Are illustrators doomed… or is this our time to shiiiiiine? [AI workshop replay]

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Are Illustrators Doomed… or Is This Our Time to Shiiiiiine? [AI Workshop Replay]"

Podcast: The Good Ship Illustration
Hosts: Helen Stephens, Katie Chappell, Tania Willis
Date: February 13, 2026
Theme: Navigating the Future of Illustration in the Age of AI

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Episode Overview

In this special episode, Helen, Katie, and Tanya share an audio replay of their live workshop, “Standing Out in a Sea of Robots: Being an Illustrator When AI is Everywhere.” The Good Ship Illustration team—three experienced illustrators from varied backgrounds—dive deep into the landscape of illustration in the era of artificial intelligence. They answer common fears, dissect industry trends, and offer practical exercises and community advice to help illustrators confidently fly their "freak flags" and stay relevant.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI Anxiety: Is Illustration as a Career Dead?

• The hosts address the prevailing fear that AI has made illustration obsolete.
• There is overwhelming uncertainty and concern among illustrators, especially beginners, about whether it’s even worth pursuing the field anymore.

Notable Quote:
"Everyone's been scared to death, haven't they, that the game is over, but it's really not. We've got some ways to conquer it." — Helen (00:51)

2. What Makes Human Illustration Irreplaceable

• Major brands (e.g., H&M, Hermes) now deliberately seek out human, quirky, “wonky” artwork to distance themselves from the slickness of AI-generated visuals.
• The hosts discuss artistic authenticity and the importance of uniqueness.

Notable Quotes:
"The less polished we looked, the better. The more we're flying our freak flags and being ourself, the better it is." — Katie (02:00)
"The world definitely needs more creative human voices like yours." — Tanya (01:24)

3. Why Big Brands Are Moving Away from AI Art

• Human-made illustrations foster trust and authenticity—values that slick, generic AI imagery cannot replicate.
• There's an “anti-AI” trend occurring as businesses realize customers mistrust “shortcutty” or soulless visuals produced by AI.

Notable Quotes:
"It's a bit shortcutty, isn't it? If they're going to use the visuals, then what's the product like? It just generates so much mistrust, doesn't it?" — Helen (08:08)
"Illustration lends a friendly, approachable, non threatening humanness, which I think in the rise of AI people are going to be craving more and more." — Tanya (09:28)

4. Copyright, Licenses and the Legal Mess of AI

• Clients have legal issues with using AI-generated art because AI outputs lack clear copyright; only human creators can assign copyright.
• The hosts discuss the importance of protecting creator rights and mention current campaigns.

Notable Quote:
"They can't control the licenses to the copyright of the artwork that they commission if it's output by AI… at the moment, that's why clients will often send you a raffle, some ideas that are AI generated, because that's the easiest way for them to do it. But they want us to make the work." — Helen (04:55)

5. Your Weirdness is Your Superpower

• Each illustrator’s unique experiences, interests, and quirks combine into a “treasure box” that no machine can replicate.
• Personal stories and specific obsessions give work an individual flair that stands out.

Notable Quote:
"It's that weird combination of your life experiences that makes you so individual and it makes your illustration work really stand out." — Katie (06:13)

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Practical Advice & Prompts

6. Human Prompts: Unearth Your Unique Voice (12:10–14:27)

Seven reflective prompts for illustrators to tap into their individuality, including:

• Clothes you've worn since childhood
• Teenage obsessions
• Where you'd go if you could visit the past
• What made you the "weirdo" at school
• Collections you keep
• Embarrassing quirks to celebrate in your art
• Causes you’ve always been passionate about

Notable Quote:
"This is a really good way of appreciating all of those golden nuggets about yourself that AI can't replicate." — Katie (12:10)

7. Industry Examples & Trends (14:38–16:29)

• AI-powered ad campaigns (e.g., Coca-Cola, Toys R Us) received backlash for being “soulless and lazy.”
• Brands like Polaroid and Heineken now emphasize “analog, imperfect and human” in their marketing.

8. Advice for New Graduates and Community Building (29:14–35:49)

• The hardest transition is right after graduation; community is critical.
• Find or form networks—many free options exist, such as urban sketching groups or using social media hashtags (e.g., #urbansketching).
• Don’t try to “fix it all at once.” Radical incrementalism—small, steady steps—works best.

