AI ’Toons

I want to share this H.T. Webster cartoon from 100 years ago before maximum relevance is lost.



Webster’s “Idea Dynamo” automating the creation of new cartoons, drawn for
The New York World in 1923, looks amusingly — if not eerily — prescient given conversations we’re having in 2023 vis-à-vis artificial intelligence. The use of AI to generate concepts from whole cloth doesn’t appear to be as immediate a concern as the realization of concepts input by human minders, granted, but if the mechanical brain has been trained on the corpus of a particular cartoonist, let alone massive swaths of an entire society’s creative output, it’s easy to imagine the contraption going to town once prompted to fashion, say, further exploits in the fictional life of Webster’s Caspar Milquetoast.

I came across the gag as reproduced from Webster’s original art when finally reading the Comics about Cartoonists anthology edited by Craig Yoe, about which I’ll hopefully write more later.