Where Humanity Meets AI: Illustration Joins the Wider Conversation
Mr. Magpie. Artwork by Marc Burckhardt / Reuters Momentum AI Austin 2026
Reuters Momentum AI Austin 2026 is taking place at the JW Marriott in downtown Austin on 24–25 September, bringing together more than 500 senior leaders and over 60 speakers from technology, healthcare, finance, government and academia.
It is a major enterprise AI gathering concerned with big AI questions: how artificial intelligence is being introduced into organisations, how it should be governed, who takes responsibility when things go wrong and what happens to work as increasingly capable systems become part of everyday life.
Which is why one particular conversation caught my attention.
On Wednesday evening, ahead of the main conference, illustrator and painter Marc Burckhardt took part in a Reuters leadership discussion called Where Humanity Meets AI.
Marc joined Kristine Lee, Chief Transformation Officer at The Permanente Medical Group
Mike Pell, working across emerging technology and design
Kenneth R. Fleischmann, Interim Dean at UT Austin's School of Information.
Christina Lessa, founder of Blueprints for Arts and Policy and CEO of ARTVUE Worldwide, moderated.
Healthcare, technology, information, academia, art and illustration were being brought into the same discussion.
That feels important. Not because illustration needs to prove it belongs there, but because many of the questions illustrators have already been dealing with such as authorship, originality, ownership, interpretation and human judgement are rapidly becoming questions for everybody.
AI has moved beyond the novelty stage
For the past few years, much of the public conversation around AI has concentrated on what it can and potentially can do. We all know AI can now write an essay, generate an image, imitate a voice (Gene Wilder & Willy Wonka !?), summarise a report, make a video of somebody who has never existed.
That phase happened extraordinarily quickly and become intuitively integrtaed into our everyday lives.
But now the conversation seems to be getting serious.
Which is why Reuters has organised Momentum AI around four themes;
Build - Govern - Lead - Grow
Covering big topics like infrastructure, security, regulation, leadership and the commercial adoption of artificial intelligence. The full Momentum AI programme gives a sense of just how quickly the discussion has moved from experimentation to implementation.
The question has moved from can we build this? to what should we actually allow it to do?
Or in my language … just because you can, doesnt mean you should.
That’s a huge shift for a big conference.
AI is being seamlessly integrated into healthcare systems, banks, workplaces, search engines and creative software. Soon most of us will probably be using more AI every day without actually knowing or even thinking about it. At that point the question is no longer about novelty but arguably about responsibility.
For anyone wanting to go deeper into what the rather dry-sounding phrase AI governance actually means, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework is a starting point.
Illustration & Where Humanity Meets AI
And more closely to home, Illustration has already been dealing with a lot of these questions.
There is of course, a much larger discussion happening about what generative AI means specifically for illustrators. A machine can now produce hundreds of convincing images in the time it takes an illustrator to develop a handful of ideas. Copyright, training data, imitation, employment and authorship are all significant issues.
The legal side alone is substantial enough for another article. The US Copyright Office's Artificial Intelligence study now covers everything from the copyrightability of AI-generated outputs to the use of copyrighted work in generative-AI training. Some boring but important points.
But that isn't really an argument for here…
What interests me is that illustration has experience of questions the wider world is only beginning to encounter.
If a machine can reproduce the output of someone's work, where does the value really sit?
Is it simply in the final object or outcome?
Or is some of that value in the judgement, experience and point of view that produced it?
An illustrator does more than manufacture a picture. They read something, interpret it, decide what matters and work out what is worth saying visually. AI can now draw extraordinarily well or badly. The more difficult question is what is worth drawing or doing?
That distinction reaches far beyond illustration.
Marc Burckhardt and the handmade image
Marc Burckhardt is a Hamilton King Award-winning illustrator and painter whose clients have included Gucci, Porsche, TIME, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, the US Postal Service and Random House.
He is a past President of the Illustration Conference, ICON, and chaired the Society of Illustrators' 47th Annual Exhibition. Marc won the Hamilton King Award, one of the profession's most prestigious honours and an award that can only be received once.
Marc also still physically paints.
The work accompanying his announcement of the Reuters discussion, Mr. Magpie, measures just 7.8 × 7.8 inches and is painted in acrylic and oil on wood panel. There is something particularly relevant about that here.
At a moment when machines can produce an almost limitless quantity of imagery, Marc is making a small physical object through an intentionally slow process. That doesn't automatically make one form of image better than another but it does expose an important distinction.
One process can be scaled almost infinitely.
The other remains attached to a person.
