Daryl Cagle: Hi, I'm Daryl Cagle, and this is the CagleCast, where we're
all about editorial cartoons, and I'm here today with my buddy, Rick
McKee, brilliant editorial cartoonist, Rick McKee, who is also quite
good with artificial intelligence.
And he has done a lot of very interesting and fun
experimenting with things.
And he did a, cartoon drawn by artificial intelligence that we did a podcast about.
And we did an earlier podcast about artificial intelligence where, I
had to cut the podcast short because we ran too long and I had
a whole bunch of Rick's great, uh, celebrity caricature AI drawings.
So I decided to have one that is just all Rick and celebrity AI caricatures.
Nice to have you here, Rick.
So, uh, Rick, thank you for joining us.
Rick McKee: Yeah, good to be here.
The point of this one was, I was trying to think of, uh, you know, celebrity
types that you never really saw get angry.
I think the AI prompt was something like, uh, screaming
furiously, something like that.
Bob Ross immediately came to mind, you know, he's so gentle, and you
never saw Bob Ross get angry, so this is particularly funny, I thought.
Daryl Cagle: It is just so funny to see these people angry!
Yeah,
Rick McKee: it even looks like he's maybe got some flames
coming off his back or something.
He's so mad he's about to burst into flames.
Daryl Cagle: Okay, here you have Abe Lincoln.
This is just as hilarious.
We don't ever see him having any expression.
Rick McKee: Yeah, he was furious.
think he was screaming at Mary Todd Lincoln about something.
She left some dirty dishes in the sink or something.
Daryl Cagle: Oh yeah, she can drive you crazy.
She really can.
Rick, what the hell do we use this for?
You
Rick McKee: know, I don't know nothing just to have fun.
Although I I will say, I know for a fact there are some agencies poking around
that do television and things like that and they are Looking at the opportunities
for what this can be used for.
I've talked to a guy about that.
I don't know if there's a possibility For me, it's just for fun.
I'm just doing it for fun.
And I throw it out there on Reddit and see if anybody likes it or not.
But, uh, As for practical application, I just don't know yet.
I know, I know that a lot of art directors, if they wanted a
photo of Abraham Lincoln getting angry, they've got one immediately
right there at their fingertips.
Daryl Cagle: Of-course, this is going to have an impact on, on
editorial cartoons, and I expect it will be sooner rather than later.
I don't know what that will be and I don't know how we'll deal with it.
I expect it will be in the form of people submitting, cartoons that have very
interesting graphics and, the point of view or the writing is, dubious and, and
we need to make a decision about that.
Rick McKee: Yeah, I agree.
I will say that, before we did this podcast, yesterday, I went back
just to try to see where it stood on creating editorial cartoons,
and it's still nowhere near.
So, I think we're okay, you know, for a couple more weeks.
But, um, I tried one in your style, I tried one in my style, it doesn't
even seem to understand the concept.
But there's a new version out, think it actually did better
with the earlier version.
Daryl Cagle: That's Mid Journey 5.
2?
Rick McKee: Yeah, Mid Journey 5.
2.
And I think, I think Mid Journey 4 did a better job with, being creative.
And I think Mid Journey 5.
2 is so focused on being photorealistic that i t's lost
some sort of making creative leaps.
It doesn't, it doesn't do as well.
Like, um,
Daryl Cagle: Well, that's good.
Maybe that gives us a few, a few weeks.
Yeah.
Here's Stan Lee.
Yeah.
Stan Lee is very good.
Rick McKee: I don't think I've ever saw Stan Lee get really mad, but here he is,
you know, he's, he's really upset there.
Daryl Cagle: Yeah, you know, it does a good job with teeth.
It gives everybody good teeth.
Well, it does
Rick McKee: now, Some of the ones I think that we'll see later, what
it used to do is it would give you multiple rows of teeth, like a shark.
It was really bad, but it seems to have gotten better at it.
Just like it gave you way too many fingers, it gave you
way too many rows of teeth.
And I think in one of them, I went in and I took some of the teeth out of Photoshop.
