GoKawiilAnd what of the future? What would you tell budding illustrators?
d’Oliveira: I don’t think scientific illustrators are threatened by AI. I think it’s a bigger threat for non-scientific illustration.
Weiss: We must continue learning: as creative individuals, we need to continually push ourselves to improve. And build relationships. The connections you make are important in your career.
Saharan: There is certainly some catastrophizing — but I would say that students are appropriately worried. We don’t know where the technology is going.
Much of the concern focuses on what the models might one day do, but there are other aspects: the unresolved questions of copyright and ownership, the environmental costs of these tools and the costs to our craft and to our voice in the field.
I advise students to keep tabs on AI, to be aware. It takes discipline to resist seductive tools that promise ease and efficiency, and to ask instead what we risk losing when creating gets easy. To me, that is the real question: how to remain intentional.
Wilson: Yes, there is a humming concern, which I agree is reasonable.
When AI first came up, it was very much as: ‘this is going to replace you’. Many of us pushed it away immediately: something that will replace me, but first I need to feed it my work? Make it make sense.
At the moment, if someone wants to depict the correct anatomy, they still need a medical illustrator. And I often think about what a professor said during my master’s: people used to worry that illustrators would be replaced by the camera. But if a camera takes a photo of a surgery, you don’t see anything, just blood. You still need a medical illustrator to draw everything else.
I anticipate something similar happening in the next ten years: illustrators will still be needed to clarify, correct, modify and make images that various audiences can understand. Newcomers should be concerned, but more about learning enough about AI to be able to keep it in its place: it is just a tool.
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