I’m proud to certify Comic Philosophy as completely free of any generative AI content!
As I explained on my About Site page, all written content on this site has always been exclusively produced by a human being – me. And all the images used in my comics ethics posts are taken from actual comics in my collection (print or digital), with full credits given to the creators in the text captions and Alt tags.
The potential issue was with some of the background pages. As I explain on my About Site page, I didn’t want to use any copyrighted images on this site (aside from the actual comic panels, where they were contextually relevant). That left what I could produce, or stock photos and images with open creative commons usage rights. And of course AI-generated images, which have similar broad use licenses. When I first launched the site in early 2025, I had used a few AI-generated images of superhero-like characters on some of the pages and posts – but I quickly removed those, as I explained in my Comics, Ethics and AI post. I also scoured through the stock photos to remove any that I suspected of having been generated by AI (an increasingly large problem for stock photo sites).
But there were a small number of custom AI-generated images that persisted on the site – namely my site logo and portrait, and my attempts to show the integration of philosophy and comic book superheroes. These have now all been replaced with original art.
Out of respect for comics artists, I have wanted to replace these for some time – but it took me a while to find artists who could create the pieces I was looking for, and were available for original art commissions. While these were in development, I was horrified at the announcement that Disney was making a $1 billion (USD) investment into OpenAI and letting ChatGPT’s Sora “generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters”. UPDATE: It seems this deal is now dead, with Disney backing out of its investment after OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora.
The success of Marvel (and Disney) is basely entirely on talented creators, artists and illustrators creating characters and stories that resonate with people. But the reality of work-for-hire is that so many of those artists are barely getting by (if that), while the corporations rake in literal billions of dollars. And now the fruit of struggling artists’ labor will be used by a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” (as Disney used to call it) to generate even greater profit – and further devalue the original art work itself. I can only imagine what kind of horrors will be produced for social media purposes. Something tells me most people aren’t planning to place superheroes in the context of ethics and moral philosophy!
I plan to continue to work with real artists to create novel content for this site. You have my pledge that no AI-generated content will be used in any part on comicphilosophy.com.
If you are curious, I am happy to describe the process I used in finding replacement art below.
Comic Philosophy theme art
The main theme of this site is that comic book stories (especially superhero comics) illustrate normative ethics (moral philosophy) theories and principles. Comic book stories can thus be used help explain normative ethics theories and concepts to a wider audience. To get this across visually, I like to show various combinations of philosophers, thinkers, comic book creators, and superheroes interacting together.
I have found a great collaborator in this through Pablo Alcalde, a talented comics artist from Madrid, Spain. This is the first image he drew for the site, where I wanted to show a progression of philosophical thought from ancient Greece and China, through the Dark Ages and Medieval times, the Enlightenment period, and finally modern times – up to an including comics superheroes.
I love everything about this image, from the character details through all the background elements. The unexpected addition of the owl (often used to signify wisdom in ancient times) was a nice touch! Pablo thought to reflect my main site colors in the superhero figure, and came up with the logo after I suggested using the site’s initials on his chest.
I first found Pablo through the Comic Art Commissions website. As you will see, his work shows clear influences of both classic and modern American comics, along with aesthetics and pop culture. I love how Pablo is able to create visually compelling narratives that are dynamic and evocative. We are currently working on some additional images for this site, that I know will be equally fabulous. You can see more of Pablo’s work at his personal website: pabloalcaldef.wordpress.com. I highly recommend you reach out to him for your projects!
Author portrait
Although I typically kept my previous online work anonymous, I thought my professional background and interests in neuroscience and philosophy would be highly relevant to this site. I initially tried a bunch of online “comic filter” tools to try and convert my last headshot into a comics avatar for my About Me page. In the end, using photo-editing tools I combined a number of these together in a patchwork fashion to make my own reproduction. But as these were still based on machine-learning programs initially, I decided instead to find a skilled artist who could do a manual creation from the photo.
I found Akarsan, a local Ontario artist through Etsy. They specialize in doing watercolor-style reproductions. They confirmed that no AI tools are used in generating the images. They paint the portraits on an iPad with an Apple pencil, using the common painting app Procreate. I think they did an amazing likeness (although my beard is whiter in real life).
Site icon
The hardest image to drop was my site logo image (also previously used as the category image for Brain posts). I don’t have any artistic skill, but I know how to use photoshop and similar tools. So I had an AI image generator create a stylized brain to my color and design specs, and then spent many hours drawing over it repeatedly to create what I had in mind (using a variety of brushes, textures, filters, and image effects).
To explain what I was going for, when I was in the fifth grade we had to do a multimedia assignment on what we wanted to be when we grew up. I didn’t have a name for it then, but I knew I wanted to study the brain. I draw a giant image of a brain on a white bristol board, using the simple illustrations I found in city library books as a guide (so, not the most detailed or accurate). I then painted the color and festooned it with stars (the gold and silver adhesive ones teachers used on graded school assignment back in those days) since the brain was the star of the show! After my presentation (which, as you might guess, was very thorough) my teacher told me I did an excellent job. She only had one question for me – why was it green?
I knew from the black-and-white reference books that the brain was composed of grey matter and white matter – but had no idea what shade of gray (I eventually discovered it’s a very pinkish one in living tissue due to the blood supply, and a pale yellowish one in formaldehyde-fixed tissue). But in my ten-year-old imagination, I pictured it as a slightly bluish green (kinda like teal). So that’s what I painted then – and what I was for going in my artistic recreation. I thought I had created something quite impressionistic (I even signed it!).
However, imagine my surprise to discover that once shrunk down for use as my site and category icon, all my efforts disappeared – it basically looked like a slightly fuzzier version of the original AI composite. So, I’m afraid this had to go as well, as I have chosen to be completely AI-image free (outside of this post and my original AI commentary post). I leave it here for posterity, so you know what I was aiming for.
As replacements, I made a background-blurred version of the superhero that Pablo drew for me for the site icon, and found this excellent line art on Wiki commons for the Brain category.
I’ve got lots planned for future original art images, so stayed tuned for details!
See my Glossary post for a list of the key philosophical concepts and related links on this site.