Notable Quote:
"Do not lose touch with the community that you’re at college with. That’s the hardest thing." — Katie (29:35)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• "Naivety is a superpower. You shouldn’t learn how everybody else uses watercolor. You should buy them like an alien, squeeze them on the palette and use them however you think you should use them." — Katie (19:41)
• "It just gave me the ick definitely. And it made me think, oh, if you've cut corners on that, what else have you cut corners on?" — Tanya (07:30)
• "Radical incrementalism. Even if you get really into it, you're not allowed to do any more than 30 minutes. I don't know how that bit works, but I'm desperately hanging on to radical incrementalism as a way to get through my big tasks." — Helen (31:57)
• "Illustrators that will be okay are the ones that really stand out and are positioned as like a special thing… blending in and doing what everyone else is doing and hopping on trends. Yeah, it was always a bad idea, but now it's like even more of a bad idea when AI can just churn out that sort of soulless stuff." — Tanya (27:51)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• AI Anxiety & Reassurance: 00:51 – 01:53
• Human Art in Big Brands: 02:00 – 04:29
• Legal & Copyright Issues: 04:55 – 06:04; 22:10 – 24:17
• Personal “Weirdness” as Differentiator: 06:13 – 07:05; 17:03 – 20:51
• Reflective Human Prompts: 12:10 – 14:12
• Industry Trends and Brand Case Studies: 14:38 – 16:29
• Advice for New Grads & Building Community: 29:14 – 35:49

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Tone & Closing

Helen, Katie, and Tanya maintain an upbeat, empathetic, and encouraging vibe. Their message: AI may be disruptive, but it cannot replicate the value of real human quirkiness and genuine creativity. Don't despair—illustration, when personal, weird, and human, is more important and desirable than ever.

Closing Words:
"I hope we were useful. We can't solve everything, but perhaps it was like a step in the right direction." — Helen (36:02)

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For more exercises, free workshops and community events, head to thegoodshipillustration.com. Submit your illustration questions for future episodes!

Transcript

[Tanya]

This week we hosted an AI workshop for illustrators and it was called Standing out in a sea of robots. Being an illustrator when AI is everywhere. This is the audio recording, which is not 100% ideal because there was some visual stuff. We also had handouts, but it gives you the general gist and it might be useful if you're drawing. If you want the replay, it's available, I think, until the end of today. And then after that, we're going to put it inside the find your creative voice fly or freak flag course as a little download in there. So, without further ado, here is the workshop. Have a lovely time listening to it, and if you were there live, thank you for coming. There were so many good questions at the end and we didn't get to them all, but we would love to answer them. So do submit them as a podcast question on the website because we love getting fresh, shiny new questions to answer. Okay, have fun.

[Helen]

Everyone's been scared to death, haven't they, that the game is over, but it's really not. We've got some ways to conquer it.

[Tanya]

Yes. And we've done our best to kind of gather some of the gooderest news about AI and what it's like to be an illustrator now, because we get a lot of messages, people saying, is there any point in even training to be, like, learning to be an illustrator now? Is my career completely over? And we think, no, it is not.

[Helen]

It really is like a bad part, isn't it? It's the gift nobody wanted or asked for.

[Tanya]

Yes, it's true. And honestly, we don't know what the future will look like. But we do know that illustrators and our quirks and weirdness and humanness is not going anywhere. And the world definitely needs more creative human voices like yours. So this is the reason we're running this workshop, so that you can see the value in your voice and how you can kind of lean into that and be as untouchable by AI as possible. And we've got some practical ways to get even more confident about your work.

[Helen]

Yeah, we've all got golden nuggets in us.

[Tanya]

So good. I think Helen dug this one out. We're big fans of Molly Fairhurst.

[Katie]

I think it's really interesting how the big brands like H M are looking for people with humanness in their work now, because they're so desperate to show that they're not a huge corporation and that they are human. They want to be seen as human. So they're searching for people with this gorgeous, wonky they want Molly's brain treasures, basically. So I think the less polished we looked, the better. The more that we are flying our freak flags and being ourself, the better it is. Because the big companies are trying to pretend to be that, aren't they? And that's what we are and that's what we can give them.

[Tanya]

Will is crying out for it, really. And I think now there's almost like an anti AI feeling out there where, you know, people are rejecting the things that feel like slick AI and me going for stuff that feels more like premium and handmade and quality. I got really excited when I saw this by. Oh, you told me how to say it yesterday. Hermes. Hermes. Hermes. I'm not posh enough to know the right way to say it, but they hired an agency and they got Linda Murad to do these illustrations and honestly the whole website was illustrated like this and these really detailed, rich illustrations for all the different products. And I went on their website today and they've got like a stop motion horse animation. It's amazing. So I think that is such a big signal that these big companies and things, these brands, the world in general is crying out for illustrators like us.