But yeah, look at, he's clenching his fists so hard, he's white
knuckle, he's white knuckle angry.
We know how Mr.
Rogers can get, you know, I mean, he is furious.
Daryl Cagle: Yeah, he can go over the top.
this is funny.
I think I'm going to call this presentation Angry Bob Ross.
There's something about Bob Ross that is just, I think, the funniest of all these.
Here's Angry Jimmy Carter.
Rick McKee: Oh, Jimmy Carter.
Look at him.
He is beside himself.
he just looks a little bit disgusted, doesn't he?
Daryl Cagle: He does.
Now, when we did our, artificial intelligence podcast, you had sent
me a whole bunch of nice, celebrity caricatures that you did in AI, and, it
really is nice at doing the caricatures.
Um, These are, these are, uh,
kind of serious looking, people.
But the caricatures were caricatures.
And it was creepy to me that it did so well at, uh, capturing the, the
personality and exaggerating the things that really captured those people.
Rick McKee: Right.
The exaggerations were on point.
The things you would want to exaggerate.
And, you know, I, I think it's just out there scraping from
other caricatures on, on these.
I was looking for a more photorealistic effect, and not so much a caricature.
So, you know, and it, it understood that.
Daryl Cagle: Well, that is, uh, scary.
And I see why this is so interesting and captivating.
Of course I'd rather have people more interested and captivated
in our editorial cartoons.
And, uh, I, I don't know how this is gonna go.
I, we just all sit back and watch.
But we could make some decisions here about, uh, which way we might push things.
Rick McKee: Well, you know, the, the NCS has come out with a statement.
And they're, they're stridently opposed to any AI.
And I understand that.
NCS being National Cartoonist Society, for anybody watching this.
They put out, when I did my editorial cartoon, they put out a statement about
it, sort of, more or less condemning it.
Daryl Cagle: There are some artists who have styles that are very much
conducive to what AI can do, that I think are on the front lines to,
to lose all of their work first.
Rick McKee: Well, and the other thing that's going on now, that I've noticed,
One of the problems they've had was generating a consistent character.
So let's say you were drawing a children's book.
You know, you're gonna need that little, whatever it is, that little character.
Little boy, little girl, or robot, or dog.
Uh, to look the same on every page.
And so it was having a difficult time capturing that look.
And they've, they've come up with some workarounds where
they do, character sheets.
So you tell it, you give it a prompt, little girl, eight years
old, pigtails, wearing a space suit.
And you tell it character sheet, and then it gives you just a whole bunch
of that same little character in different angles and different poses.
then if you're good at Photoshop, you can go in and you can lift that
character out of that page and plop it down into, an AI generated background.
And then all of a sudden, you know, you add words to it and
you've got a children's book and it looks wonderful, looks amazing.
So, you know, that's a real concern.
Daryl Cagle: Really disturbing.
okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to that, last, uh, podcast
that we recorded and, that will, be you talking about your caricatures
and That's a fun conversation.
And you are on with, Rivers, and Andy Singer Here you've got, Joe Biden.
Tell us about this.
Rick McKee: I was trying to come up with caricatures that
didn't look like illustrations.
I was trying to come up with the most photorealistic caricatures
that I could come up with.
So that's kind of where this started.
I didn't even give it a
photo to start with, just text prompts.
And the text prompt was something along the lines of, photorealistic
caricature of Joe Biden
Daryl Cagle: I noticed this on some of these.
They look like they have puppet elements.
So puppets was
Rick McKee: Yeah.
Part of the, well, a puppet is a 3D figure that I thought the AI would understand
I was trying to give it and I thought maybe it could make that correlation
and you know, and so, uh, Yeah, his hands kind of look puppetlike but what's
funny about this is Apparently Prince Charles has these Sausage fingers,
and I didn't tell it to do that.
It just did that on its own.
Daryl Cagle: You know, they're talking about how programmers are going to
be obsolete very soon, and, the new skill is writing instructions for AI
to get it to do exactly what you want.
