Using AI Like An Artist

Everyone with a pencil and an Instagram account seems to have an opinion on AI art. The most popular one? It isn’t art at all. I usually let that roll off my back, but The Oatmeal’s recent post hit me right in the gut.

An artist I’ve admired for years pulled out their bullhorn to say what I’m doing isn’t art. It cannot possibly be art. I’m just a middle-manager Karen making social-media slop.

I know that isn’t true. These online arguments always swing to extremes: AI art is either evil or it will save us. They miss the nuance, the potential — and the most interesting question of all:

How do you use AI like an artist? And what happens when you do?

To me, AI is another tool in my palette — a different guitar pedal on the board. It gives me new ways to shape expression. It doesn’t replace me; it relies on me. Just like my guitar can’t play itself. And this creative dance with AI isn’t easy. It’s full of trial and error, gremlin-chasing, and relentless editing and application of taste.

Nothing I produce is accidental. In fact, it’s deeply intentional.

I don’t just enter a prompt, push a button, and call it a day. That’s probably not art. What I’m doing is far more interesting.

My early attempts at AI comics where chaotic. Every time I rendered JenOS, she looked different. Sometimes she was a man. Sometimes the Architect was elderly. Once he had both a monocle and glasses. Sometimes Cat’s glow went full nuclear orange. Something needed to change.

I wanted recognizable characters I could pull into gags and a style that didn’t scream “AI made this.” That takes work.

So I built structure: a character bible and style guide that every panel now references. I load in calibration panels before each render. Once those were set, I made model sheets for each character and prop. They keep the world consistent and the gremlins mostly at bay.

Basically, I became a one-woman production studio.

Beyond that, making a joke land isn’t as simple as panel in, gag out. Comics rely on timing, pacing, and composition. It takes practice, iteration, and taste. It’s easy to overstuff a panel, lose an arm, or have Cat drift between renders. It’s hard to get three consistent panels that land without visual chaos.

I’m not publishing one-prompt, unedited AI slop. I’m curating an entire world in my own style, with my own taste. I’m steering the ship.

This argument isn’t new. When cameras were invented, people said the same thing: you push a button — that can’t be art. It isn’t painting or drawing. Where’s the discipline? In music, we saw it with synthesizers: can it be music without a “human touch”? Of course it can. Anyone who’s played a synth knows just how much touch matters.

We’re in that same place with AI. Prompt in, garbage out isn’t the only way artists interact with it. Some of us are approaching it with discipline. Some of us are filtering the output through decades of study and practice.

On that point, The Oatmeal and I actually agree: art lives in the process. And my process is still very human.