[Helen]

And I think if a company like Amaze is using it, it's a sign that the luxury brands are distancing themselves like crazy from cheap, nasty digital slop. And going back to Molly Fairhurst. She was picked up by this really amazing art director who signed up about four different illustrators, quite fresh graduates, and she used them all for the mailchimp campaign. This was about four or five years ago and it's interesting that the tech companies were some of the first to know that their products haven't got any humanity. So you can't connect customers to a software because there's no personality to it. So they needed personality and that's why they picked Molly and the other co illustrators that worked with her on that campaign to try and inject humanity. Now the tech companies are the very ones who are trying to take it away from us. And I don't think they're going to succeed because they know deep in their hearts you need that humanity on show, that kind of personality or people can't connect.

[Tanya]

It's mad, isn't it, that we're sitting here thinking like, inject some humans into that. It's so good. What?

[Helen]

Hey, where could we get some humans to do this for us?

[Tanya]

This is the good news. So Tanya texted this through before. So these are the reasons to be cheerful and the main one that we kind of covered companies need real illustrators. And it's not just companies. I think the world in general is so thirsty for really good human work that feels like a human made it.

[Helen]

Yeah, yeah. The big one is they can't control the licenses to the copyright of the artwork that they commission if it's output by AI. Some of them have commissioned their own AI generating machines, which they claim will protect the copy work, their copyright. But anything that is commissioned and produced on AI, then nobody owns a copyright and that's going to be really uncomfortable for clients. I don't see how they can get around that unless they start creating their own machines, which is long winded. It's a huge investment, but at the moment, that's why clients will often send you a raffle some ideas that are AI generated, because that's the easiest way for them to do it. But they want us to make the work. And a lot of people got quite upset about this. But actually it doesn't threaten us that much. As long as we're not using AI generated materials in the work, they're not asking us to include AI materials in the work. It comes out as a handmade artist's work and the client gets to own and control the license and the copyright if we assign it to them. And only human creators can ensure that.

[Tanya]

We've got a brilliant video by Chris Horton that we're going to show you as well. Can I talk about that? But in the meantime, give us some weirdness.

[Katie]

We were just talking about yesterday, we had a chat about this and we were talking about what makes a human a human being. And it's all of those treasures, all those memories, all those experiences that store up in your brain and makes you you. So you know, every exhibition you see, every book you read, every album you listen to, piece of handmade clothing sewn, every. Everything that you take in becomes part of your brain. And it's that weird combination of your life experiences that makes you so individual and it makes your illustration work really stand out. So, yeah, I think it's about learning to appreciate all of the weird interests, the niche interests, the things you might find embarrassing about yourself, and the combination of all those things together that makes you unique.

[Tanya]

So why companies are moving towards human made illustrations, there's four main, main reasons which is exciting and good news for us as illustrators. Obviously that first one, authenticity. It's all about standing out, isn't it? And I think this sort of rebellion against the slick AI shininess like I was in, I was talking yesterday I was in Morrisons and on the way out there was a car seat and I thought, oh, my mum needs a car seat, that might be handy.

[Katie]

And.

[Tanya]

But when I looked closely the boy, I looked closely at him and his eyes were twinkling just a little bit too much. As I got closer, I was like, his skin is so smooth, his clothes. And I was like, this bloody AI boy. And just even that initial noticing that it was AI just kind of made me feel a bit sick and a bit like you couldn't even be bothered to take a photo of a child sitting in the seat. Like. I don't know. It's just that initial probably, obviously, because we're illustrators, we feel it more strongly, but it just gave me the ick, definitely. And it made me think, oh, if you've cut corners on that, what else have you cut corners on? You don't care, clearly.

[Helen]

It's a bit shortcutty, isn't it? If they're going to use the visuals, then what's the product like? That's a really good point. I think it just generates so much mistrust, doesn't it? And that, like I said, it's not just us. I think lots of people can smell the stench of AI on different products and it just. Yeah, everyone's very cagey about it. Some people love it, but I think the majority feel ill ease.

[Tanya]

Yeah, definitely. And it's. I've been at events where big companies are talking about how it's great because it's cheaper and it's faster and it's shiny. But if you were sad about those companies using AI, are those the people you really want to work for? If all they prioritize is being faster and shinier and cheaper.

