Cartoon VS Meme Pt. 2

This week I had a bit of a Monkey’s Paw moment. Or maybe it’s more of a Fantasy Island situation? What I mean is, I made a wish, it came true with unforeseen consequences and now I regret that I made it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how cartoons and memes are different beasts. As my much-smarter-than-me friend Amy Kurzweil put it, “Memes have a life of their own, they kill the author, which is why they're such a post-modern art form. But a cartoon has an author, that's why they're signed!” I went on to say how some cartoons become memes, like with Asher Perlman’s “He’s going for the Jukebox!” Finally, at the end I wrote that I would “be ok if one of [my cartoons] fell to the forces of memedom. I would want to see what happens.”

Big mistake. When I wrote that, I had imagined a situation like Asher’s. The words are changed, an element of the picture is changed, but the original work is there, underneath, an echo of its origin, as if one of my fingers were still trying to hold on to it. What I didn’t foresee was that new force of memedom has risen, zombie-like, to wreak havoc on the forces of art and ownership. Of course I’m talking about AI!

I don’t like to publicly talk about AI because I don’t like being yelled at. Also, I don’t know/understand enough to really discuss it. On top of that, I’m terrible at arguing. Alone, in the shower, I’m great, I anticipate all counter arguments because I just made them up in my head, but in the real world I just freeze up and my brain goes blank, even if I am knowledgeable on the subject. It’s frustrating! This is all to say that all I’m going to do is write about how I feel about this stuff, my messy, inconsistent thoughts on full display. I would love to hear your thoughts as well, but please do not be rude about it. It’s really not necessary. I am a mere cartoonist.

In a way, this story started a few weeks ago when OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT that lets you upload pictures to use as prompts. You probably saw that trend, where folks were uploading photos of themselves and asking the AI to redraw the photo as if it were drawn by Studio Ghibli. I wasn’t a fan of this, and did not participate. I ignored it and kept posting my cartoons to social media as usual.

Then a follower from Instagram sent me this:

This is not Studio Ghibli style, but it is interesting. It came from a Facebook fan page for Leica cameras. It is not affiliated with the company at all, do not get mad at them. Someone saw it, and shared it as a story on IG. From there, my follower saw it and sent my way. He did so because this is a rip-off of one my more popular cartoons, drawn long ago:

What has happened here, and I’ll present my evidence in a sec, is that someone took my cartoon, and, like the Studio Ghibli photo trend, uploaded it in ChatGPT, asked it add colors and make it about cameras. He added a little comic strip title, “Leica Life,” and took away my signature.

I posted this to Threads, making a itsy-bitsy stink about it, and it blew up from there. I tapped into an ongoing internet argument, artists vs AI, so naturally it brought out lots of fighting, insults, support, trolling, and an accusation that by posting about it, I’m getting people killed. The usual stuff. By far, people understood that this was shitty, and were real nice about it, but of course there were some that felt that I was the true villain, just another whiny cartoonist trying to stop the wonderous, amazing technological advancements graced upon us by the Gods of Silicon Valley.

There were a few people in the comments who didn’t believe that this was directly stolen from my art. Their arguments were along the lines of, it’s just a picture of a kid and guy on the street, and the phrase “Do you have a moment to talk about…” is common. If it pleases the court, I will now present my counterargument, and by doing so, bravely break my rule to never explain my cartoons.

Many cartoons have what is called an “incongruent element,” an aspect that takes a situation that the reader immediately understands and adds something new, or changes part of it. A twist on the normalcy, big or small. From there, the caption resolves this incongruency, surprising the reader and hopefully making them laugh. In my cartoon, the incongruent element is the kid.

The situation I’m riffing from is a trope, the “do you have a moment to talk about…” set-up, playing off real life situations when a street canvasser tries to get your attention. I’ve done lots of these kinds of cartoons, as have many cartoonists. Usually in that situation, both in cartoons and in real-life, the canvasser in question is an adult. In this cartoon, however, it is a child, creating a distinctiveness, a novelty that demands resolving. The line, “Do you have a moment to talk about my favorite dinosaur?” answers the question, ‘why is this street canvasser a child?”

