Today is my last day of classes. I just submitted my final assignment. I’m done with graduate school. Well, almost. For whatever reason, my university doesn’t hold a summer commencement ceremony, so I’ll have to attend the one in the fall. But as far as coursework goes, I’m finished.
You’d think I’d be ecstatic. You’d think I’d be rushing to get more creative work done, hopping onto LinkedIn to chat up recruiters and look for possible contracts, or finally uploading some of the art I’ve been sitting on.
I think I’m just going to sit on it for a while. Maybe indefinitely.
Today, I was going to upload an animatic I’d been working on for three or so weeks. It took a lot of planning, a lot of scrapping, and considerably more drawing than I’d originally intended. But I finished the damn thing.
I’ve done all this work in Toonsquid, which has its quirks, pluses, and minuses. One of the things I don’t enjoy is using the paint bucket tool. No matter which brush I used, it will leave tiny hairline gaps between the filled area and the outline I made to contain the fill (I ink on one layer and color in another). So I have to go back over these gaps with the brush.
It’s tedious and time-consuming, but the result looks better. And if I miss a line, it’s usually not noticeable.
I took the finished video into DaVinci Resolve to create one zoom-and-pan effect, because I still can’t figure out Toonsquid’s convoluted way of doing it. I was finally satisfied with everything and ready to export when I noticed it.
A fucking hairline gap.
I don’t want to spend the time covering up this one mistake. I don’t want to repeat the bullshit of setting up keys, zooming, and panning over this one section just to fix something most people would never notice.
But I don’t want to share the animatic now, either.
Because some fucker who thinks they’re smarter than everyone else is going to see this one mistake and decide that this is evidence of generative AI.
Because anymore, calling out AI usage has devolved from curiosity or concern into a mindless a witch hunt. I’ve seen for myself people who have never touched generative AI being accused of using it because their grammar is too flawless, their linework has strange tangents, or their work contains imperfections that somebody has decided “looks AI”.
God forbid someone takes care with their writing, or forgets to erase a pencil line. Forbid something looks too polished or not polished enough.
So you know what? No new videos for a while.
In fact, maybe I won’t even bother with YouTube. Maybe I’ll stick with another platform I’ve found.
Maybe I’ll just keep my work to myself until the witch hunters have either caved in to the machine, given up, or been shamed into realizing that they’re impulsive dunderheads who speak before they think out of a desperate attempt to look intelligent.
But I just want to salvage the day. I just finished graduate school, and thinking about the online world has tainted what is supposed to be a monumental milestone for me. I spent years working toward this moment, and somehow I became entangled in thoughts about whether strangers on the internet will decide if my work is “real” enough.
I don’t want that to be what I remember about today.
I’m logging off and thinking about what I can make offline. The internet doesn’t deserve everything that’s ever been made by humans.