Who’s the Creator, Who’s the Machine?

And Why GenAI is Not Frank Miller

Juliano Lissoni

Frank Miller didn’t just make comics darker—he made them deeper. In the 1980s, when superheroes were bright, noble symbols of hope, Miller dragged them into the shadows. He gave us an aging, cynical Batman fighting not just crime but the decay of a society that no longer believed in heroes. He took Daredevil, a struggling, second-tier superhero, and turned him into a tragic figure wrestling with guilt and identity. With Sin City, he stripped stories down to their essence: stark black-and-white, bursts of violent color, and characters as morally ambiguous as the world they inhabited.

Miller’s genius wasn’t in rejecting the conventions of comics but in knowing exactly which ones to subvert. He turned orderly grids into chaotic fragments, clean heroes into flawed antiheroes, and simple stories into gritty meditations on morality and power. His work disrupted not just the way comics were created but how they were perceived—elevating them from pulp entertainment to serious art.

Now, a new disruptor has emerged: generative AI. It doesn’t draw by hand or write from experience. It calculates, predicts, and synthesizes. It’s not human, but it can mimic humanity with uncanny precision. The question is: Can it truly disrupt the way Miller did? Or will it always be a machine trying to understand the soul of creation?

The question is: Can it truly disrupt the way Miller did? Or will it always be a machine trying to understand the soul of creation?

When we talk about AI’s creative potential, we often marvel at its scale. AI can produce in minutes what might take a human days. It can draw inspiration from every artist in history, generating images that feel familiar yet novel. But here’s the catch:

AI doesn’t create. It calculates. It doesn’t decide what matters. It produces what is probable.        

Frank Miller didn’t work on probability. He worked on instinct, on risk, on a deeply human ability to feel when something was wrong and make it right. His Gotham City wasn’t just a backdrop—it was a metaphor for urban decay, a reflection of 1980s America. His Daredevil wasn’t just a superhero; he was a man wrestling with his soul. Could AI ever create something like that? Could it feel the pulse of a moment and make something that speaks to it?

Maybe. But not on its own.

The future of creativity doesn’t belong to machines or humans alone—it belongs to their interplay. Imagine Frank Miller with AI as his collaborator. He sketches a grim version of Gotham, and the AI offers dozens of variations: one darker, one brighter, one filled with surreal, dreamlike distortions. Miller chooses one and tweaks it, pushing the machine in unexpected directions. The AI becomes a tool, an amplifier for human imagination, but the vision remains Miller’s.

This is the promise of generative AI—not to replace human creators but to expand what they can do. Machines can generate ideas, but humans decide what matters. Machines can offer patterns, but humans can break them.

The grid may belong to the machine, but the choice to shatter it will always be ours.

But here’s the twist: What happens when the machine gets good at breaking the grid? When AI isn’t just predicting patterns but learning to disrupt them? What happens when it’s not clear who’s leading and who’s following, who’s the creator and who’s the collaborator?

In the end, isn’t that the most human question of all? To look at the work of our own creation and wonder: Who is the machine—and who is the one creating the spark?