Thank you Andi Penner, chris eliopoulos, Bear Edwards, Ann Feild, PJ Pierce, and many others for tuning into my live video with Alex Hallatt! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Some notable quotes from this week’s episode:
“We can’t just be blinkered and think, ‘Oh my God, as creatives, this is an existential threat, and we have to stop it, because we’re not stopping it. It’s like the internet, but bigger.”
“You can continue doing what you’re doing, the way you’re doing it, but you better be bloody good because you’re going to become an artisan.”
“You don’t pay the plumber for banging on the pipes, you pay him for knowing where to bang.”
“Cartoonists die at the drawing board.”
“AI is coming like the printing press came for monks and illuminated manuscripts. Do you think the monks were pissed off or do you think they were relieved?”
Today’s Draw Me Anything featured the return of the brilliant Alex Hallatt, creator of the syndicated strip Arctic Circle and the Substack Cartooning in the Age of AI.
Alex joined us from Dorset, UK, where the weather is currently “not very lovely,” which is British for “apocalyptic.”
We dove straight into the giant robotic goblin in the room: Artificial Intelligence. Alex approaches this topic with a “scientist brain” (she used to work in clinical research), which makes her perspective refreshingly pragmatic. Instead of just panicking, she’s looking at how to survive. She compared the current AI panic to the early days of digital photography, when old-school photographers insisted it wasn’t “real” photography. Now, shooting on film is an “artisan” pursuit. The lesson? If we want to keep drawing by hand, we’d better be bloody good at it, because we are all becoming artisans now.
One of the funniest moments came when Alex described how she uses AI to handle the “tedious” stuff, like finding the secret service menu on her storage heaters, so she didn’t have to pay an engineer £200 to push three buttons. It’s the “plumber analogy”: you’re not paying for the button pressing; you’re paying for knowing which button to press. And right now, AI knows where the buttons are.
We also talked about the “enshittification” of platforms like Amazon, where search results are now buried under AI-generated guidebooks and sponsored slop. It’s getting harder for independent creators to be found, which is why building a direct relationship with readers (like on Substack) is the only real lifeboat. As Alex put it, “I want to have a chat... human connection has real value in an AI world.”
