NYCC 2023: Mark Sable Tackles Artificial Intelligence In ‘Boxed’

Artificial intelligence has always been a staple of science fiction and comic books. But with the rise of ChatGPT and other large language models, the hype has reached a fever pitch. Writer Mark Sable is taking on AI in his latest comic from ComiXology, Boxed. The first issue, due out November 21, 2023, is drawn by Jeremy Haun. Erik Amaya, Comicon.com’s editor in chief, and I caught up with Sable at New York Comic Con to ask him about the series that he describes as “Blade Runner meets The Silence of the Lambs.”

Tom Smithyman: (laughing) So the obvious question is, did you use ChatGPT to write Boxed?

Mark Sable: Yes! (laughing) No no! In addition to being a writer and a writing professor, I’m a futurist. And I consult with government, military, and business. So it’s ironic that I never really thought that the threat of AI could be to my job right. And right now I’m not worried about somebody writing a ChatGPT comic that’s going to compete. But it has been really eye opening especially on the art. c side just to see the advance of it and the implications of what it means.

Smithyman: Have you used ChatGPT, even just to experiment with it?

Sable: I’m newer to ChatGPT. I’ve messed around with it for fun. I’ve put an idea into it to see if it will add anything to it. It kind of doesn’t. I’ve used Midjourney – just to be very clear I’m not using for anything commercial or even non-commercial!

I live in LA so much of the Writers Guild negotiations and still ongoing SAG ones are about you know what corporations can do with AI right and what the studios will do.

It will be an interesting thing whether writers and artists want to use these tools. I’ve read articles about writers training AI on their own writing. Will it help them write more books? That sounds miserable to me – just taking the fun out writing and also just producing something in a factory. I don’t know if there are ways that it can like analyze my stories and find things in them. I still would trust a human over it, but how would in five years or 10 years?

Erik Amaya: Part of the thought behind AI is that is can remove the busy work. But when you sit down to write, none of it is busy work.

Sable: One person’s busy work is another person’s career right. You see on social media people saying that anybody can write or anybody can act. Just replace it with AI. And I think those same people, just like I might have been a year ago, aren’t thinking that their job might be able to be replaced by AI or robotics. Honestly I probably haven’t thought as much as I should have. Auto workers have been dealing with automation for how long, for example?

Amaya: How much of AI is a flash in the pan, like Web 3.0 or NFTs?

Sable: I don’t think that AI, in a very broad sense, is a flash in the pan.

Studios want to be able to generate, for example, another season of Game of Thrones. It’s not like Ai’s going to come up with the idea for Game of Thrones, but once we have that initial idea can we iterate off that and then can we like capture enough of an actor’s performance that we only need them for this line and so on. I think what holds it back in comics is that right now creators and the audience to a certain extent are revolting against it.

I just don’t see limits to AI unless we put them there. Just seeing how quickly things advance is both fascinating and scary.

Amaya: Are the AIs in Boxed spontaneously generating or do they originate from a human element?

Sable: In the world of Boxed, there are there are there are essentially three sentient AIs. The first one was Prometheus – they all Greek mythological names. Prometheus achieves sentience. It was designed by humans but grew past what its designers set out to accomplish and then went and killed almost all the AI scientists they were a threat. Then it was boxed, or contained.

Pandora is what I call a honeypot. It is like if the CIA or FSB or one of those intelligence agencies wanted to seduce somebody – and that doesn’t even mean to sexually – but to recruit somebody as a spy. She’s boxed sort of before the story starts. Frank, our government agent, has to use her to get Hippocrates, who’s the AI that the Centers for Disease control is using.

In the book, we get into what constitutes sentience – and if they do have sentience, what rights to those beings have? Frankenstein is maybe the first artificial intelligence. Even before we could conceive of AI, we knew the threat of any science or technology.

Smithyman: Thanks for taking the time to discuss Boxed. Best of luck with the launch.