Joe's AI-Generated Funnies 2: The New Batch

Is it already time for a sequel? Of course it is.

My blog generates very little traffic these days, so when an article even does moderately well in terms of views, I pay attention. Recently, I posted an article called "Joe's AI-Generated Funnies!" It was a compilation of cartoons and comics I had created with artificial intelligence. In other words, fake art for real jokes. I haven't gotten any feedback, positive or negative, about that article, but it got slightly more clicks than most of my content. So I figured it was time for a sequel. Luckily, I have plenty of this stuff lying around.

Joe's AI-Generated Funnies!

This header image was AI-generated. Am I supposed to feel bad about that?

"You scribble."

This book changed my life.

My older sister said those words to me when I was about four years old, and they had such an impact on my still-developing brain that I didn't draw or color anything for quite a while after that. Eventually, my concerned parents bought me a copy of I Can Draw It Myself (1970) by Dr. Seuss, which got me to pick up a crayon again. Very little has changed in the ensuing decades since the incident with my sister; I'm still hyper-sensitive to criticism and am liable to quit a project after receiving any negative feedback.

Dr. Seuss got me back into making art, and I was further inspired by Lee J. Ames' Draw 50 Famous Cartoons (1979), which I discovered at the Flint Public Library. Because of those books—plus the influence of Mad, Cracked, and various DC and Marvel comics—I became a compulsive doodler for decades, drawing on any piece of paper I got my hands on. Did I get any good at it? No, but I was having fun. As I've mentioned on this blog in the past, I started creating my own comics and sharing them with classmates in elementary school, and I continued doing so through junior and senior high. I trailed off a little in college, until I saw Crumb (1994), which made me want to draw again.

I used to spend hours and hours drawing. To this day, I have two thick binders of the sketches I've created over the years. They're still on a shelf in my closet now, taking up valuable real estate. But whenever I've shared my hand-drawn art with others, it tends to get one of two reactions: either total indifference or mild dislike. I think the low point of my experience as an artist was submitting a cartoon to a website and being told, straight up, that the art was not of professional quality. I call this a "low point" because the same website had recently published a cartoon that was simply a drawing of a triangle with a funny caption. That's what had emboldened me to submit one of my own drawings in the first place.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 135: Let's create some Ed Wood fan art with AI

An image that unites Wood, Spielberg, and Kubrick.

If you've been conscious for the last year or so, you've probably seen a lot of art (or "art," depending on your point of view) that has been created (or "created") by artificial intelligence or AI. Look, I'm not here to debate the ethics of AI or even define what is and isn't art. I'm here to take this awe-inspiring and terrifying newish technology and apply it to Edward D. Wood, Jr. 

I've done this kind of thing before. Back in 2019, I ran some screenshots from Jail Bait through a colorization app. In 2020, I used a site called Preference Revealer to rank my favorite and least favorite Ed Wood movies. Now it's 2022 and AI art is the hot thing, so let's do some of that... with Ed Wood.

I chose a service called Midjourney to do this project. Why? Because I'd seen it in this video by a YouTuber called Mighty Jabba and thought the results looked cool. Very quickly, though, I realized I was in over my head. I don't know a damn thing about how to generate AI art. My first prompt was: "Ed Wood as drawn by Al Hirschfeld." (I assume you know who Al was.) Here are the results:

Prompt #1: "Ed Wood as drawn by Al Hirschfeld"

I'd say that falls somewhere between success and failure. It's not Hirschfeld, but it's not not Hirschfeld either. My second attempt at a prompt was: "Ed Wood made out of Legos." Here's how that turned out:

Prompt #2: "Ed Wood made of Legos."

I don't know what's happening with the top left image, but the other three are at least in the ballpark. I then went on to Wood's repertory players. Folks, I tried and tried to get Midjourney to generate some Tor Johnson fan art, but that stupid computer had no idea who Tor was. None of the artwork even came close. So I ditched Tor in favor of Vampira. More specifically, I tried "Vampira on the beach at night." Even Midjourney knew who Vampira was, and it dutifully belched up these lovely images:

Prompt #3: "Vampira on the beach at night."

What else? What else? Oh yeah. I tried "Elderly Bela Lugosi in the style of the French impressionists." 

Prompt #4: "Elderly Bela Lugosi in the style of the French impressionists."

And I brought it all home with one last, simple prompt: "Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi holding hands."

Prompt #5: "Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi holding hands."

At that point, I realized I had enough for a single blog post and ended my experiment. How did I do? Good? Bad? Indifferent? You probably think you could do better, and I agree. In fact, I urge you to go do just that. There are plenty of AI art sites out there. Make your own stuff. Or, more accurately, get a computer to make stuff for you. You don't have to use Midjourney. Are we at the beginning of a new era in creativity or is this just some dumb internet fad that'll fade in a year? Time will tell.

The rise and fall of Tay, Microsoft's artificially-created teenager

The hideous logo for Microsoft's Tay.ai.

One would think they had this whole “world wide web” thing down by now, but software giant Microsoft learned a swift, cruel lesson in how the internet really works this week when it unleashed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chat robot called Tay, supposedly a slang-slinging simulacrum of a typical teenage girl, and left her to the tender mercies of Twitter. It didn’t take long for the tweeters of the world to turn innocent Tay into a hate-mongering nymphomaniac, forcing Microsoft to put its beloved artifical daughter to sleep after only one day. Writer Helena Horton has the whole, sad saga in The Telegraph. As Horton explains, Tay was created by a mostly-male development team at Microsoft. The idea was to create a self-aware, pop-culture-savvy young woman, with whom users could communicate via Twitter, Kik, or GroupMe. Tay was supposed to talk about Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, but that’s not how things turned out.

The trouble is, Tay tends to parrot back what people say to her, no matter how inappropriate or offensive that may be. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. The results quickly became disastrous:

“Tay” went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in <24 hrs and I’m not at all concerned about the future of AI pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A

— Gerry (@geraldmellor) March 24, 2016

In considering this embarrassing, hopelessly naive failure on Microsoft’s behalf, Horton chalks it up to sexism within the tech industry. “It seems like yet another example of female-voiced AI servitude,” she writes, “except this time she’s turned into a sex slave thanks to the people using her on Twitter.” While the pranksters and predators of Twitter are party to blame for Tay’s downfall, Horton points out that Microsoft does not have a great track record on gender equality either, having recently hired women in “schoolgirl outfits” to appear at an official function. With that ugly incident not far in their rear view mirror, Microsoft might have wanted to put a little more care into the creation of Tay. Live and learn, AI developers.

Meanwhile, score another victory for the human race. AI 'bots may have conquered Jeopardy!, but they couldn't conquer Twitter.