After I finished this cartoon, someone on Reddit asked me if one of my previous cartoons was drawn by A.I.. So just in case, I’ll clarify: This comic is not really drawn by A.I..
The news that inspired this comic:
Kaepernick, who was the subject of the Netflix film Colin in Black & White, is launching Lumi, a company that, according to his Twitter/X account, seeks to enable creators “to create, publish, and monetize your stories all in one platform.” As reported by The Beat, Lumi PR promised to “focus energy on comic book and graphic-novel creators first.” However, this news was undercut by a fact that drew ire from many corners of the comic book industry: Lumi would be using AI to create the stories and comics it promised its users.
Kaepernick has experience in comics – he gave the plot and input on a graphic novel memoir of his life, written by Eve L. Ewing and drawn by Orlando Caicedo. It seems based on that experience, he is looking to cut out writers like Ewing and artists like Calcedo from the process and utilize AI that mines the work of writers like Ewing and artists like Calcedo without their permission to create comics.
Kaepernick has already raised four million dollars for this venture.
Like a lot of comics folks, I thought well of Kaepernick – he famously protested for racial justice by sitting during the national anthem, and in response he was blacklisted out of pro football. So having his name come up in this context is both odd and disappointing.
Illustrator Alice Meichi Li commented on Facebook:
This is so disappointing. For $4 million, Kaepernick could have started his own comics studio and paid 40 artists $100k to work for a year — way more than many artists ever make. He could have employed struggling marginalized creators and empowered them to tell the stories they never had the time or funds to tell.
Instead he’s putting $4 million into the hands of tech bros to steal art from from hardworking creators and put them out of work. Seriously upsetting.
Kaepernick has talked about “democratizing” comics creation – with the implication that barriers like “you have to write” and “you have to draw” are undemocratic. What his venture is implicitly promising people is the ability to create comics without putting any of the work in.
But the comics created will be crap.
Could A.I. generated comics be any good? Sure. If someone spends hundreds of hours editing the plot and script, generating and modifying the art over and over and over and over to be not just shiny looking images but good storytelling, and in this way is able to bend what A.I. generates into an actual story with relevant, consistent artwork and some personal expression, that could be good.
But at that point, why not just write and draw a comic?
CARTOON
This comic has four panels, each showing the same two characters. There’s a woman with long brown hair, a circle shaped earring, a black shirt and a red skirt. And there’s a fat guy with round glasses and dark hair tied in a ponytail, and he’s a caricature of me, Barry, the cartoonist. The two of them are talking in an outdoor park like environment.
PANEL 1
Barry is seated behind a desk that’s on a grassy hillside. He’s speaking directly to the reader with a big grin on his face and his arms spread wide. Nearby, the woman looks skeptical, as she pokes at a panel border.
BARRY: Announcing my new A.I. comics initiative! This comic is entirely drawn by A.I.!
WOMAN: Are you sure? It doesn’t look like A.I.
PANEL 2
Barry, grinning too big and looking like a nervous salesman, sweat flying off, holds out his hands. His hands look very gross, with many extra fingers.
BARRY: Uh… This is A.I.! Honest! Just look at my hideous hands!
BARRY: Are you listening, Colin Kaepernick? It’s yours for only three million dollars! Whatta bargain!
PANEL 3
The woman talks to Barry, holding up a palm in an “explaining my point” gesture. Barry, in response, holds up a hand in a “talk to the hand” gesture and turns away from her, his other hand on his forehead.
WOMAN: Couldn’t human cartoonists do the same work much better?
BARRY: Boring! Old! Not “disruptive!”
PANEL 4
The woman turns away from Barry, glaring down at a thick magazine about A.I. Art. Barry grins and holds his fisted hands to his chin in a “bursting with hope” sort of gesture. From the side, where Barry isn’t looking, a crude robot caricature of Barry has rolled onto panel. It’s holding up a four-panel comic strip.
WOMAN: It sounds like you’re selling out.
BARRY: Heck yeah! I just hope I can cash in before A.I. replaces me.
ROBOT BARRY: Hi there.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken Fat” is an old-fashioned cartoonists’ expression for little unimportant but hopefully fun details we put into cartoons. There’s a lot of chicken fat this time!
PANEL 1
In the foreground, there are a bunch of mushrooms growing from the ground, one of which has the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland on it, smoking from a large glass bong.
A gray-skinned Richard Nixon is popping up from a hole in the ground.
The woman’s earring is a yellow smiley face with red splattered over one eye, the icon of the “Watchmen” comic book.
PANEL 2
Among Barry’s many, many fingers is one that has a smiling face on the end. And one that’s a banana. And one that looks like the monster from “Alien,” with a smaller mouth extending out of the larger mouth.
Although all other panels show a cloudy day, in this panel the sky is clear blue and we can see the sun. The sun has a face and is scowling at Barry.
Barry’s t-shirt, which was black in the previous panel, has turned read. Words on the front of the shirt say “ME. © me 2024.”
PANEL 3
The woman’s skirt, which had a plaid pattern in panel 1, now has a polka dot pattern.
