Pixels of You is a slow-burn, rivals-to-lovers human/AI romance. It’s also a nuanced narrative speculation on how near-future AI will shape human culture and be shaped in turn. This sleek and stylish graphic novel is a collaboration between a superstar indie creative team — writers Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (Barbarous, Lucky Penny, and Johnny Wander) and artist J.R. Doyle (Knights-Errant) — and their thoughtful exploration of the intersections between technology and human difference is guided by a heart of gold.
Pixels of You
Written by Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota, Illustrated by J. R. Doyle
Amulet Books
February 8, 2022
Indira and Fawn are interns at an art gallery in New York City, but their relationship gets off to an awkward start. Indira, a human, uses an inherited camera to create intimate portraits of robotic chassis, while Fawn, a human-presenting AI, uses the digital camera integrated into her eyes to take close-up photos of plants. Fawn finds Indira’s AI portraits objectifying, while Indira thinks Fawn’s flowers and succulents are too cliché and safe. After Fawn speaks out of turn at Indira’s gallery showing, Indira responds in kind, and a public argument ensues. The no-nonsense gallery owner delivers an ultimatum: the two women must work together to present a joint show, or they won’t receive college credit.
As Indira and Fawn resentfully begin talking to each other, they gradually reveal their creative inspirations. Indira was fitted with a cybernetic eye implant after being injured in an accident caused by an AI-driven car. She has to cope with chronic pain, as well as a rotating cast of doctors who won’t allow her to maintain a stable schedule of medication. Meanwhile, Fawn’s parents have been discriminated against because of their visibly robotic chassis, but they’ve worked hard to be able to enjoy a sense of peace and belonging in a charming historic house and its carefully-tended garden.
The deeper artistic motivations of the two photographers are complicated and surprising, and it’s fascinating to watch Indira and Fawn open up to one another. Pixels of You contains a number of oblique references to the real-world politics of identity, such as when a set director tries to give Indira a well-intentioned but slightly off-color nickname, or when two AI at a photoshoot make a snide comment about how Fawn isn’t better than them because she has the privilege of passing as human. Still, Pixels of You is an intensely personal story driven by the specificity of its characters, and it leaves the big political and philosophical questions up to the reader, both to ask and to answer.
In order to emphasize the subjectivity of the characters within their social context, Pixels of You interrupts the story at key points with a single news headline, which is written in stark white text against a solid black background. To give two examples:
Companies scramble to scrap secret AI recruiting tool that taught itself bias against women’s resumes: Experts worry that rather than removing human bias from decision-making, AI will recreate and automate it.
Study finds bias by gender and skin type across multiple commercial AI systems: Neural networks failed to recognize some photo portraits as showing a human face at all.
The first example references a report by Reuters, while the second summarizes a widely shared MIT study. When Indira tells Fawn how she lost her eye, however, her account is interleaved with solid black pages, as if to suggest that no news headlines can convey the depth or particulars of her individual experience. Her story has no room for editorials about the infamous trolley problem, just pain and grief and the unpleasant realities of an imperfect world.
It’s significant that Indira gains the courage to tell her story not to another human, but rather to an AI who has started to care for her. The differences between Indira and Fawn are subtle but real. Fawn acknowledges that her current body won’t be her last, and Indira jokes about how Fawn’s lifespan will be much longer than her own. In more mundane matters, the two women have different tastes in fashion and different viewpoints on photographic methods and techniques. Regardless, these differences aren’t as immediate as their growing feelings for one another, which are conveyed through gentle disagreements, flirty text messages, and stolen glances.
As brilliant as Hirsh’s and Ota’s writing is, the character designs are equally striking. It’s a pleasure to watch the two protagonists move across the page, each with their own visual language of movement. In addition, every minor character is distinctive and visually interesting. Some of these characters, such as the art gallery owner and Fawn’s father, have no right to be as attractive as they are. The art in Pixels of You is a combination of Ota’s storyboards, the illustrations of J. R. Doyle (Knights-Errant, Battery Acid), the colors of Tess Stone (Not Drunk Enough, Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name), and flatter Fen Garza. The stylistic contributions of each of these artists shine brightly in a palette of cyber jewel tones that never feels limited until, in the continued absence of more gold-hued shades of yellow and green, the reader begins to wonder whose eyes we’re seeing this world through.
Many near-future stories about the relationships between AI and humans are characterized by what Isaac Asimov called “the Frankenstein complex,” or the anxiety that the nonhuman beings we create will become monsters and turn against us. The alarmist headlines referenced in Pixels of You hint at these concerns, but the intensely subjective viewpoint of Fawn and Indira’s story has no place for a fear founded in vague overgeneralizations. Pixels of You negotiates difference not through philosophy, but through intimacy. Hirsh and Ota’s work offers no grand pronouncements about near-future AI, but rather a soft reminder that the world is difficult and complicated, and that all we can do is support each other as we figure things out one step at a time. Pixels of You is a gentle love story of attraction between opposites, but its keen insights will linger in sharp definition long after the last page.
