#393: The Westminster Horror Show & AI’s Effect on Humor Writing, Trapped in New Jersey, Mort the Fort & More!

+ Picture This! returns this Sunday & Morris squints at me while I write...

I hope you’re having a tremendous

I’m a little early this week. I’m buried in a crazy book deadline, so I have to disappear into my studio. I’ll see you on the other side!
But, in the meantime…

The multi-talented Sofia Warren went to Colorado to draw/write a profile on one of my favourite people in the world: New Yorker cartoonist Mort Gerberg. You can read her interview in the New Yorker here. If you want to learn more about Mort and cartooning, can watch my interview with Mort from 2021 below:

The Westminster Horror Show + AI’s Effect on Humor Writing

Another artist told me they’re using GPT-4o as a tool for finding illustration reference instead of Google images. I needed to draw a cartoon of the Westminster Dog Show, so I just typed in “Image of dog at Westminster Dog Show.”

That’s it.

I swear to God, this is what came back…

After this result, my P(Doom) went through the roof…
There’s no doubt the art will get better over time. It already has. However…

Source: One Useful Thing. I recommend you subscribe!

…the question is whether that trajectory will continue ad infinitum. Chris Best had a good chat with Noah Smith this past week about “AI Slop” that has been permeating Facebook. If you want to learn about everything from bird testicles and prefab housing to AI “Dogfooding” you can watch/listen to their chat below:

Noah Smith vs. Insane Facebook AI Slop

Bob Mankoff recently gave a TED talk on AI and its use in writing humor. When I talked to him about it a few years back he wasn’t overly concerned, but we did agree that it would only ever improve over time. The models don’t tend to get worse unless they’re actively sabotaged (that’s a discussion for another post.)

There is plenty of literature on people now using AI to try and game the New Yorker’s famously difficult Caption Contest, among other bone-headed attempts at sucking the fun out of things:

When I interviewed Emma Allen, the New Yorker’s current Cartoon Editor on stage back in September 2023, I asked if there was an increase in cartoons and captions being submitted to her that were artificially generated. She confirmed it had already been happening for a while, and there were purpose-built tools that could be found all over the internet for this very specific use case. She said, “AI is terrifying, and it is a problem, but it is a problem that we’ve already been facing.” (Watch from about 1:00:00 for more discussion on the topic).

The question of whether AI will replace cartoonists completely is another matter.

There are certainly a lot of bread-and-butter jobs that keep the lights on for freelance cartoonists and illustrators that have precipitously vanished in the past 18 months. Though they aren’t the main gig, they make the pursuit of the ‘main gig’ possible. One particularly disconcerting comment from one of the most powerful people at OpenAI, CTO Mira Murati, was:

“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place..."

What she is missing, due to a total lack of experience in the field, is the point I made above: that those smaller jobs are the ones that allow for adjacent skills to be learned, perfected, and crafted to a professional level. You take on those jobs (reluctant as you may be) to enable you to pursue the bigger picture career. If those smaller jobs disappear, so too do the ones above them, and the careers that could have been.

This 1974 cartoon appeared in Bob Mankoff’s Ted Talk but I can’t make out the signature. Going off the style and the visible “W” I’d say it looks like it’s by Warren Miller.

This weekend I’ll be hosting and drawing at my favourite show in the world: Picture This! The show combines my only two employable skills: stand-up comedy and drawing quickly.

I started out drawing and performing on Picture This! back in 2013 during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival when it was still a new show finding its feet. I would race off stage from my own hour-long stand-up show across town to jump in the saddle and draw for a slew of guest comedians who would pass through on their way to the bar - it sort of became the unofficial comic hang of the festival; seeing which big names would show up for a spot.

Photos bt the wondrous @MikeBrykNYC

Fast forward 10 years, and Picture This! holds 2 shows every month; one in LA, and one in New York— usually at Union Hall in Brooklyn. The generous folks at Wacom supplied us with new Wacom Mobilestudio Pro tablets to draw on, animating the comics’ sets on stage while they interact with the drawing. If you get the chance I highly recommend coming down for the next show.

This week’s Sketchbook is peeled from the sketchbook page I sweatily drew on the New Jersey Transit carriage in which I was slowly decomposing a few weeks ago. You can read the full account in the link below.

While I do love the convenience of an iPad/Wacom/Xenselabs tablet… I can’t ever replicate the joy of using analog tools. I’m launching a new Substack called “Process Junkie” to explore all of the joys of the Process of making art. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you can sign up here.

I’m sad to say I’ve had to bow out of several matches this season due to the abovementioned oppressive (borderline impossible) book deadline. I’ve been chained to the drawing board for weeks at a time and haven’t had a moment to swing a bat. I’ll report more on the matches this summer once I turn in the finished book!

He is sitting at the door, squinting at me while I type this sentence…