Barry’s t-shirt has changed again and now has an illustration of Bugs Bunny on it.
The woman’s round earring now has Charlie Brown’s face on it.
Barry has a third arm, which is holding an ice cream cone (one scoop of ice cream has fallen onto the sidewalk).
The woman’s hair is merging with a tree in the background.
A newspaper lying on the sidewalk, named “Background Tribune,” has a big headline which says “Litterbug Strikes Panel Three!”
PANEL 4
The woman’s skirt pattern has changed again, and is now a squared-off spiral pattern.
Her earring has changed again, and is now the face of Jack from the movie “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
Barry’s t-shirt has changed again, and is now a drawing of a hammer in a yellow circle, which was the superhero character “Captain Hammer’s” logo in the web musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”
The woman is holding a very thick magazine called “A.I. Art Daily.” The cover has a picture of a happy stick figure with three eyes and way too many fingers. There are two headlines: “Glossy surfaces are all art needs” and “Rainforests will not be missed.”
The comic strip the robot is holding is actually this comic strip.
I really like the drawings in this one!
The hands in panel 2 look really bad, but I think that’s the point? I love the robot Barry in panel 4.
I recently made a post comparing the arguments for the supposed benefits of LLMs with certain segments of the Dungeons and Dragons community. Specifically, the argument for using LLMs is very similar to the so-called “Oberoni Fallacy,” a popular fallacious argument used in discussions of D&D.
https://transfem.social/notes/9vr3bgwm36ri0reu
I think the most ridiculous use of AI has got to be fandom.com’s “Quick Answers.” For those out of the loop, Fandom is a wiki-hosting site: you can use a free account to create a wiki about almost any topic. In 2023, Fandom introduced Quick Answers, an AI-generated “FAQ” that they automatically added to pages of popular wikis. The AI generated considerable misinformation. For example, the fake FAQ on the Legend of Zelda Fandom Wiki confused Link from LoZ with Link from Hairspray. In response, Fandom decided that volunteer wiki admins would get a chance to “vet” the AI-generated answers for accuracy.
I think it’s extra ridiculous because, what’s the motive? A traditional publisher wants to use AI because they think they can save money by not paying writers. But Fandom has never payed their writers: people spend their free time editing wikis for free.
@beb: AI is buzzy right now, they’re trying to ride that buzz. Hardly the first instance of some clueless company trying to associate themselves with a flashy new technology that doesn’t align with their mission (see – crypto, blockchain, NFTs, and the steam engine)
Barry – is the use of Nixon’s head some kind of political commentary? Or do you just find Nixon’s features fun to draw? I always thought that, politics aside, Nixon’s face was an absolute gift for political cartoonists.
Atrotos – It’s meaningless. I was thinking “okay, I’ll draw a groundhog,” then I thought “I don’t feel like drawing a groundhog, what would be fun to draw?” then I thought “I’ve never actually drawn Nixon.” :-p Drawing Nixon turned out to be fun and easy.
I’m not sure why, but I find the hair merging with the tree incredibly disturbing.
@6 –
For me, the hair merging with the tree is the most realistic AI bit in the comic. The other AI stuff is a lot more cartoony, I think? But the hair being the tree trunk seems genuinely AI to my (terrible) eye.
I agree that it’s the most realistic AI bit. And that it’s the creepiest looking thing here. :-)
The third panel really nails the AI style: the extra limbs, the sixth finger on one hand, the hair in the tree. Also Charlie Brown looks like he was decapitated. For whatever reason, I don’t get the same impression from Jack.
This is so much better than anything you could get by prompting an AI to do a parody of AI.
“Q: In the fields of social media and the creative arts, who is Barry Deutsch?
ChatGPT: Barry Deutsch is a cartoonist and graphic novelist, best known for his work in comics that often address social and political issues. He is particularly recognized for his graphic novel series Hereville,…
Q: Where is he from?
ChatGPT: Barry Deutsch is from Portland, Oregon, in the United States…”
Be very careful what you say about AI. ChatGPT knows where you live.
The NFL famously puts up with a lot of shenanigans from players that are actually good. But there’s not much of a market in the NFL for a QB that went 3 – 16 in his last two years in pro ball before he got benched.
Nancy, thank you so much!
Daran, lol! At least someone has heard of me…. :-p
@12: The idea that Kaepernick wasn’t one of the best 30 quarterbacks on the planet (never mind one of the best 60 to 90) is such a ridiculous position to take that I can’t believe I have to respond to it.
As a non-initiate, could you explain it to me? Ron’s comment made me curious enough to look it up. It looks to me like CK had a fantastic W/L ration for the first several years of his career, but not the last two years. Any idea what caused that?
W/L is rarely the result of a single player – even one as important as the quarterback. Phil Simms, winner of a Super Bowl had an awful W/L record early in his career because the rest of his team just sucked. A great QB can make his team decent. A decent QB, like Kaepernick, can’t make a lousy team good. A big part of how lousy the 49ers were the last couple of his career was the head coach. If you look at the 49ers record after he left, they were 6-10 in 2017 and then 4-12 in 2018 before getting good again (13-3 in 2019).