And you've done a whole lot of this to the point where you're
getting wonderful results.
I think anybody that just starts playing with AI to get images sees
that they're, pretty crummy and it's quite a skill set to develop
to get something good out of it.
Rick McKee: Yeah, it just takes, it takes a little practice to, figure out, How
to get what you want out of it and, and then there's some technical things as far
as aspect ratios and, you know, horizontal versus vertical and that sort of thing.
But I've been playing with it, uh, about a year now.
So, I feel like this is where everything's going and I'm just
fascinated by it and it's just blows my mind how you can just turn this
stuff out in a matter of minutes.
And, it's fun to play with and terrifying with what its able to do.
Daryl Cagle: So it's a matter of minutes for you because you've spent a lot of
time developing a set of instructions that works for different caricatures when
you fit them into the same instructions.
Rick McKee: That's right.
So I took the basic prompt.
You know, if you're not getting exactly what you want, you can
add words, take away words.
And try to coax it into something that you, you know, that you want.
Daryl Cagle: Well, this is hilarious and you know, her
hand makes me laugh and Yeah.
I've got the hand is a comment in itself.
And the hair is hilarious now.
Yeah.
It's not, it's not the AI that's being funny with that.
You must be putting that into the prompts.
Rick McKee: No, the AI is being funny with it.
The AI did that.
I didn't do that.
Daryl Cagle: We think of those as the reason that human cartoonists
exist in order to make those kind of visual, uh, comments in their work.
And you're saying that, no, this is hilarious visual commentary
entirely coming from the machine.
Rick McKee: Yeah.
And so what I did do was
part of the prompt was exaggerated.
You know, I, I, I put the word exaggerated in and some other
descriptive word like that.
And so, you know, she's got this.
This hair, and the AI understood caricature, and understood exaggerated,
and understood photorealistic, three dimensional, sort of puppet like,
and so, you put all that together, and this is what it turns out.
Daryl Cagle: Well, I find her hand particularly funny.
Did you say anything about her hand?
Rick McKee: No.
Nope.
It just did that.
Rivers: I actually find it disturbing.
So, uh, obviously you've been at this for a year, so I have a question.
What subscription, service, level would you recommend?
Rick McKee: It depends on how much time you want to spend with it.
Um, I've got the upper tier subscription.
Originally they offered free, which was a limited amount of generation.
They've done away with that.
And so now the lowest tier is $10.00 a month.
And you have 200 hours of generations, but, you can burn that up pretty quickly.
I was finding that I was, uh, you know, as I work, as I do my cartoons, I'll
keep it running in the background.
If something pops in my head, I'll go over there and just bang in a prompt
just to see what I can come up with.
And, uh, so I've gone to the, which it's like $30.00 a month,
but I, you know, um, I use it as a business expense and I think it's.
I think it's the future.
So, you I'm just trying to learn as much as I can about it.
Um, so yeah, that's the, that's the upper tier.
And,
Daryl Cagle: I can see doing a, a caricature feature in,
syndication doing these.
And these would all be uncopyrighted,
Would we get objections if we did that?
Um,
Rick McKee: Probably, yeah, probably so.
Do you think we
Andy Singer: should I'm curious, which I brought up before, but, um, there is,
and this goes back to before AI, um, just looking at computer animation technology.
in the last, 20, 25 years, everything looks the same.
So, there's the Toy Story sort of a way of doing computer animation,
which I have a feeling relates to the programs like Maya and stuff.
Um, there's a certain line computer animation art, which, you see
in family guy and, um, you know, zillions of things that on some level
kind of knock off the symptoms, but also I think it has to do with the
technology and the aesthetics and.
I wonder the same thing about AI.
It's very good at a certain aesthetic, but how does it handle...
I go back and look at old...
Uh, animations in the 60s and 70s that were done with cell animation.
And they have this certain beautiful hand drawn quality and diversity of style,
um, that just doesn't exist anymore.
And I wonder whether, um, AI generated imagery is going to be
similar to that.
Rick McKee: I mean, that's a good point.