[Helen]

Attractive clients at all, are they? Because then there's that mistrust of how they use your work if they're going to use. Use AI as well. So, yeah, it's going to damage them in terms of attracting people who service their industry at the same time.

[Tanya]

Yeah. Can you hear us again?

[Katie]

It's interesting, isn't it, seeing companies like Ortley that we've got pictured on there. They use typeface that looks like it's printed by hand, they use wonky illustrations and all of the. The copy on the side of the bottle make it sound very, very chatty. They're doing absolutely everything they can so that they don't look like a huge multinational. To build trust.

[Tanya]

Exactly. And I've been interested because I've been hired to go to AI conferences and I'm Always a bit like, why, if you're a big AI company, why are you hiring me? Or even big pharmaceutical companies? And it is exactly that. Like illustration lends a friendly, approachable, non threatening humanness, which I think in the rise of AI people are going to be craving more and more.

[Helen]

It would be great to get some ad agency creative directors on to talk about the core goals for connecting with consumers. And it has to be humanity. And how do they feel about bringing AI in or making it even visible in any way? Because it must be the kiss of death to products. Right now we've got over the honeymoon. Well, we never had a honeymoon with them, but I think some people got very excited about AI but that's really draining away now.

[Tanya]

Here's some more gorgeous, gorgeous examples.

[Katie]

This morning I was talking about Johnny Hanna and how what an individual voice he has. And I can't imagine. I can imagine AI trying to do an impression and at surface level it might pull it off to some extent, but his range of interests is so surprising and varied and brilliant that yeah, Jerry said, oh, he's basically Captain Freak Flag. I really love that. I think I should message Johnny and tell him it's his new name. We may need to make him a cape. But yeah, he's, he's just, it's just every interest in his life is in his work. You can see so much about his personality and his work and it looks so gorgeously handmade. And yeah, he's everything that AI is scared of.

[Helen]

It'd be interesting to Johnny Hannah.

[Tanya]

Johnny Hannah, isn't he?

[Helen]

If you put him next to Grayson Perry, it's really interesting. Johnny Hannah, he makes images about all the things that he loves and wants. So it's kind of a forward motion set of references rather than necessarily biographical or backwards. Whereas Grayson Perry's is all, but it's not all. But originally it was very biographical about all the things he'd grown up through and all the issues he'd lived through. And then it becomes maybe future facing because he does some work about politics and sociology and things like that. But both of them just draw so richly on their past or their wants or their futures. Like you say, AI could never guess what they might want next or what their past memories were. These things are too much to be replicated or second guessed because AI is.

[Tanya]

So good at generalizing and summarizing and smooshing out any of the wonky human bits. So should we do some practical stuff? We made some prompts, some human prompts, not AI prompts. So you can use your human brain to answer these.

[Katie]

So you can answer these questions just with a pencil and a notebook and make written notes, or you could draw the answers to some of these things, or you could start after today if you want to print out the PDF and work on it properly. You could make Pinterest boards or illustrations about these things. This is a really good way of appreciating all of those golden nuggets about yourself that AI can't replicate and really appreciating those brain treasures. They're all stored in there. And the thing about this task is, once you start, it's really hard to start. Stop. So even when you get to the end of the seven questions, you'll just be flooded with more and more questions. You could ask yourself to build this amazing kind of treasure box of subjects for your illustration work.

[Helen]

And even if you kind of get a bit worried that you're not coming up with things, because starting is quite hard. Like Helen said, once. Once you start, you can't stop but getting it going. We are quite old machines and we really need cranking up and all the adulthood lasagna that is on top of our childhood memories, she sort of blocks out the stuff and it. It takes a while to get yourself into that mindset. So even if you just do some immediate reactions to it, it'll start triggering more ideas. So don't worry if you don't. You don't immediately come up with an answer, even dwell on it tonight, and it will get you somewhere.

[Tanya]

Number one is what are the clothes that you've always worn and bought again and again since you were a child? Number two, what were you obsessed with as a teenager? Number three, if you could visit the past, where would you go? Number four, what made you the weirdo at school? We were laughing about this one yesterday because probably as illustrators, I don't know if you do get cool illustrators, I suppose, but, like, in general, illustrators tend to be a bit weird, don't we? Now, what did you. What do you collect? Collections are good clues. What are the things you find embarrassing about yourself that you could celebrate in your work? And number seven, what causes have you always been passionate about?

[Katie]

I have gone in later with this kind of task and picked a subject and then actually made an illustration about it. But you can interpret any way you want. You can just write a list of answers for now if you want to.

