The self-published zine has long been central to cultural revolutions, from queer activism to Black feminism and the riot grrrl punk movement, producing titles such as Sniffin’ Glue and Sweet-Thang along the way. But now the traditionally analogue art form faces a new shift: artificial intelligence.
AI may seem incompatible with the these cult DIY booklets, but some creatives, designers and artists have begun to experiment with the technology, causing alarm in parts of the underground publishing world. It has been their Dylan-goes-electric moment.
“AI is eliminating a lot of people’s ability to think critically for themselves,” says Rachel Goldfinger, a Philadelphia-based video editor and illustrator who has published an anti-AI zine.
“Of all art forms that I partake in, I feel like zines are the ones that make the least amount of sense to use AI for. They’re supposed to be handmade and scrappy.”
Zines are typically self-published on ordinary paper with much smaller print runs than traditional magazines, and are often hand-illustrated.
Jeremy Leslie, founder of the magazine retailer MagCulture, has observed AI creeping into zine culture. “The zines using AI that I’m aware of have used the technology knowingly, as an experiment and often to make a point about its inability to match human creativity,” he said.
Notably, most zines using AI are online-only, where it has been employed to help design layouts as well as to generate artwork, and to make the creative experience more efficient.
The product designer Jesse Pimenta and the writer Cheyce Batchelor produced a 97-page 90s-inspired zine using Figma’s AI tools, praising the fact it allowed them to “reorder things without a lot of mental bandwidth”.
In 2023, Steve Simkins, an IT engineer, used AI to help produce an online photo zine while working at a US tech startup. He used AI to code and publish the website hosting the zine, but produced the content himself.
“I asked ChatGPT to help create an online zine with HTML and I provided the image links. It would give me some HTML, I would open it in my browser, then ask ChatGPT to adjust bits and pieces until I had something I liked.”
At the time he viewed AI as a “democratising software” that offered opportunities for artists lacking technical skills, “where AI could help enhance [their] pieces while still keeping the primary art itself”.
Zinemakers are among the most vocal critics of using AI to create art. Some are creating anti-AI zines in protest. Maddie Marshall spent a year working on a 92-page zine opposing the technology that she now sells on Etsy, the online craft marketplace. Marshall, a Melbourne-based video editor and illustrator, was inspired to create it after facing pressure to use AI at work.
“I felt…
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