In the camera version, there is no reason for this canvasser to be a child. Cameras, particularly expensive fancy brands like Leica, are not child’s fare. I’m not saying that there aren’t kids out there who enjoy taking photos, but it is not shorthand for a child’s interest like dinosaurs are. In fact, this AI version would make far more sense if it were an adult. The incongruent element would then be that this canvasser is a camera fan who just wants an ear so he can talk about the wonders of Leica Life.

When you take that, and add the fact that the child looks and is dressed like the one in my cartoon, same with the adult, and that it shares the same angle, to me this is undeniably an AI rip-off. I have further evidence from the Threads post: a helpful commentor showed me how it could be done by doing it himself. Here is a version that he created instantly by putting my cartoon through the ol’ AI box:

Then someone else jumped in with another version, although I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be helpful or troll me:

Like I said, these were made instantly, as was the camera version. They cartoonifyed my cartoon!

Say what you will about the quality of these images. In some respects they are better drawn than mine, as they are taking from millions of artists, most of whom are better artists than I. But there is an unmistakable zombie-like quality to these, a deadness in the drawing that lies within all AI art. It’s immediately recognizable, and that’s how I knew the camera cartoon was AI the moment I saw it.

What does this have to do with memes? I ask nobody, as a lazy transitional device. Some of the comments on the threads made me realize my monkey’s paw moment. One was “This is literally how memes work,” and another “Congratulations on your meme!” Those comments helped me understand that AI is the future of memes. No more zine-style cut outs, that quasi-punk aesthetic, the poorly-drawn-but-more-hilarious-for-it doodles. Just the cold, dead-eyed edits of a machine tracing over someone else’s work, or creating something else from all the art it has sucked up. All sense of energy, playfulness, irony, and humanity will be eaten up and regurgitated as a soulless creature, a horror of science pointing at your shotgun, asking you to put it out of its misery.

This sucks, but this outcome is inevitable. As Amy said, memes “kill the author,” and when you kill the author, it only makes sense that AI would resurrect them in its own image. This is why so many AI defenders claim that art belongs to no one, because for them, raised on memes, it never has. AI is the great flattener, giving the ability to create an image to all, for the small price of individuality, voice and perspective. Content over art.

For the AI art defenders, I just want to say: I get it. AI is crazy. It’s pretty incredible to see it work. I was awed when Dall-E first came out, in that innocent summer of 2022. Me and my buddy Jason Katzenstein even made a cartoon for The New Yorker about it:

I have even seen a few people use AI in ways that create a vision, and that clearly use editing and other techniques that surpass the usual slop. I still scroll through IG to find myself mesmerized, even haunted, by some of the AI stuff I see. There may be a future for it in the world of art, concerns of ownership notwithstanding.

But awe-inspiring doesn’t give something a license to operate as it pleases. To shut out the many legitimate concerns is foolish and counter-productive. I hope we can agree that at the very least, AI should not be used as a copy machine to otherwise subdue a human’s act of creativity. Really what I’m trying to say is: please don’t yell at me, I’m just some guy. There’s no need.

Finally, consider this: we think so much about the output of art, the creation itself. But the artist lives for the input. For me there are few better feelings than the physical act of drawing. Typing in a prompt and waiting for outcome is fun, I’m sure, but in no way compares to getting lost in a drawing, losing all sense of time. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it. You don’t have to be good at it, you don’t have to show anyone. Each picture is a personal adventure, one that cannot be traversed by anyone but you. It seems wild to me that anyone would want to spit on that.

Anyway, that’s it! But just cause it’s relevant, I’m going to end on this comic I drew for The Washington Post, back in that aforementioned innocent age when AI couldn’t get hands right:

What Else…

I was on the Cartoon Caption Contest Podcast! If you like to listen to me ramble about cartoons, never letting the hosts get a word in, please listen! It was a ton of fun.

That’s it! I hope you enjoyed. If you did enjoy, and haven’t yet subscribed, please do! Have a great weekend!