Been a while since we've seen Sarah! Behind the scene's, she's been dating. The guy had to have a name for the alt text, so now his name is Stanley.
This comic was originally intended for the “AI art isn't natural” post, but I didn't get it done in time. Because the next regular Greyfriar's Isle comic isn't getting done in time either (I've started drawing the first page of the new storyline even though the story isn't yet fully written, but that page is still in its early stages), you're getting it now, as a filler comic.
Among the things that I object to about AI “art”, this is very low on the list, but it's on the list: the prevalence of slop is making cops of us all. More and more, people's engagement with new art and writing online is being reduced to checking it for the telltale signs of a piece being AI-generated. In prose, one such proposed tell is the “it's not X, it's Y” construction.
This doesn't work, ever. For one, the detective work we're doing for free and without anyone asking us for it is helping the tech teams that train the LLMs to improve their models, so that classic tells like too many fingers are now mostly gone from new pieces of slop. If the tell is that the “art” is too crisp, then in the next-gen model, they can muddy it up, and then the urine-stained newsprint look becomes the new tell.
For another, the models are ultimately trained on human output (much of which is, to be brutally honest, also slop). So things like the m-dash* or the “It's not X, it's Y” construction are there because human writers that the model was trained on used them liberally. And while some artists have tried to make a meaningful distinction between art errors hat only an AI would make and art errors that a human makes, most of these also have human counter-examples. A classic one that pretty much every artist has made is putting the wrong hand on a character, for example. There really is no such thing as a reliable tell that can be used to detect AI output and has no false positives or false negatives.
The only way to win this game is not to play. By all means, be critical of the possibility that someone may be presenting slop as their own work, but don't let that replace your engagement in art. Don't become the AI police.
I'm prone to doing this myself, by the way. I’m trying not to.
* and lemme tell you, based on my day job, that thing is beloved by legal writers today.
By Reinder Dijkhuis
Greyfriar’s Isle is a comic about an island and the people who live there. A small family runs Marsh Light, a naturist campsite connected to the beach where locals and tourists spend their vacation time. The island is historically friendly to naturism, but not universally so. Also, there are ghosts and strange, eldritch island customs.
Greyfriar’s Isle is inspired by the comics I read in my youth, by the real-world island experiences I had in my youth, my ideas about what naturism should be and the stories naturists tell each other about themselves.
New episodes come out on the first and third Wednesday of every month! 🪐
Check out past episodes of Greyfriar’s Isle:
Love this?
Check out the backlog of Greyfriar’s Isle here, or on the artist’s website here. You can also support him and his work on Patreon. Subscribe to his Steady newsletter here, or find him on Substack. He’s also on Bluesky.