Ayo Edebiri Draws a New Yorker Cartoon
In June 2021 (pre The Bear), New Yorker cartoonist Zoe Si coached Ayo Edebiri through the process of drawing a New Yorker cartoon. The catch: neither of them could see the other’s work in progress. Super entertaining.
I don’t know about you, but Si’s initial description of the cartoon reminded me of an LLM prompt:
So the cartoon is two people in their apartment. One person has dug a hole in the floor, and he is standing in the hole and his head’s poking out. And the other person is kneeling on the floor beside the hole, kind of like looking at him in a concerned manner. There’ll be like a couch in the background just to signify that they’re in a house.
Just for funsies, I asked ChatGPT to generate a New Yorker-style cartoon using that prompt. Here’s what it came up with:
Oh boy. And then I asked it for a funny caption and it hit me with: “I said I wanted more ‘open space’ in the living room, not an ‘open pit’!” Oof. ChatGPT, don’t quit your day job!
Discussion 1 comment
It's so bizarre and interesting how the AI image generation seems so capable, yet gets so much weird stuff wrong. Not just that it didn't follow the prompt (the guy's head is supposed to be sticking out of the hole), but the strange additions, like the board he's standing on, the random copies of the New Yorker scattered about. The framed "New Yorker" picture on the wall, and the most strange: a log on the floor. No human artist would add those things. These programs create images that look correct at first glance, but then fall apart on further inspection.
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