writers (and Kenyans, apparently).

What were LLMs trained on? Professional writing, first and foremost. Books, scientific papers, op-eds, blog posts. So by default they take a polite, professional tone with all the flourishes and best practices that previously used to be de rigueur for authors and the like. So now what happens when someone used to “proper” writing writes something?

Everyone thinks it’s AI slop because that’s how LLMs talk. High effort now looks like low effort. And because tech bros immediately went on to develop “humanizing” tech, any other style will soon also look like low effort. And the same is true for art: Being able to produce highly detailed pictures with spectacular colors and shadows went from something impressive to evidence that you’re just a random jackass with a ChatGPT subscription.

You can’t really win anymore. Anything short of a live performance or a feature-length movie could feasibly have been generated by a fully automated content mill. That really sucks if you want to engage in creative expression of any kind and doubly so if you once thought you could make a living off of that.

Just gotta use the latest slang to come out of tik tok before it hits the model training ong fr fr bruh. Ah shit I’m behind brb

Problem is, if your slang is too new it looks like gibberish. Of course you could try something else that stands out. Like badly translated idioms.

But it’s probably jacket like pants. Even if you tear your ass open to make your writing look less 08/15 that doesn’t mean everything’s in butter. It’s probably only a matter of time until LLMs will copper off that style as well and your clever plan turns into a zero number. And that’s where the hare lies in the pepper: Your clarity goes over the Jordan and it ain’t itching the LLMs’ bean. It’ll get trained on your stuff anyway and the cat bites its own tail.

Maybe bad translations aren’t the solution either.

Maybe bad translations aren’t the solution either.

No, by all means, please continue. I’m fully invested now.

Since AI has poisoned the space for professional writing, and for slang, gibberish is the only thing we have left.

It seems like it has way too stable continuity between different panels to be AI generated.