Our newsletter for May is out! It features news about our AI-free media campaign, an upcoming review of a drawing tablet and our most popular cartoons in April. Subscribe if you want to receive a monthly update from us (and subscribe here if you want to receive our daily cartoon in your inbox).
Our section of Austrian cartoonists is expanding with the addition of Wolfgang Ammer. Since 1981, he has worked for the Wiener Zeitung. He is also a contributor to NRC Handelsblad, Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Cartoon by Stellina Chen
Renowned illustrator Molly Crabapple has written an open letter against AI replacing artists, cartoonists and illustrators in the media. You can read the open letter below and add your signature to support this protest. Cartoon Movement is joining this campaign with a pledge that our platform will be AI-free; all the content on Cartoon Movement is and will continue to be made by humans. Guaranteed.
We are also calling on other media to join our pledge. To that end, we've designed a logo that media organizations can add to their website to show they are AI-free. Feel free to download and use this logo.
Restrict AI Illustration from Publishing: An Open Letter
Since the earliest days of print journalism, illustration has been used to elucidate and add perspective to stories. Even with the advent of photography in the 19th century, hand-drawn illustrations continued to have their place, both as a synthesis of the artist’s vision and the writer’s meaning. The illustrator’s art still speaks to something not just intimately connected to the news, but intrinsically human about story itself.
With the advent of generative-image AI technology, that unique interpretive and narrative confluence of art and text, of human writer and human illustrator, is at risk of extinction.
Based on text prompts, these generative tools can churn out polished, detailed simulacra of what previously would have been illustrations drawn by the human hand. They do so for a few pennies or for free, and they are faster than any human can ever be. Because no human illustrator can work quickly enough or cheaply enough to compete with these robot replacements, we know that if this technology is left unchecked, it will radically reshape the field of journalism. The result will be that only a tiny elite of artists can remain in business, their work selling as a kind of luxury status symbol.
AI-art generators are trained on enormous datasets, containing millions upon millions of copyrighted images, harvested without their creator’s knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. This is effectively the greatest art heist in history. Perpetrated by respectable-seeming corporate entities backed by Silicon Valley venture capital. It’s daylight robbery.
If you think this sounds alarmist, consider that AI-generated work has already been used for book covers and as editorial illustration, displacing illustrators from their livelihood. As a result artists and illustrators have already started suing certain creators of AI art generators for copyright infringement.
Why, beyond the immediate effect on individual artists, does this matter? AI purports to have the capability to create art, but it will never be able to do so satisfactorily because its algorithms can only create variations of art that already exists. It creates only ersatz versions of illustrations having no actual insight, wit, or originality. Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists. Over time, this will impoverish our visual culture. Consumers will be trained to accept this art-looking art, but the ingenuity, the personal vision, the individual sensibility, the humanity will be missing.
This is also an economic choice for society. While illustrators’ careers are set to be decimated by generative-AI art, the companies developing the technology are making fortunes. Silicon Valley is betting against the wages of living, breathing artists through its investment in AI.
Generative-art AI is just beginning. If illustrators want to stay illustrators, the time to fight is now. Molly Crabapple and the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting call on artists, publishers, journalists, editors, and journalism union leaders to take a pledge for human values against the use of generative-AI images to replace human-made art.
Media publishing takes intellectual property rights very seriously. Its business would not exist without upholding the laws and values that protect such rights. If newsrooms aim to resist corporate theft, they must commit to supporting editorial art made by people, not server farms.
You can sign the open letter here.
We are happy to welcome Martyn Turner to our community. He has drawn cartoons, and written stuff, for The Irish Times since 1971. He is a former editor of Fortnight magazine in Belfast. He lives in Ireland and France. 20 books of his cartoons and writing have been published.
Pepsch Gottscheber, a renowned cartoonist and illustrator from Austria, has recently joined our website. He gained recognition as a political caricaturist for Süddeutsche Zeitung and his caricatures are published in many German daily newspapers and magazines. Pepsch was awarded the German-American Thomas Nast Prize for his contributions to the industry.
We are delighted to welcome Oliver Schopf from Vienna, Austria. He has been the editorial cartoonist for Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard since 1988 and contributes his cartoons to many publications around the world. Check out his website to see more of his work.
Dale Cummings is a cartoonist from Canada. He was the editorial cartooning for the Winnipeg Free Press for over 30 years.
Today is not only World Press freedom Day, it also marks the expansion of Cartoon Movement into the US. We eare officially taking over the activities of American syndicate CartoonArts International.
This means that starting today, we'll step in to provide content for the political cartoon categories formerly provided by CartoonArts, on GoComics. You can check them out here:
Views of the World
ViewsAmerica
ViewsLatinAmerica
ViewsAfrica
ViewsEurope
ViewsMideast
ViewsAsia
ViewsBusiness
Cartoon Movement will also take over the existing clients of CartoonArts, and integrate the editorial cartoons and caricatures of CartoonArts and its global roster of artists into its platform.
Cartoon by Mahmoud Rifai
Read out latest dispatch from the world of cartooning here. Subscribe to receive a monthly update from us directly in your inbox.
From April 20 to June 1, 2023, cartoonists will be able to submit their work for the fourth edition of the European Cartoon Award. Submitted cartoons must have been published between May 1, 2022, and June 1, 2023, with a media outlet from a country within the Council of Europe, plus Belarus, and Russia.
Founded in 2019, by the European Press Prize and Studio Europa Maastricht, the European Cartoon Award has one of the highest monetary prizes for cartoonists, granting its winner a prize of 10,000 euros. The cartoons can be submitted here.
About the European Cartoon Award
The European Cartoon Award was founded in 2019 by the European Press Prize and Studio Europa Maastricht to encourage cartoonists in their essential work for freedom of expression.
'I am proud of how the ECA has grown, quickly becoming one of the most important awards for cartoonists in the world. We are sure that this edition will exceed expectations and greatly help cartoonists everywhere in the world. Now, like never before, we need them to be sharp and help us, with their work, to make sense of what happens around us' said the organizer of the ECA 2023, and Head of Communications and PR with the European Press Prize, Emanuele Del Rosso.
Award ceremony and exhibition at Beeld & Geluid
Following the success of the exhibition hosted by the Beeld & Geluid Museum of The Hague in 2022, for this year’s edition, the European Cartoon Award will hold its Award Ceremony and exhibition opening once again at the renowned Dutch museum. The Award Ceremony will take place, therefore, at Beeld & Geluid on September 14, 2023. Moreover, the best 40 editorial cartoons will become a temporary exhibition, that will then travel to other museums, hopefully even outside the Dutch borders.