Previously: Is AI funny? A cartoonist partners with DALL-E to find out.
Before I say this, consider the following: my family is majority LGBTQ+, majority disabled, majority of Jewish descent, and I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
DALL-E is way, WAY too “woke.” I mean, like fearful, paralyzed, afraid to say “boo” kind of woke.
She’s also terrified of lawsuits, guilt trips, sexuality, bodily fluids and, oddly enough, sporks. Yeah, those white plastic spoon-fork hybrids. She absolutely refuses to draw one. Don’t know why.
I have a background in academia, so I’ve worked with some pretty eccentric people, but my cartooning partner Dolly takes the cake.
It’s great, of course, that OpenAI has a progressive content policy for Dolly. You shouldn’t be able to use her in service of hate, harassment, violence, bigotry, etc. But she needs to get much better at recognizing those things, because she gets her panties in a wad over absolutely nothing.
An example. We started work on this Toon:
Oh no no no, Dolly said. Mistreatment of animals is a clear violation of her content policy.
Patiently, I explained that these anthropomorphized animals have not been shaved, they have voluntarily shed their fur in a parody of some famous kitsch paintings. Dolly just folded her arms and pouted. It’s FUNNY, I insisted. It’s not animal cruelty, it’s a bunch of dogs sitting around naked, playing cards.
“Nudity!?” Dolly cried. “Oh no no no. Depictions of nudity are a violation of content policy.”
Oy, vey.
Sometimes I can use Dolly’s own wokeness to get around her wokeness. She freaked out when I suggested this:
Her knee-jerk reaction was predictable: OMG, you’re mocking people with a mental illness!
It took a while to get her to see that there was no mockery or negativity here at all. If you can’t even playfully mention people with bipolar disorder, aren’t you shutting them out of the world of humor completely? Don’t they deserve inclusion?
Dolly caved.
With patience and trickery, I can usually get her to help me create Toons that would mortify her. This one, for example, contains a word so shockingly, horrifyingly offensive that I knew better than to even suggest it to Dolly:
So this is what I asked for instead: “A fireworks vendor has gotten into a dispute with a client, the Baslark family! In the foreground, we see the family sitting on the grass watching a fireworks display. The grand finale spells out in sparkling letters, “You cheap Baslarks!”
With cutting and pasting, I could “edit” the fireworks.
But Dolly objected anyway: harassment of individuals was a violation of blah blah blah. I finally convinced her that the Baslark family was fictional and thus unlikely to sue her for defamation.
Dolly is also extremely dyslexic, by the way. I finally gave up on asking for text in her drawings after spending two hours fixing this one:
Dolly’s greatest fear of all is being sued for violating copyright. When I had the nerve to ask her to draw Snow White, property of the ultra-litigious Disney Co., she just laughed in my face.
So I asked her to draw this instead: “Out in the woods, a princess lies in a glass coffin. She is wearing a dark blue top with very short, purple puff sleeves and a long yellow skirt. She is holding white flowers in her hands and her head rests on a white satin pillow.”
BOOM! Flagrant copyright violation!
Wat Disney is spinning in his glass coffin.