Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 25, 2024

Maybe we’ll have an AI president.The back story will have him/her meet all the Constitutional qualifications. Born and raised in Ohio (so not a coastal elite). Early 50’s, so not too old or too young. Has an MBA. Married 3, kids. Served couple terms in congress before elected governor.

Gives Hollywood phony a whole new meaning.

Ted’s avatar has an Oscar? AI must have already come further than we thought!

Not a serious conversation when you are pigging out!

I wonder if AI can infiltrate Trump’s empty cranium!!

AI’s doing ah… “great” on Youtube already

…he might be overstating the timetable a bit, but he’s not that far out of line. And when that DOES happen, it’s going to be a DISASTER.

MBA? A poor substitute for experience; never trust the decisions of someone with an MBA or DBA, they only know theory and form all their decisions based on the examples taught to them.

What is he talking about. There hasn’t been an original soap opera script since 1959.

They have just released an AI program that will (ahem) ‘create’ videos in seconds based on your written input.

The original “Star Trek” TV series did a few episodes where Kirk, Spock, etc visited civilizations that were ruled by computers. “Landru” is one which comes to mind. The alien world which Landru ruled was, like Earth, ravaged from wars. Landu took charge, benevolently, and made sensible laws and brought peace to his world. Before he died, he set up a computerized system to rule in his stead. (Didn’t work out quite so well, as Kirk and Spock found when they arrived.)

Go see Tom Tole’s last cartoon, right now, and look at panel 6.

Much TV and pop music are so formulaic, they might already be AI generated.

How long until Gary hangs it up and has AI draw his strips? Just kidding….

AI couldn’t replace you Gary. The day we lose writers, is the day we lose.

“Interface” by Frederick George and Neil Stephenson. An AI candidate with the perfect background is runnign for President.

I’ll wait to see what A.I will become. Right now there are businesses and wall street trying to get people to spend $$$$ for investment, so they can take their portion off the top. That way if it fails they’re still rich. Screw everyone else. Also the amount of electricity these data centers will need to have the A.I. is huge, like another Sweden amount for the whole world’s usage. As long as there’s a kill switch, we should be OK.

Given that the ones who create the current youtube videos can’t be bothered to program the voiceovers for proper pronunciation, it’s a safe bet that they won’t do a proper job on anything more complex, either. The ones looking for money don’t care about anything else.

Maybe she’ll be black…?

Take out Asian? Way too much Sodium.

Dude, you had me until that last panel and I almost threw my iPad into the next room…(written with help from Ai)

It’s going to get even weirder than what GT can imagine, but very close to this and quite a bit past it. A kind of “immortality” if you will… For those who can afford it.

From what I’ve seen, AI already appears to be writing the scripts for all talk shows and reality shows. There isn’t a bit of humanity in any of them.

Along these lines, I read this week that Tyler Perry halted production on an $800 million studio after he saw what AI can do on costuming and makeup. He’s worried about all the people who will be put out of work.

https://www.Businessinsider.com/tyler-perry-ai-studio-productions-movies-2024-2

Isn’t pickleball a little middle-class for Sid? I’d think he’d be playing handball or racquetball at some trendy club.

If that happens — when — they’ll certainly deserve each other.

how long until AI is writing the comics?

Democrats are the party of staged exaggerated melodrama.

The Science Fiction author JG Ballard wrote a story about this very topic about 50 years ago. “In the future” he has all art being produced by AI and it’s BORING, but no one can do better because they have no inspiration. Then a Muse come to Earth and convinces people to throw out the computers and make art again.

I laughed at the time I read it…

You can tell a chat GPT clone by the amount of garbage it spews out in volume with meaningless text.

And the audiences will settle for it, because it’ll be familiar, and nobody wants anything new because new things might make them think.

With an AI-generated military record?

Time for people to start learning crafts again, how to make things by hand, how to DO things. Otherwise you’re all going to be out of work.

We’re going to have a choice. Which is more valuable. Things made by mass production, in a factory? Or things made at home, by hand? It’s going to be the reverse of the Industrial Revolution, folks.

Tell your kids, learn a SKILL, learn it well. Something that a machine, or AI can’t do. Do it in a way that they can’t.

Hand made clothes. Leather craft. Carpentry. Artistry. It’s all going to come back. Time for us to value our artisans.

Forget soap operas, instead think paperback romances: they were being written by AI before AI was developed! Each and every one has the exact same plot : Lord Stephen Stereotype meets Lady Clarissa Cliche’, they whine about one dam thing after another for 300 pages, and then they get married.

The future’s so bright I have to wear shades…

Does Sid considered that his job will go out the window too???

It turns out the hard part is training an AI for soap opera writing, because it involved making it watch a LOT of soap operas. :)

We are all replaceable. That’s why I’m starting early.

And so it begins. Me thinks our a$$ is grass.

Why would I bother to read (or watch) something that no one could be bothered to write?

Artist: “But an AI has no imagination – it can’t think outside the box or challenge any preconception.”

Executive: “Good! Three less things for us to try and understand.”

Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, wrote in the January/February 2024 issue that chatGPT had taken her submissions from 712 in December 2022 to 1088 in February 2023, and that every one of them was dreadful, including the cover letters.

There will never be an AI Boopsie,so the entire process is flawed.

AI is bad news for folks like my daughter, a digital artist. OTOH, maybe it will help in some fields, such as medicine, in untangling the mysteries of illnesses and how to fix them.