Hey, before we get going…
My dear friend Ann Telnaes is on a panel this Thursday at the Society of Illustrators, talking about satire and why it matters while American democracy is (how do I put this delicately?) ..uh, on fire?
She’s joined by Steve Brodner and Adam Zyglis (My doppelganger, I’m told by the French.) Historian Nan Wolverton will cover satire’s long history in American politics, and Pedro X. Molina will explain how his native Nicaragua slid from democracy into autocracy. Ann has heard Pedro’s story before and warns you’ll be horrified by how familiar it sounds.
Moderating is Roslyn Mazer, who wrote the cartoonists’ amicus brief in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, the Supreme Court case that protects satire in America. (She’s the reason I’m legally allowed to draw politicians the way I do. For now. Thank you, Roslyn.)
Thursday 8th October, 6 to 9 pm, Society of Illustrators, 128 East 63rd Street. It’s free, but you need to RSVP at societyillustrators.org/event/republic-of-satire
Can’t make it? Ann and I have had some wonderful chats on Draw Me Anything, and you can go back and watch them here:
Now, on with the show…
On September 4, Brendan Loper published a post on his Substack called What’s In A Name Anyway? ChatGPT and Me.
It’s his story, and he tells it better than I can, but basically he was at a wedding when his brother texted him a cartoon. Dolly Parton and Tim Curry had just died (the wrong people keep dying). Someone on Facebook had asked ChatGPT for a New Yorker-style cartoon tribute, with Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter walking Dolly up to the pearly gates. (Real original shit.) It went viral. In the bottom corner, perfectly legible, was BLOPER, Brendan’s signature.
His brother knew Brendan hadn’t drawn it. The text still ended with the best line of the whole mess: “everyone makes a stinker now and then.” It was the second time it had happened. Earlier in the year, a random stranger had sent Brendan a ChatGPT therapy cartoon with his name on it. He wrote that it made him afraid to post new drawings online.
I shared his post that day. I’d already watched AI do shithouse impressions of Harry Bliss, Jason Adam Katzenstein, and Will McPhail, but adding a real artist’s signature was a new low. I wrote that now when people google our names, viral slop now comes up, not the body of actual artwork we’ve painstakingly produced over decades. I was furious for Brendan. I also assumed it was mostly happening to Brendan. Then I checked in with some other New Yorker cartoonist friends… it was, in fact, not just Brendan.
Then, yesterday Nieman Lab showed it’s waaaay worse than we thought.
Andrew Deck’s well-researched story documents more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures Open AI has put on cartoons they never drew. Emily Flake, Joe Dator, Pat Byrnes, Harry Bliss, - even deceased legends like George Booth and Saul Steinberg. Warren Miller, who was publishing in the 1960s also showed up with a ghost signature on a blob of slop.
I’ve been writing recently about the already diabolical disappearance of professional cartoonist positions around the world, and how recently in Australia and the US, they’ve been replaced with AI slop cartoons.
The Vanishing Cartoonists
Cathy Wilcox, Ann Telnaes, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, Fiona Katauskas, Col Wicking... The era of the staff cartoonist is over. Nobody bothered to tell the cartoonists.
Pat Byrnes has signed his work with a full stop after his name since he was a teenager. Deck found more than a dozen ChatGPT fakes with Pat’s name on them. (Every one of them has the fucking full stop.)
That’s the detail I can’t shake. The model learned how one human signs his name, right down to the punctuation, and it vomited it out like it wasn’t shitting all over his entire legacy.
