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 178: The Perverts (1968) [PART 1 OF 2]

The Perverts is sort of the Swiss army knife of Ed Wood books.

Artificial intelligence has been on my mind a lot recently. I think that's true of many of us, since we're bombarded with AI-generated songs, images, videos, and articles on a daily basis. It's getting difficult to know what's real and what isn't. And then comes the flood of ethical questions. Is AI an incredible boon to humanity or the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it? We don't know yet. I guess we'll have to see how this plays out. If, in 20 years, Earth is a smoldering husk ruled by artificially intelligent automatons, I owe you a Coke.

Eros warned us; we didn't listen.

Science-fiction writers have been warning us for decades about the perils of teaching computers to think, but we didn't listen. We did it anyway. That's human nature for you. We never consider the ramifications of our actions. Remember Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)? The alien Eros (Dudley Manlove) tells pilot Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) that we humans have been building newer and more powerful weapons before we even fully considered the consequences of doing so. We're jeopardizing the entire universe through our stupidity and violence. Jeff responds by punching Eros in the face. Oh well. It was a nice universe while it lasted.

So far, I've found that artificial intelligence is quite good at mimicking and rearranging what already exists, even if the results are still slightly stilted and predictable. If you want a particular pop song, for instance, sung in the voice of a cartoon character, AI has you covered. Where it falls down is in true innovation and spontaneity. Ask AI to make a profound insight into the human condition or make us laugh in a way we hadn't even considered before, and it won't be able to do it. For now, only people can do those things.

But what if we fed the collected works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. into some chatbot and asked it to churn out a "new" Ed Wood book? It should be eminently possible. Although he switched between styles as an author from one project to the next, Eddie still had a definite cadence to his writing. There were certain beloved words and phrases he used time and again. He also had topics and themes that he returned to repeatedly. And much of his writing is already kind of stilted, as if it were being written by some nonhuman entity who had observed people without truly understanding them. Surely, then, a computer could absorb all of Ed's short stories, novels, articles, and nonfiction books and churn out dozens more for us to read in the 21st century.

The first book to emerge from such an experiment might very well turn out like The Perverts, which Eddie wrote for Viceroy under the name "Jason Nichols" in 1968. (That same year, he wrote Sex Museum and One, Two, Three for Viceroy under the same bland pseudonym, plus Hell Chicks for Private Edition as "N.V. Jason.") Put simply, The Perverts is a distillation of just about every Wood book and article I've read and reviewed so far on this blog. It serves as a Whitman's Sampler of Eddie's obsessions. If you don't have room in your life (or your bookshelf) for Ed Wood's dozens of nonfiction books and articles—most of which are about sex and crime—this one will give you a solid idea of what they're like.

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.