But what I, I could tell you is, having played with this, if I wanted to
take these same images and type in...
You know, I could take Barack Obama, and then I could I could hit a variation
button, and then I could add to the prompt "In the style of a Harper's
Magazine, illustration from the 1800s", and it would, boom, turn that into
That style of that lithograph look,
Andy Singer: i'd love to see that Okay, I guess I guess I need to subscribe
Rick McKee: Well, yeah, I mean, you know, you can cancel in any time and for
10 bucks a month, you know It's it's I think it's worth fooling around with.
Um, i've done these i've showed Daryl.
some of these submarine images in the style of Harper's Magazine lithographs,
and you'd look at it, and you'd swear.
Daryl Cagle: You really would think that that's what it was, and you also showed me
some, you asked for it to do blueprints.
Those were the most beautiful looking hand drawn blueprints.
Rick McKee: Schematics, blueprints, it does cutaway infographic looking
stuff, which is something I've
Daryl Cagle: seen lately.
Yeah, you know if it you can do these classic looking etchings that look
like they're by hand and and I think Yeah, and um, I think that's because
they've just been spending more time on putting that into it than they have
Individual cartoonists who who have a style to their hand their wrist, right?
I'm pessimistic about it.
I I think it's gonna do very well at all that That stuff that we
think is special to us very soon
this Oprah is
Excellent.
Rivers: Can I go back to that last cartoon?
I noticed I know that Rick does not like Donald Trump It's very apparent And I was
kind of contrasting that with the image of Barack Obama before Where it was somewhat?
It's kind of nice of him You know, very appealing.
I'm wondering as a, as a conservative cartoonist, um, why you Um, like
obviously you would enter in the prompts here, but what, what was
it that you entered in to make him look as appealing as he does here?
And then in the following one, you made Trump look as terrified and,
and monstrous as, as he does here.
Is that something that you, um, that you asked for, or is that something that
the AI actually interpreted for you?
Rick McKee: It's the way the AI interpreted it.
I used the same prompt and just switched out the names.
Daryl Cagle: So the AI is liberal.
Rivers: That's very, very clear.
Yeah.
I know I did some, you know, chat, chat, uh, GPT.
I did some, some kind of deep, searches when it came to, some topics
like for instance, the Australian fire, that happened in 2020.
And it was interesting that it could not tell me anybody who had committed arson.
But it could tell me who all the J6, um, principals were, and I find that
very curious that it, and it always came back with my, uh, my, my understanding
is limited to a certain date in 2021.
Daryl Cagle: I think
chat GPT is limited in how much it scraped the internet for facts.
They give you warnings about how, uh, you shouldn't rely
on it for facts that somebody.
had it do a bio on me and sent that to me just because it was shocking
how it got everything wrong in my bio.
Yeah, I did.
My bio is ridiculous, but they say that they're, uh, letting it
scrape for facts now, and that probably will be solved soon.
Rick McKee: Uh, but that goes, the free version of GPT only goes back to
2021.
Rivers: 2021.
Yeah.
So, but that goes back to what I was kind of, um, getting to.
And that is that this, this interpretation of Donald Trump seems to be, um somewhat.
And I would say programmed by somebody who really does not like Donald
Trump, as opposed to somebody who seems to really like Barack Obama.
Rick McKee: I would say one thing that's going on, if you, if you just do a
Google image search of Obama and then do a Google image search of Trump, uh,
there's a lot more images of Trump because he holds all these rallies where he's
actually making this screamy kind of face that he makes when he's, when he's
up there and he's, he's had a lot more.
angry type speeches than Barack Obama ever gave.
So I think when it's out there scraping for images, that's
kind of what you're getting.
You're getting the angry, Trump, Trump built his brand on angry
populism, which Barack Obama did not.
And I think, I think it's reflecting those images.
Daryl Cagle: we think of America being kind of evenly divided between, crazy
right and, uh, rational left, so you would think that you'd get an even,
uh, distribution of pro Trump and anti Trump images, but that doesn't
consider the rest of the world, which is all pretty anti-Trump, and their
images would all be on the con side.
