Yeyei Gómez: “Progress means stopping when we are on a dark path”

• Illustrator Yeyei Gómez reflects on the social impact of art, the satire of power, and the threat posed by AI.
• She calls for legal limits on technology, arguing that true progress requires knowing when to stop or slow down.

Art and Social Impact

• Gómez views her work as drawing rather than formal illustration, maintaining an analog spirit in a digital age.
• While she uses satire to critique power—notably in her award-winning cover for La Marea featuring Donald Trump—she questions the efficacy of parody when figures often co-opt it for their own campaigns.
• She believes art should provoke discomfort, including in the artist themselves, and views the act of creating as a way to challenge personal and societal biases.

The Threat of AI

• The artist highlights the existential threat AI poses to visual creators, noting that it absorbs intellectual property to build datasets.
• She views the trend of creators returning to physical mediums and analog spaces as a defensive reaction to the hyper-digitalized environment.
• She finds the necessity of "human-made" labels, such as the one recently adopted by Spanish translators, to be grotesque, yet acknowledges the difficulty of validating such labels when AI integration has become pervasive.

Professional Sustainability

• Reflecting on the precarious nature of artistic work, she advocates for systemic reforms, such as proportional self-employment taxes, rather than relying solely on erratic grants or awards to sustain creators.