The growing presence of artificial intelligence in comics and graphic storytelling has been reshaping the conventional ideas on authorship, creativity, and artistic labour. This talk explores how AI-generated or AI-assisted comics challenge human-centred ways of thinking about creative production, especially in relation to the politics of tools, work, and precarity in contemporary Indian comics and graphic narratives. Traditionally, the making of comics is depended on well-defined human roles—the writer, penciller, inker, and colourist—each leaving a visible mark on the page. AI tools have unsettled this structure by spreading creative agency across human decisions, algorithmic processes, and vast data infrastructures. Focusing on recent Indian experiments with AI-assisted comics and the debates surrounding generative image technologies, the talk argues that authorship today increasingly resembles curation or management rather than hands-on craft. It examines how AI systems often reproduce dominant styles and aesthetics, raising pressing questions about cultural homogenisation, consent, and the invisible extraction of artistic labour from training datasets. At the same time, it recognizes how independent creators use AI strategically—to overcome resource limitations, expand their reach, and sustain themselves within fragile creative economies. Framing AI-assisted comics within broader discussions on posthumanism, digital labour, and algorithmic capitalism, the presentation suggests that graphic narratives offer a uniquely self-aware space for thinking about what creativity means in an age of automation. In the end, it positions AI-generated comics as critical cultural texts that expose how our understanding of the “human creator” is being renegotiated amid technological change and economic uncertainty.

The quick rise of generative AI into creative industries has cast doubt on established ideas of authorship, originality, and artistic work. In visual storytelling—especially in comics and graphic narratives—where style, handcraft, and personal style of the artist have been the basis for authenticity, AI-generated and AI-based practices create important cultural and political inquiries. Who speaks when computer programs produce images? Are the images produced by the algorithm count as having their own voice? What do these questions mean for creative work in already unstable cultural sector? The project considers AI comics as an important field for discussing authenticity, authorship, and creative instability. The work uses mainly Indian graphic novels, animated features, and other works related to computer storytelling.