Pat Mills, Torunn Grønbekk and Ram V Among Comics Creators Sounding the Alarm on AI in New Book by Pete Trainor

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape creative industries, a powerful new book is asking an urgent question. What happens when the people behind the work begin to disappear?

Drawn to Extinction: Comics, Craft, and the Battle for Originality in the Age of Ai is a cultural criticism and memoir hybrid that uses the comics industry as a lens on what generative Ai is doing to creative work more broadly. Through extended interviews with some of the most recognisable names in the medium, alongside conversations with lawyers, union officials and Ai researchers, Trainor builds a case that the adoption of generative tools across the creative industries is not really a story about creativity at all. It is a story about labour cost, and about the quiet displacement of the people who built the culture being optimised in the first place.

Pat Mills, the creator of 2000 AD and Judge Dredd, contributes the foreword. The interviews that follow include Torunn Grønbekk, Ram V, John Wagner, Hannah Berry, Frazer Irving and Patrick Goddard, alongside Lesley Gannon, Deputy General Secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and copyright specialist Jonathan Bailey, founder of Plagiarism Today. Threaded through the named voices are the anonymised ones, the working artists and writers who could not afford to put their names to what they had to say, and whose presence in the book quietly tells its own story about the state of the industry right now.

Trainor’s argument is unfashionable in the technology world he comes from, and he makes no attempt to soften it. Generative Ai in comics, he argues, is not really a creative tool at all but an extraction mechanism, one whose training data was taken without consent from the very people now being undercut by its outputs, and whose savings are being made at the expense of the artists rather than the publishers who employ them. The language of efficiency and democratisation that surrounds these tools, Trainor suggests, is doing the same work that the language of outsourcing did twenty years ago, which is to dress a labour transfer up as a public good and hope nobody looks too closely at who is actually paying for it.

The book’s hardest chapters sit with what that transfer is costing the people inside it. A typed prompt is being sold as the equivalent of a drawn page, and the language of magic that surrounds generative tools is doing real damage to how a younger generation of creators understands what the work actually is, what it takes, and what it is for. The studios know what they are buying when they commission a prompt instead of a page, and the artists know what they are losing when the brief never arrives. The Ai founders, Trainor argues, are banking on the gap between those two knowings staying wide enough to keep the money flowing in their direction.

What gets lost in that exchange is the thing the book keeps returning to across every chapter and every interview. Human struggle creates meaning, and Ai bypasses that struggle by design rather than by accident. The imperfections, the time, the mistakes, the long apprenticeships and the longer persistence are not inefficiencies waiting to be engineered away by a better model or a faster pipeline. They are the work itself, and stripping them out does not produce the same thing more cheaply. It produces something else, and calls it by the old name.

Trainor brings unusual credentials to that argument. He is the founding chair of BIMA’s Ai Think Tank and was named by Econsultancy as one of the five most influential figures in the British digital industry, and his previous books include Human Focused Digital and Calling All The Dreamers. He has spent nearly three decades working at the intersection of design, technology and human behaviour, which makes him an unlikely critic of the industry he helped build, and which is part of what gives the book its weight. He is asking the comics industry the question he believes every creative industry will soon have to answer for itself.

About the Author

Pete Trainor is a London-based author, technologist and analyst whose work focuses on the impact of emerging technologies on creative industries and human behaviour. He is the founding chair of BIMA’s Ai Think Tank, and his guiding principle, Don’t do things better. Do better things.™, runs through his speaking, his writing and his consulting work.

Website: https://trainor.fyi/books/drawn/

Substack: https://substack.com/@drawntoextinction

Available from

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Drawn-Extinction-Comics-Battle-Originality/dp/1067648208

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/drawn-to-extinction-comics-craft-and-the-battle-for-creativity-in-the-age-of-ai-pete-trainor/17c91e993fd30c08?ean=9781067648206

Comic Vault: https://comicvault.cc/p/drawn26