Born in Dayton, raised (mostly) in Kettering, educated in Columbus, detoured to Van Wert before settling back down in the state capital, I’ve been up and down the western half of Ohio all my life. Despite this, I’d like to think I keep a mind open to new perspectives.

why “artist”?

“You’re working mostly in design, why call yourself an artist?” First, ouch. Second, I’ve long been of the opinion that “art” is a craft, first and foremost. Ripping the word from its origins as something everyone does and finagling it into ~Art~, the province of the Elevated Oracle Unconnected to the Common Folk, has done a huge disservice to humanity. You don’t sneer at the contractor building your house for “only” doing lowly carpentry instead of sculpting elaborate colonnades, do you (at least I hope you don’t)? So why do this to artists?

Over the years, I’ve picked up a load of skills: graphic design, front-end coding, 2D animation, motion graphics, video editing, even a little bit of photography. All of these have their peculiarities, and each of them their own career titles. I could microlabel myself all day (and as a queer woman who lives online, believe me, I do know and appreciate microlabels), but there’s a much better-known term that unifies all of these skills through their shared discipline:

Artist.

So that’s why I titled this site “Sarah E. Combs, artist.” I’m an artist. A designer, a coder, an illustrator, a visual editor, sure, but all of those things together are, put simply, an artist.

stance on generative AI

AI automation has its place, but creating artwork is not it. Generative AI in its current iteration can only serve up a statistically-likely match to search strings; the software behind these programs is incapable of sentient thought or reasoning, even if the paragraphs it spits out make it seem like it “understands” what you asked. Art and writing—any form of creation meant to convey human-understandable information—requires human cognition to work. Color, composition, subject matter, design decisions, and even media type are all conscious decisions an artist makes in service of their message. Even everyday commercial pieces are crafted by artists whose visual and emotional literacy and experience informs their design choices. To get your message across, you need to speak your audience’s language, after all.

Even if you’re satisfied with the surface appearance of AI-generated imagery (and I would ask you to examine why that is), there are the myriad ethical problems with it. The current popular generative AI models all work from stolen data, and don’t appear to be changing course anytime soon. Not only that, but the energy costs and water consumption needed to fuel generative AI aren’t doing our climate any favors. And if for some reason neither of those reasons deter you, there’s the fact that because there’s no actual thinking mind behind LLM AI, the returned data frequently is factually wrong or, in some cases, downright dangerous.

For all these reasons, I refuse to work with or contribute to generative AI.