Nevertheless, anyone who followed the NFL at the time knew that Kaepernick was better than a number of starting QB’s in the years he was being blackballed. Even if he wasn’t, he was better than the vast majority of 2nd & 3rd string QB’s. To claim otherwise is, as I said, utterly ridiculous. Any number of commentators noted this in the years he was trying to get a tryout – not even getting a tryout as even one of the top 120 QB’s in the world is all you need to see to know that he was being blackballed. Drew Magary was really great (and just a great writer) about this in the late teens.
Kapernick’s W/L record and his career followed an arc: 5-2, 12-4, 8-8, 2-6, 1-10 and then benched. He was initially successful because he had a particular style of play that presented new problems to NFL defenses. He was benched because NFL defensive coordinators figured out his style of play and over two years demonstrated they had learned how to counter it, plus the effects of the injury he sustained in 2015 (his 2-6 year). I don’t know how much any of you follow football, but if you look into it you’re going to have a very hard time finding a team that keeps their QB who has a record of 8-8, 2-6, and then 1-10 over his last 3 years. Look at this year’s draft. Look at last year’s draft.
Look at any NFL draft over the last decade or so. Teams drafting at the top (the teams with records like 1-10) have a very high preference for drafting new QBs.
Bringing politics into the locker room and onto the field likely didn’t help, but you don’t need it at all to explain why he’s out of the league. Heck, it would be almost unprecedented if he’d stayed in.
@JSO:
That’s true. And it would be the normal next step in such a QB’s career arc. But Kaepernick was demanding #1 QB money and would not settle for what a #2 or #3 would normally get paid. No team can afford to pay 2 QB’s #1 money. If you don’t follow football, understand that the teams have a salary cap; they are only allowed to spend a certain amount of money for their entire player payroll. He priced himself out of the market and then claimed it was because of discrimination instead of economics.
I’m curious – where does this information come from? I’m not familiar with football – is this information (not what a player gets paid, but what they’re asking for) usually made public in football?
Both of these assertions are less than completely factual. Kaepernick initially demanded #1 QB money – as most #1 QB’s do – but dropped that goal within 2 years. The fact that Kaepernick called Seattle in 2022 asking for a tryout and wouldn’t even get one then is more evidence of him being locked out of the league.
There are definitely teams paying #2 QB’s more than the lowest paid #1 QB in the league now and this has been the case over the last 10 years. (Unless your argument is that some teams are paying their #1 QB less than #2 QB money, I guess.) For example, the 49ers highest paid QB is getting $2.25 million while the Broncos 3rd highest paid QB is getting $2.73 million. The Colts 2nd stringer is getting $5 million, the Commanders QB2 is getting $6 million, the Cowboys QB2 is $5.31 getting million. There are 3 other second stringers earning $5 million or more this year. There are 8 teams paying their first stringer $8 million or less.
The idea that Kaepernick wasn’t even worth a tryout for a single NFL team for all those years is so ridiculous that I still can’t believe I have to respond to this. The vast majority of reputable NFL journalists come down on my side of this very obvious issue if you want more support for the very obvious blackballing of Kaepernick as factually correct.
If you want to see how much each QB under contract is being paid, here’s a list:
https://overthecap.com/position/quarterback/2024
Dropping that goal after 2 years was 2 years too late. Very few QBs leave the league for 2 years and then come back. The league had simply moved on and had pretty much lost interest in a QB that spent the last two years demanding QB1 money for a QB2 role and who was insistent upon bringing politics into the locker room. You may also remember that when he finally did relent and thus get a number of NFL teams interested again he scheduled a workout that the teams showed up for only to shift it to a completely different facility at the last moment. NFL teams have found that players in general who demonstrate erratic behavior are rarely dependable or a good fit either on or off the field.
The vast majority of reputable NFL journalists are as politically left-biased as the vast majority of journalists overall, and I would not trust them to be politically objective about this.
Ron, would you describe yourself as completely objective and unbiased? Would you be making this many justifications if a right-wing player had been cancelled?
That’s quite the feat of moving the goalposts to distract from your clearly inaccurate opinion. I’ll pass on discussing the spurious left wing bias of NFL sportswriters and just keep to the facts I cited in support of the very obvious conclusion that Kaepernick was blackballed by the NFL.
We can also look at DeShaun Watson as a comparison. His career W/L arc (for what that’s worth) is:
3-3
10-5
11-5
4-12
Pandemic – credibly accused of assault by at least 12 women, settled with some of them, served an 11 game suspension by the league for this. He then received an absolutely MASSIVE contract with another team and has since gone…
3-3
5-1
It’s weird how a perfectly cromulent QB who kneeled during the national anthem to respectfully show his affinity to BLM couldn’t ever get another tryout while a possibly slightly better QB sexually assaulted at least 12 women and got a huge contract.
Here’s Watson’s career stats.
Oh, hey! Speaking of Deshaun Watson and the over 2 dozen women with whom he settled civil sexual assault cases, here’s another with bonus analysis of where he rates as a QB.