Is AI funny? A cartoonist partners with DALL-E to find out.

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My new partner is giving me a migraine.

Yes, she’s a talented illustrator, draws cartoons with blazing speed, and works for free. But my partner, whose name I began spelling “Dolly” back during our honeymoon phase, is also prudish, stubborn, and eccentric as hell. Imagine teaming up with Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory to create cartoons. Bazinga, my ass.

Dolly also harbors a dark secret that I have only recently discovered. She suffers from an actual mental illness that, if she were human, would have her heavily medicated in an inpatient facility. But more about that later.

I’m starting to miss the days when my only problem as a cartoonist was that I couldn’t draw anything beyond stick figures. And I couldn’t even draw THOSE without software.

I was living inside the DC Beltway at the time and producing training materials for the U.S. Navy, using software called Adobe Flash (once hugely popular but now defunct). Flash was a tool for creating animations: making silly logos dance on webpages and showing seamen on nuclear submarines how to target their torpedoes.

I’m a pacifist, a peacenik, and I was miserable being part of the military industrial complex. (There was worse to come: soon I’d have a much higher security clearance and start working for agencies we don’t talk about).

So I took refuge from reality in humor. I started writing and drawing a comic strip called Sticks & Stones, about Gary Stone, his wife Rose, their young daughter, and their wacky lives. Even using Adobe Flash, I couldn’t manage anything better than stick figures, so dialogue had to deliver the laughs.

Eventually, inevitably, the torpedo of my own conscience found me, struck me midships and sank me. Alcoholism, depression, the usual stuff. So I left the Beltway, moved my family back to the Midwest, and we built a happy new life. And because I was happy, I didn’t need to be funny anymore.

But the funny thing was, I missed funny. Funny is fun (probably why it’s right there in the word).

But Adobe Flash, the tool that had allowed me to at least draw simple, stick figure cartoons, was long gone. What to do?

Then along came OpenAI’s DALL-E.  

Wow. Tell it, “Draw a canoe on a river” and in 15 seconds you had a lush illustration of a man paddling his way through rippling blue water.

Fascinated, I played with DALL-E for days, bumping my head against the usage limits for my account. Then I asked it to draw something—I forget what—and it misunderstood my request and drew something illogical and ridiculous.

And funny.

So now the game became, “Break Dall-E.” I started messing with it, feeding it prompts that were vague or obtuse–anything that might confuse Dall-E, tripping up its unimaginably complex algorithms. Then it struck me: if Dall-E could be accidentally funny, could it be intentionally funny?

Nope.

Ok, fine, but DALL-E could draw anything, so if I provided the humor, why couldn’t it be a software tool for creating cartoons? 

Now let me pause here and sip my cappuccio, thinking back fondly on those halcyon days when I envisioned a jolly and freewheeling partnership with Dolly. I imagined saying things like, “Hey, draw Vincent Van Gogh working as a TV weatherman, pointing at a weather system that looks like ‘Starry Night.’” She’d spit out the hilarious cartoon I had drawn in my head. We’d share a laugh and slap each other on the back.

So I got to work with my new cartooning partner. We started with that “Van Gogh the meteorologist” idea.

Whoa, what the hell is THAT? A young Van Gogh wearing a modern suit, that’s great, but he’s holding a paintbrush in each hand and apparently painting a self portrait. Where’s my TV weather report? So I reworded my prompt and tried again. And again. And each time, Dolly would get one thing right and two things wrong. 

And then weird stuff started to happen. As if Dolly were becoming tired and confused, odd elements began appearing in the drawings. Van Gogh was holding an umbrella. Van Gogh was scowling angrily. Van Gogh became a camera operator in a TV studio, filming some OTHER random guy doing a weather forecast!

And so it went, hectoring Dolly through draft after draft until I finally decided that she was not a tool for drawing cartoons, but only PIECES of cartoons. And that was fine. From playing around with other tools like SnagIt and Photoshop, I had pretty good cut-and-paste skills. But it would be difficult and require patience, especially because Dolly’s artistic style changed with every attempted drawing. 

So over the next week I cobbled together some good, single-panel cartoons from the pieces she spit out. Then one day I gave her a prompt about a scarecrow and a crow sitting together in a bar. The scarecrow finds the crow attractive and is trying to get around their adversarial relationship (“Oh, come on, it’s the weekend! At least let me buy you a drink.”). 

On her very first try, Dolly drew this:

Holy crap! It was perfect! Way, WAY better than the drawing in my head. Ok, nobody move… What had I done differently this time? I had given her a longer prompt–not more detailed graphically, but with more context. I had mentioned the caption and explained WHY the joke was funny. 

Hmm. Maybe I hadn’t been pushing Dolly too hard. Maybe I hadn’t been asking ENOUGH of her cybernetic intellect! She wasn’t funny on her own, but maybe she understood a joke when she heard one. Maybe I should start trusting her to get into the spirit and groove of a cartoon.

“Dolly, draw a homicide scene inside a fish tank. Use your imagination: a dead fish on the sand, chalk outline of the body, CSI on the scene, a fish reporter asking questions, that kind of thing. A weary homicide detective is saying, ‘We see a lot of this. It’s the tapping. Tapping on the glass. Drives’em nuts.'”

All of that, and THIS is what she drew:

Lord, give me strength.

Read Part II: Dolly has a mental illness