“New Yorker Cartoon Generator”
Here’s a site, “Free New Yorker Cartoon Generator: Create New Yorker Cartoons Online” that popped up in one of my daily searches yesterday. As a New Yorker cartoon generator myself, I wish I could be more welcoming, but everything about this AI newbie is counter to the cartoon world I’ve been a part of for close to half a century. Is this a brave new world for cartoon art, or a lazy new world for cartoon art?
Here’s some of the language from the site, bolded, with my bracketed comments appearing directly each excerpt:
“Our free New Yorker cartoon generator eliminates barriers, no sign-up, no subscriptions, or no skills needed.”
[
“…no skills needed”… Well, okay then. I suppose all of us who have spent an awful lot of time learning to draw, to write captions, and learning how to integrate the two, might as well hang it up. Game over]
“Bring your humor to life with our free New Yorker cartoon creator. It delivers watermark-free illustrations, so you can enjoy clean, humorous cartoons perfect for articles, social feeds, or business presentations without the need for additional editing. Capture New Yorker-style sophistication while enjoying clean, distraction-free artwork you can confidently showcase anywhere.”
[
“perfect for articles…business presentations without the need for additional editing.” For those
New Yorker cartoonists supplementing their magazine income by pursuing commercial work, fahgettaboudit. I suppose cartoon editors might as well call it a day too]
Make Everyone a New Yorker Cartoonist
Experience the joy of crafting ironic political cartoons with our New Yorker cartoon generator! Instead of investing long hours drawing manually, it instantly makes sophisticated, polished New Yorker magazine cartoons in moments. It saves precious time, enhances efficiency, and gives you the freedom to focus on wit, humor, and creativity rather than technical drawing.
[What has made The New Yorker cartoon world unique in its 100 years has been its devotion to finding artists with a unique “voice.” There has always been room for a variety of voices. It has been a magazine that has published such disparate styles and sensibilities as James Thurber and Saul Steinberg, Mary Petty and Charles Barsotti, Jack Ziegler and Helen Hokinson, Otto Soglow and Barbara Shermund, Ed Steed and Reginald Marsh. Each cartoonist has brought some of themself to their work. I believe that the magazine’s readership has found great joy in following and coming to know the artists work.
Making everyone a New Yorker cartoonist is probably not a great idea. The New Yorker‘s cartoon stable is already quite large (large enough that I’ve taken to calling it a “cartoon colosseum” rather than a stable). Hundreds of cartoonists vie weekly for the dozen or so OKs handed out (“OKs” are New Yorkerese for bought cartoons). The elevator taking cartoonists to nirvana (i.e., the pages of The New Yorker) is already quite crowded.
The words “instantly” and “efficiency” are used in the AI Generator’s text– ironic as any workaday cartoonist will tell you. Most of us don’t come up with drawings “instantly” — there’s patience, trial and error, and thought involved. The “work” of a cartoonist is the blurry time spent sitting with the seed of an idea, or even sitting over a blank page, while the wheels turn. “Efficiency” is not a word that comes to mind either when I think of how cartoonists work. Summoning up ideas is a crapshoot, or a magic trick, or just luck — it’s anything but efficient. No one of us expects it to be efficient — what fun would that be.
The word “generator,” used as it used, along with the words “instantly” and “efficiency,” reminds me of assembly lines, and product. I picture thousands, or hundreds of thousands of efficiently assembled cartoons rolling out into the world. I wasn’t going to welcome The New Yorker cartoon generator, but I’ve changed my mind — hey, I’m only human.