Explore Marc Burckhardt's illustration and painting at Dutch Uncle.
Human vs machine is probably the wrong argument!
The least productive version of this debate is humans vs machines.Technology has always altered creative work. Photography changed painting. Photoshop changed photography. Digital drawing transformed illustration. AI will change things again.
A more useful distinction is between augmentation and substitution. Augmentation gives the illustrator better tools. Substitution removes the illustrator from the process. This is bigger than just illustration.
In normal language: does technology help somebody do the valuable part of their job better, or does it remove that person from the job altogether? If AI can search through an illustrator's archive, transcribe a meeting, resize fifty files and eliminate hours of tedious administration, that could be enormously useful.
Give those hours back to the illustrator to think.
If we automate the thinking and leave the illustrator doing the administration, we've got things slightly backwards.
Healthcare makes the same point
This is where the mix of disciplines on the Reuters panel becomes particularly interesting.
AI is already being used in healthcare to reduce some of the administrative burden around medical consultations. Kristine Lee has written about ambient AI scribes, which can help with clinical documentation and give physicians more time to focus on their patients. Read Kristine Lee on how AI can give physicians more time for patients
The technological achievement is obvious: the computer can write the notes.The more significant result may be that the doctor can look at the patient. Now that is a useful measure of good technology.
Does AI remove the parts of work that interfere with the important human part or does it simply allow fewer humans to produce more?
There’s quite a difference.
Governance sounds dry until it affects you
Governance is another major theme running through Momentum AI. The word sounds technical, but the principle is straightforward.
It is about deciding the boundaries.
What information can an AI access? What decisions can it make? Who checks those decisions? What was it trained on? Who takes responsibility when something goes wrong? Can a human intervene?
If an algorithm recommends a terrible film, you might not get those few hours back but it wont disrupt your life.
If it influences your healthcare, insurance, employment or your finances, it suddenly becomes extremely important.
Illustration has already encountered its own version of these questions.
Who gave permission for an artist's work to be used as training material? Where does inspiration end and imitation begin? What happens when somebody asks a system to create an image in the style of a living illustrator?
Who owns the result and who gets paid?
These sound like creative-industry questions, but underneath them sit the same issues being discussed across the wider conference: ownership, responsibility, transparency and value.
Illustration brings something useful to the wider AI debate
This is why I think illustration being represented at Where Humanity Meets AI matters.
Creative people have spent the past few years experiencing some of AI's biggest philosophical questions in unusually direct form.
What is original?
What constitutes authorship?
Does provenance matter?
How much value sits in the result and how much sits in the process?
What happens when technology can reproduce the visible outcome of years of human experience?
For illustrators, these questions arrived very quickly because images made the capabilities of generative AI immediately visible.
Other professions are now encountering versions of exactly the same thing. In medicine it is about clinical judgement; in law, responsibility and advice; in journalism, authorship and verification; in education, what it actually means to learn; and in software, what happens when the machine can increasingly produce the code itself.
And that gives illustration something worthwhile to contribute to the broader conversation.
Is AI forcing us to define the human part??
There is something fascinating underneath all of this. The better machines become at things we once considered particularly human, the more clearly we have to actually define what the human contribution was and its value.
One response is already visible in fashion: a renewed emphasis on craft, process and the hand of the maker.
Hermès has made its artisans and traditional techniques increasingly visible through projects such as Hermès in the Making, while Chanel's Métiers d’art celebrates the embroiderers, feather workers, milliners and other specialists behind its collections.
The making has become part of the value and part of the content.
Sketches, workshops, hands, materials and works in progress make the human contribution visible and add value - being human judgement, human skill and human experience behind the finished work.
That is not a rejection of technology but it may simply be a way of making the human part clearer.
Which is why the title Where Humanity Meets AI feels particularly appropriate.
A wider conversation that is only beginning
The Where Humanity Meets AI discussion has now finished, but Reuters Momentum AI continues across 24 and 25 September, with major conversations around infrastructure, governance, security, healthcare, business and the future workforce.
Those discussions are taking place in Austin right now, but their consequences will travel much further.
The decisions being debated at conferences like this will shape the AI that gradually appears inside our hospitals, banks, offices, media and creative industries. The fact that AI conferences event exist is like a surreal sci-fi movie we’re extra’s in.
That is why seeing illustration included alongside medicine, technology and academia feels significant buty not because it has unexpectedly been allowed into a more serious conversation. Quite the opposite.
The serious conversation about artificial intelligence has become broad enough to recognise that creativity, authorship and human judgement are part of it.
And illustration has plenty to say on this.