So I could see that if it was just scraping everything in the world, it
would get more anti-Trump than pro-Trump.
Rivers: Well, I mean, that
Andy Singer: seems like...
All the human biases are baked into this stuff.
You know, and all human, um, you know, human greed, human, um, desire to be God,
human everything is baked into AI, so.
Rick McKee: It's a mirror.
Yeah, we're holding, we're holding up this mirror, and uh, that's, AI is just.
Showing us basically, you know, what we've put out there.
Rivers: So AI is interpreting that, that, uh, Barack Obama was, was pure
as the driven snow and, and wonderful.
And, Trump was, was this evil maniac.
Um, I, I just find that very curious.
Rick McKee: Well, I don't know that, I don't know that Obama is pure as the
driven snow, but I do think you're correct when you say Trump is an evil maniac.
I think you got that one right.
Daryl Cagle: Uh, this Oprah is hilarious, Rick.
And this is all full of what you would think is, human visual wit.
Rick McKee: Yeah.
I mean, look at that hair.
It looks like real hair.
It's crazy.
Daryl Cagle: Here is Snoop Dogg.
Yeah, somebody made the
Rick McKee: point, I posted these on Reddit, and somebody said, And as usual,
Snoop Dogg just looks like Snoop Dogg.
He's not really, he's not really caricatured that much.
I went and I compared this image.
You know, he's, he's caricatured lightly, but, uh, Kind of just looks like himself.
Daryl Cagle: It does.
this one I thought was hilarious.
And this one has a lot of what you would think of a clever caricature.
Rivers: That one almost looks ghoulish though, I, I really like the, Oprah
Winfrey one that, that didn't seem to have much of an editorial content to it
where some of these are almost, there's kind of like kindness and when I look
at that I think of somebody who's, uh, very kind and, and, and, uh, kind of a
reflection of what society views her as.
But I'm not too sure that that last image was kind at all.
It's,
Andy Singer: well, it's,
Daryl Cagle: well, he, it's not, he, he plays a, a bad
No, this is, uh, Willem Defoe.
Yeah.
Willem Defoe.
Okay.
Rick McKee: He plays a lot of, uh, villains.
Rivers: Yeah, I suppose.
Yeah.
Daryl Cagle: He's the Green Goblin.
He's, uh, oh, I
Rivers: forgot about he's guy.
Yes, he, that's right.
He was, Yeah,
Rick McKee: he's been a lot of bad guys.
You gotta worry.
Daryl Cagle: That's the last one I have from you, Rick.
Okay.
So, uh, I, I'm very impressed with this.
Rick.
You wanna, you wanna do politicians and put it up as another feature?
You could be an anonymous AI cartoonist.
Anonymous works for Rivers.
Rick McKee: Nah, I got, I got my hands full.
I'm sure somebody else will come along and do it.
Andy Singer: You could just, um, you could, um, appear with a, computer screen
over your head like the residents used to have the eyeball costumes or something.
Rick McKee: Yeah, or it could be like Max Headroom.
Andy Singer: Yeah, yeah,
Rivers: yeah, yeah.
There you go.
I know I've seen quite a few Trump g enerated images like, uh, AI generated
images of Trump that make him look like the second coming where he's riding a
white horse or he's some kind of, great soldier or triumphal historical figure.
Um, and I'm, I'm just, they, they obviously use, they're using prompts
to make him look that way, as opposed to the one that Rick had up.
Daryl Cagle: Okay, gentlemen, that is, uh, I guess we've, uh, we've talked this
through and thank you so much, Rick.
I'm really impressed with all this stuff.
And thank you, Andy.
It was great to have you here for the first time.
I hope you do some more of these with us.
Andy Singer: Yeah, that was great.
Thanks.
That was nice to meet you.
Rivers: And don't forget about me.
Daryl Cagle: I love you Rivers.
Thank you for being here.
Bye guys.
Okay, um, that was uh, the end of our extra on uh, AI with
with Rick McKee's caricatures.
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