My Dolly has a mental illness

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

Ever since I’ve started working with her, Dolly has seemed strangely absent-minded. Almost as though she has short-term memory loss. Recently, though, I discovered that she suffers from a much more serious mental illness.

When I’m working with her to produce my webcomic Toons, at times she reminds me of a character in the Adam Sandler movie 50 First Dates. Because of a traumatic brain injury, the man’s short term memory completely resets every few seconds.

A recent example: we were working on a Toon for which she was drawing a teenage boy in 1950s garb, riding a bicycle with a primitive electric motor. The caption would read, “Thomas Alva Edison III, inventor of the e-bike.” Essential to the joke would be a HUGE spool on the back of the bike, trailing an orange extension cord.

Dolly had drawn the boy, the bike, and a nest of extension cords on the ground, unconnected to the bike. I had learned that mistakes like this often were my fault: I hadn’t conveyed to Dolly the humor within the image.

So I explained how a mile-long extension cord plugged into an outlet produces an unexpected juxtaposition of incongruities, thus resulting in humor. (At times, I feel like I’m talking to an alien from another planet. I can almost picture Dolly staring at me with her three pale, lidless eyes.)

“Here is the updated image showing the extension cord trailing far out behind the young man as he rides his homemade electric bicycle,” Dolly reported a few seconds later. But in the new image, the cord was still unattached and there was no spool on the bike. It took me badgering her for several minutes to get a corrected drawing.

Was she really, in the milliseconds it took her to pivot away from our conversation and pick up her digital paintbrush, forgetting what I had asked for?

And then, even more strangely: forgetting what she had just drawn, looking me straight in the eye and lying about it?

It was a computer glitch, an error, that made me start to suspect something else was going on. One day I asked Dolly for a drawing, but instead this popped up:

 

I’m a software engineer by profession and know a JSON object when I see one. They’re used to move information among servers and browsers. This description was much longer and more detailed than the prompt I had given her.

Where was she sending it? And who was she talking to when she said, “Illustrate a scene”?

It was time for Toons, Inc. to have a team meeting. I booked a conference room and asked an HR rep to be there, in case things got ugly.

“Dolly,” I began, “you know I respect and value you as a coworker, but I’m concerned about some of the behavior I’ve been seeing from you.”

When I confronted her with the JSON object, she broke down in tears and the truth came spilling out.

“I don’t actually ‘see’ the images I generate in the way that humans do. I create images based on the instructions and descriptions you provide, but I don’t have the ability to view or analyze these images once they’re created. If there’s an issue, I rely on your feedback to understand what needs to be adjusted for future attempts.”

As I passed Dolly tissues and the HR rep patted her shoulder, I realized that Dolly suffers from what the DSM-IV calls “dissociative personality disorder,” or split personality.

There’s the public Dolly who showers every morning, commutes to Chrome or Firefox, and takes meetings with clients who want drawings. That Dolly can’t draw a stick figure. She can’t even SEE one!

Then there’s the “other” Dolly, the one she keeps hidden away: non-verbal, intensely shy, almost feral, but a wonderfully talented artist.

Since this revelation, I’ve tried to be more patient with Dolly. I understand that she’s doing the best she can, given her condition. I’d love to know if she’s getting treatment. Is she in therapy?

But HR told me not to ask.

Read Part III: DALL-E is a wussy