[Tanya]

Yeah. In the Find your creative Voice course, we go much more deeply into this and figure out how to kind of integrate it into Your work. But this is a brilliant starting point.

[Katie]

Yeah.

[Tanya]

Or somebody in the chat has said, do you remember the awful Christmas Coca Cola advert they rolled out with the AI animals in the truck with 15 wheel configurations because AI cannot do consistency well at all. It looks cheap and empty.

[Katie]

Yes.

[Tanya]

I found that when I was researching and what was it somebody had said? Yeah, they basically got totally dragged. There's a Coca Cola advert and a Toys R Us advert and everyone was talking about how soulless and lazy it looked. And then there was lots of good anti AI marketing stuff that came out of that. So Polaroid, the camera people, they started talking about being analog, imperfect and human as their whole brand Heineken ran big billboards saying that the best way to make a friend is over a beer, not through some AI wearable friend gadget.

[Katie]

I think people are just desperately trying to escape AI.

[Tanya]

Yeah, we had a chat with Walker Brooks as well when we were visiting and they were talking about everybody craving, you know, brambly hedge, the little mice and living in trees and burrowing in and just being wholesome and you know, pre. Pre Internet life.

[Katie]

Yeah.

[Helen]

There's a really interesting trend thing from the bright agency and they were talking about children's books and the future trends in that particularly in relation to AI and that the handmade mark was much more important and that things that could not be confused with AI were where they were looking as agents for the kind of work they were looking for. And they were also saying how there's a trend in publishing now in order to help kids read, they are producing what used to be called fad publishing books. But they're hyper focused subject matter things that kids like to do, not generally like music or paleontology or something like that. They're almost like culture trends, fast changing culture trends and they're happy to produce books about it.

[Katie]

It.

[Helen]

So it's like the more you drill down into your own personal obsessions, the more relevant they could be for non fiction books. Because the non fiction side is where it's really happening. Because. So they can talk about games developing in a nonfiction book or a particular city or a particular peculiar hobby that kids like. So analyzing your own obsessional things or the things that you're crazy about, putting those out on social media. Really interesting. And that's where people are going to see your work because people can't imitate.

[Tanya]

You and your life story. Well, they could, but what a lot of effort.

[Helen]

Yes.

[Tanya]

And it'd be weird if it wasn't.

[Helen]

And it would come out Flat. If AI tried to, you know, just do something about a particular hobby. Our interaction with our hobby is what makes it interesting how you did things as a child. Like maybe you collected marbles or old skulls and feathers. And what you did with them and how you displayed them was personal to you. And I can't imagine that, but you can. It's how you're going to represent your memories, like Helen's done. You've done lots of childhood memories, haven't you, related to this activity.

[Katie]

I really like what you said there, Tanya, about how it's how you interpret that fascination. And that reminded me of Grayson Perry. He talks about that. Like, we could get upset. Like, you see a trend and you get obsessed with it, or you see. I don't know, you see your. Maybe you go to another country and you eat something and it's delicious, and you come home, you think, I really want to recreate that. And so you do the best you can to scramble those ingredients together and you make something and it's delicious, but it's not exactly what the original meal was. And that's the same with artwork. It's like a collection of things. You get slightly wrong. So you get an influence from here and an influence from here and from here. They're all ever so slightly wrong because you don't quite know how that person did it. And the way you put them together makes you you. And that's impossible for AI to do. That amount of human weirdness, human error in its connections, that's what makes the work so interesting. It's all the little errors. Like, at the weekend, I did this fantastic story making workshop with Emily Howarth Booth, and I wanted to do something about. I mean, it's a long story how it happened, but I heard this quote about Chagall saying that his. He had. He was an absolute nightmare to his mother, but he thinks that she enjoyed him. And I love that quote so much. And I wanted to write. So I wanted to write a picture book about that, to get that in a picture book in somehow. And so I started drawing Chagall as a little boy. Then at one point during the workshop, I thought, maybe I should go and research Chagall because I know nothing about him. And then I thought, no, it'd be far better if I just did a biography of Chagall without knowing a single thing about him, except for this quote about his mother. And then all of a sudden, I was off. Then I just found that hilarious that I was just. I was just gonna get it all completely wrong. But that would Be the weirdness and the funniness of the story. And I think that's the kind of thing that AI can just never imagine.

[Helen]

Yeah, that's your naivety as a superpower gone stratospheric.

[Katie]

That is it. Naivety is a superpower. Yeah. It's like not learning to use materials correctly. That is a brilliant thing to do. You shouldn't learn how everybody else uses watercolor. You should buy them like an alien, squeeze them on the palette and use them however you think you should use them. And that's what makes your work so much more interesting and different to everybody else's.

