AI Can Be Funny. But It Needs Your Help.
Observations after more than a year of making joke cartoons with AI.
In the month of June 2023, a unique confluence of two seemingly unrelated events would make Daniel—who, for reasons not entirely clear and highly inconvenient for this already needlessly long-winded sentence, was referring to himself in the third person—consider starting a new project.
Two things happened in June 2023:
AI chatbots like Bing started receiving image recognition capabilities.
I discovered that Midjourney could render images reminiscent of the iconic daily cartoon in The New Yorker.
This made me wonder whether AI chatbots with vision capabilities could successfully write joke captions for AI-generated images.
The only way to find out, I decided, was to start yet another Substack publication.
“Surely,” I said, “The public sentiment toward AI-generated content will forever remain rosy and positive and never turn against generative AI.”
On that naive note, was born.
My reasons for starting it were two-fold.
First, I was curious to see how a purely AI-driven Substack would fare.
Secon…