By now, if you’re reading my cartoons, you know that I use AI to generate them. Feel free to vent your feelings about AI in the comments. You’re not bothering me. Instead, I’ve decided to start sharing my creative process, along with the prompts that create the images.
This cartoon was really unusual. It took a couple tried to get the AI model to produce anything at all. But when it did, it produced something that came really close to my vision, the first try! That almost never happens. Yeah, the fit guy was a bit too wide, maybe more butt crack than I expected. The shoulder hair was all AI (and brilliant, I might add). The bald guy was a bit too bald. But seriously, this was rather close to my vision. First try.
The prompt (I’ve added some formatting):
Draw a cartoon in black and white:
- In the foreground, we see three men, viewed from the back.
- One mostly bald man wearing sagging overalls, pointing up and towards the center of the frame.
- Two, a fat man in a "wifebeater" t-shirt with his butt crack showing above his jeans.
- Three, a skinny guy in jeans, a t-shirt, and a backwards baseball cap.
- All the men are looking upwards towards the center of the frame
The genesis for this cartoon was a story in the Guardian about how a whole butt ton of climate scientists now think we’re going towards catastrophe: 3C. And it occurred to me what we’re going to do about it. Nothing. And why?
I tutor math in the evenings for pocket money. The number of kids who understand fractions, decimals, and percentages, and how to convert between them is ZERO. Now maybe my POV is skewed, because have a biased sample, but I’ve got smart kids, kids who are good at English and bad at math, affluent kids, low income kids, and a few adults. Almost NO ONE is numerate (math literate). As bad as illiteracy is, innumeracy is twice as common (literally: 50% vs 25%) and is almost completely unaddressed.
This isn’t a matter of stupidity, Carlin not withstanding. THIS is why we can’t have nice things. Like polar bears and glaciers.