[Helen]

Lucky you actually had driving lessons and learned how to drive already.

[Tanya]

Figure it out. You are driving. That's a good point. Because something since we started the Good Ship, you know, we've been very clear we don't do like how to paint, how to draw. And the reason for that is so that you can figure out your own wonky way of doing things, fueled by your obsessions and stuff. Because if you, if we're following a how to guide, we're just gonna all be creating in a house style. We'll all have the same work, which is the thing we're trying to get away from here. And especially in this, you know, this mini free workshop as well. There was somebody in the chat there just said, oh, I thought this workshop was about how we could work with AI in our own illustration style. I suppose that kind of falls under the how to guide, which is something that we're not really doing ever.

[Helen]

Someone a friend of mine said though a while back, and I still think there is a space for this, if you could create and cordon off your own custom made AI machine that only worked with your work and you and no one else could access it. You could put in a lot of your work and do versions of yourself, but it was under your power. If you were, for example, doing a low paid job, you could generate a work that was similar. Of course, if you wanted to do something, your best version, your premium version would be the original work, but it would be definitely worth having at home. Machines.

[Tanya]

Yeah, something like that, where you can train, you know, an AI thing on your own work and then you're in charge of it. But I don't. There was one website somebody sent me and I was like, whoa, that's crazy. But it did give back a little bit.

[Katie]

But would it be as enjoyable as making your own work? Because you're going to go to a lot of work to get AI to make the work Maybe it'd be better to make the work I like. I just don't think I would enjoy that. I don't think I would enjoy giving out instructions as much as just sitting down with the paper and making the work.

[Tanya]

Yeah, that's the thing.

[Katie]

I would.

[Tanya]

I don't mind if AI wants to take all my boring jobs, but I quite like drawing. And so the next thing, the video by our good ship pal Chris Horton, and it's a little bit about AI.

[Helen]

And it's a campaigning video that he's made for justice for Creators and the various AI campaigns that are happening at the moment. And we've got some links to a new report from the Society of Authors. But there's different ways you can get involved in Cat. That's what we have to do, I think is campaigning to protect creators licenses and copyright.

[Katie]

So basically my understanding is that all we've always owned the copyright to our work. That's the default position. If we draw it, we own the copyright, but AI companies are just stealing those rights and that we have to opt out of them using our work as inspiration for their AI images. Is that right, Tanya?

[Helen]

Yeah. At the moment what the government's campaigning for is to give tech companies the right to take any of the copyright for any individual piece of artwork we have online. They're allowed to use or train their, their AI machines on it and they want us to opt out of every individual image that we have hosted on the Internet. I mean, that's going to take anyone years and years. It's just impossible and unworkable. And what the Society for Authors and the Institute for Musicians are all coming together to campaign about. And the association of Illustrators is to tell the government that they have to request the rights to use it and pay us a license. So it's remuneration and the right to use rather than what they're presently trying to set up, which is, yeah, help yourself. Any of our illustrators are quite happy to give you the work that they put online. So obviously, I mean, there's not really words to describe how appalling that is. So please join the justice for Creators hashtag and have a look at the Society of Illustrators reports. I think it's called Brave New World if you download that. Baroness Kidridge has written to the government on behalf of Creators of Britain, so. So join any of the campaigns that you can to protect creators rights.

[Katie]

So we've basically got two ways of fighting it, haven't we? One is to be more yourself 100% weirder. And more yourself. And the other one is to join these campaigns.

[Tanya]

So do you want to. Should we do like a tiny Q and A session?

[Katie]

Yeah, yeah, that would be great.

[Tanya]

People are just talking about how much they don't like AI. That's the general consensus. Somebody saying, Simon says, retraining AI on your own work. I saw an artist who was doing that. It looked very distinctively their work and it was better than the majority of AI stuff I have seen, but it was also a bit dead. I think this just kind of flattens, squishes things a little bit. It's not got the human heart in it. Nat Creative Chats as part of my day job is supporting students studying illustration. Thank you for the first session I've seen in months where I feel I have some positive messages to take back to them.

[Helen]

Yay.

[Katie]

That's good. That's good.

[Tanya]

Becca says, did you all see the Cintiq Wacom? They used AI for an ad. Everyone was very annoyed.

[Helen]

Oh, no. It's like, well, Adobe backfired straight off the bat, didn't they, two years ago? And then everyone opting out or planning to close Adobe and switch to affinity. And I think that's hit them quite hard because of the generative feature fill stuff that they've added. And they were going to. They were going to use our work, their subscribers work, and offer that up to tech companies as well. So it's been a lot of really poor judgment on the companies that we actually spend our money on. I can't believe it comes from them.

[Tanya]

The room has not been read. A couple questions came in. Photoshop Pro says, how do the three of you personally feel about AI and how it might affect your work, work and business? That's a big question. Is it? This actually is a good one because we've all got very different feelings on this.

[Katie]

Well, we all work in very different areas of illustration, so I think that makes a difference. I'm a picture book maker and so far I don't. I don't feel threatened by it. I've not seen much evidence of it in the world of picture books, although maybe I've missed an elephant in the room or something, but I don't. I haven't seen it in the world of picture books. Picture books are usually all about feelings. They're pretty emotional. I've not heard of a book being made by AI and being successful. There are all those websites you can go in and put your child's name in and put their hobbies in and it'll generate some Sort of rubbish book, but it just appeals because it's got your child's actual name in it. But I don't feel the pressure from AI in the world of picture books yet.

[Helen]

I don't think the big publishers can afford to use it. I mean, they can't afford to be seen to use it. It would destroy reputations of some of the major publishers as being supporters of visual creativity. As we know, the Bologna Book Festival, where you see all of it on display, is some of the most beautiful visual material ever. And I don't think AI can't muscle in there. I think in advertising it can. In expensive photo shoots for advertising, it does have a place in map making. Everything I've seen, it always has major faults in it. It roughly looks like a map, but if you tried to navigate around a castle, for example, it would be a disaster. Like a lot of AI that you use, at least 5 to 10% of it is flawed. And it can't afford to be flawed if it's a map. It can't afford to be flawed if it's medical advice or legal advice. And more and more people are realizing it's faulty.

[Tanya]

We're.

[Helen]

Which literally wipes the whole thing out. If you can't trust it, it'll have its place. But I'm hoping the desire to see handmade illustration will be really strong as a result of it.

[Tanya]

That's what I think. I feel like illustration, because of AI illustration has become a much more premium, good quality thing. So I feel like illustrators that will be okay are the ones that really stand out and are positioned as like a special thing. So I think that's really a reminder about, you know, blending in and doing what everyone else is doing and hopping on trends. Yeah, it was always a bad idea, but now it's like even more of a bad idea when AI can just, you know, churn out that sort of soulless stuff.

[Helen]

I'd qualifies. But when I say handmade, people are probably thinking, oh, it has to be painted or drawn. I think it's still digital work and procreate work and Photoshop work, which, although we're using Photoshop brushes and you could say that was the very earliest form of AI that's still handmade work. If it's coming from your mind and from your creativity and you're constructing it, I'd still call that handmade work. I'm not saying you just have to paint or draw to avoid being confused with AI Some more questions.

[Tanya]

Somebody mentioning the bias and racism and everything From AI because it's been trained on Fairybrains. Great name Says as a freshly, as a fairly fresh animation illustration graduate, do you have any advice or words of reassurance? As I've been having quite a hard time not feeling hopeless entering the creative industry at the moment. I mean I feel like the creative industry has always been tough when you're starting out because that first bit is like the hardest. Especially when you officially graduate. It's horrible. So they fire you out of a cannon.

[Helen]

Like good luck.

[Tanya]

See here there's no studio for people to talk to, you know, hopefully you succeed. What do you reckon? Advice, reassurance wise? It's hard for everyone.

[Katie]

It really is. It's really hard. I think my advice would be don't lose touch with the community that you're at college with. I think that's the hardest thing. You've got people around you, you can share experiences and advice and art direct practical advice, art directors, names and all of that stuff. So yeah, try and not to lose your community. It is a hard time for everybody straight out of art school.

[Helen]

And if you haven't got that community to stay connected to from college, see if there's, you know, creative quarter in your town or people, you know, studios you can go and work with and also join any of the associations. When I left college I was a bit sniffy about associations. I thought, oh, I don't think I'm a joining type of person. These people are much more professional than me, people who join associations. But actually I wish I'd done it all along because the AOI and there must be an animation association really make you feel part of something and they will keep you up to date. There's a great page on the AOI at the moment that talks about the most up to date things they found about AI happening to illustrators. So that's a freebie page. You don't actually have to be a part of the association but just try and connect with as many people in your field as you can and don't get too mixed up with the is this AI or is this Post Graduation Blues? Because you do often step out to a deafening silence. It's like being released from I'm a celebrity house and there's nobody there.

[Tanya]

I mean that can be really helpful getting a part time job so you don't feel so much pressure on turning it into an income straight away.

[Katie]

And that's.

[Tanya]

We talk about that a lot with finding your creative voice. Like it's almost worth like separating the money thing and the having creative fun thing, just focus on the creativity and digging into those things about when you were younger and what you were obsessed with then. Once you flesh that out, then you can come back to the other side.

[Katie]

Of things and also not trying to fix it all in one go. Just a little bit of something every day feels way more achievable. Just a tiny thing. Whether it's sharing what you do on social media or starting your website, or updating your website, or writing a blog post, like getting yourself out there. But a tiny bit every day feels way more achievable than one huge goal and no idea how to get there.

[Helen]

Radical incrementalism. You give yourself amount of time, you're allowed 30 minutes and even if you get really into it, you're not allowed to do any more than 30 minutes. I don't know how that bit works, whether you just come back more eager the next day. But I'm desperately hanging on to radical incrementalism as a way to get through my big tasks.

[Katie]

It definitely helps, doesn't it? Just to put your. If it feels like a really big task and you can't face doing it, to just put aside half an hour, I'll do what I can in half an hour. And even if, like Katie says, it's half assing it for half an hour, at least you half asked it, at least you did that. And then when you come back the next day, you've got new fresh eyes, you've got editor's eyes. If it was a piece of writing, you can fix it. If it was a start to your website, you can now add some more images or change things around just a little bit every day, then the momentum is always forward and so much easier than trying to achieve too much too quickly.

[Helen]

Find people to hang out with, to talk about it with. Even the accountability thing helps, doesn't it? Just having someone perhaps in studios next door, someone that you go for coffee with. Which is how we started because we had cabin fever and we were really isolated in Berwick and we started hanging out maybe once every two months and ended up asking each other things like, well, how do you deal with contracts with that? Have you got enough space in your house to work? Do you know anything about studios happening in Berwick? It was all sorts of things. And then we realized that we had so much information from different quarters of illustration that actually we had a quite a 360 overview. Because what I thought was illustration wasn't what Helen thought was illustration. And how it worked. We, we were, we'd been immersed in totally different worlds and now Katie was out there being an astronaut in a whole new world of illustration floating around.

[Tanya]

I think that's the thing that just. And people in the chat have been saying like, oh, some of the fees for joining communities are crazy. They're all free ones as well. I know in the uk, Yoelo used to be a good one and there's free drawing meetups and even just meeting up with people that you went to uni with or college or people who like drawing. Like urban sketching. I used to do that. That was really fun.

[Katie]

It's really. You can find all those groups on Instagram as well, like following the urban sketching hashtag. Then you discover groups of people who are meeting up in your town to draw. Yeah, you can find lots of free things on Instagram and just sign up.

[Helen]

For loads of those emails. Like things I love creative lives in progress. If you're in the UK and you know about them, they used to be part. I think they're connected to. It's nice that. But some government initiative to help young graduates across the board in different creative fields, whether it's filmmaking, graphic design, illustration. But they give their weekly email is so good for portfolio building, for job hunting. And you start slowly to feel part of a community. Just sign up for the newsletters. You don't need to be fully signed up to aoi, for example, to benefit. You can drop in and out follow them on Instagram and you get little drip feeds of information because sometimes it's overwhelming. If you join a couple of associations, there's a lot to dig into to get your annual membership's worth. There's like tons of information and content. So just joining a few and cherry picking, even if it's just following.

[Tanya]

We've got Art Club.

[Katie]

The Good Ship community. We've got our podcast. We've got Art Club. Yeah, Art Club's happening this Friday on Instagram. We've got all the freebies on our website as well.

[Helen]

Yeah, we gave up recently we had our competition list which we gave out and nearly about five and a half thousand people signed up for the competition list. So it's things like that. We give out lots of freebies if you follow us on Instagram along with lots of different kind of illustration. Groups like us are always feeding drip feeding information onto social media.

[Tanya]

Yeah, we'd love to see you there if you were free on Friday. But I think that's probably a good time to wrap it up, isn't it? We also take questions on the podcast if you want to submit it there. We love talking about everything on the podcast.

[Helen]

I hope we were useful. We can't solve everything, but perhaps it was like a step in the right direction.

[Tanya]

Yeah, we try our best.

[Katie]

Thank you. Bye, everybody.

[Tanya]

Bye. It.