Automated Infringement

This is the weekly dispatch from Bizarro Studios North, where I have been writing and drawing the Monday through Saturday Bizarro comics since 2018. My partner and friend Dan Piraro created Bizarro in the late twentieth century and continues to do the Sunday comic from Rancho Bizarro in Mexico.

Wayno 

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I had my first serious encounter with AI thievery this week, in a smaller echo of the recent wholesale counterfeiting of multiple editorial cartoonists.

A sharp-eyed reader contacted Dan Piraro to alert us to an online ad for a plumbing company in Louisiana. The ad used one of my Bizarro gags, that had been fed into some AI platform and redrawn in a bland, soulless style, with no accreditation to the original source. The colors and staging were the same as my original panel, and the dialogue was identical. It was clearly a copy.

We brought the fakery to the attention of our editors at King Features and they forwarded it to the appropriate legal watchdogs. Apparently, they did their job, because the bogus Bizarro cartoon has disappeared, at least from the place where we saw it.

Coincidentally, the topic of using AI to "assist" artists came up recently on the local illustrators' group's online forum. A member had fed a photo of a painting in progress to an AI platform to see how it would describe the work.

I was among the respondents, and did my best to articulate my disdain for doing anything to further enable the harvesting of human creativity.

Colleagues, please think twice before inputting anything you created into an AI app. Everything you feed it is used for its "training."

I just learned about someone who prompted AI to "redraw" one of my cartoons and used it as an ad for their business. It's definitely copied from my work but dumbed down into a bland, generic "style." With no accreditation, of course. 

I'd share the two images for you to compare them side-by-side, but that would only spread more copies of the counterfeit. Feeding any AI platform work that you created, even once, just out of curiosity, is harmful to yourself and your peers.

Beyond its ability to facilitate theft from artists, AI is a serious environmental threat due to its insane energy requirements.

Sorry to get all lecture-y. I realize that a lot of AI is nearly unavoidable since it's embedded in almost everything we use. I don't mean to be a scold, but it's coming after all of us, and I hope we don't put out the welcome mat for it!

Here's a well-reasoned essay on the topic that does a much better job than I could. And it was written by a human.

Multiple members of the forum offered their opinions in a lively and respectful discussion on the topic. One participant seemed a little too defensive about resisting AI, which made me wonder how much they might be relying on it to assist or enhance their work. But I'm of a naturally suspicious nature, so who knows.

No doubt the debate will continue for a long time to come, assuming the world isn't burnt to a lump of smoldering coal in the near future.

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Today's historical pipe pic comes to us from a Bizarro reader from Nipomo, CA (the same location as last week's contributor!)

I'll leave it to our correspondent to elaborate:

My grandfather, D. H. Wulzen Jr., was a pharmacist in San Francisco who became interested in photography beginning about 1897. He left over a thousand glass plate negatives when he passed, and my father (who became a commercial photographer) spent considerable time in his later years making prints and donating the best work to various collections. 

The original plate of this shot now resides in the San Francisco Historical Society collections at the SF Public Library. Like his acquaintance, Arnold Genthe, DHW spent time in SF's Chinatown and took many memorable photos of the people and built environment. 

The man pictured here is probably taking a break from his work in the basement restaurant that is behind him. The SF library mentions that this is an opium pipe, but [that is] not so, as opium pipes have different unique characteristics. This is just a guy on his smoke break. We don't have a specific date on this one, but all of the Chinatown photos were taken in 1900 and 1901, so [it was] well before the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Historian Doug Chan used the photo in this post:

https://medium.com/@dougchan/a-restaurants-cellar-door-to-a-way-of-life-ca9332201426

Thanks for the fascinating backstory to this museum-worthy photo.

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I was recently approached by a company that sells CBD gummies named after a famous stoner comedy duo, and offered a "social media collaboration opportunity" to promote their product on my Insta in exchange for some chewable samples.

Unfortunately, my system can't handle CBD (and forget about THC), so I declined, and, as always, these gags were created by a human cartoonist, without the influence of artificial intelligence or drugs.

Best of all, the pharmacy the fills the prescription accepts Monopoly money.

A colleague who saw this cartoon asked me what cursive sounds like, and I can't stop wondering about it myself.

When the criminals were arrested, Variety's agricultural edition ran the headline, Fake Fungi Fools Farmstand Frequenters.

Thursday's panel was almost a Tarzan gag captioned Man of the Loincloth, but I came to my senses.

Bizarro celebrated Father's Day a bit early this year.

The week ended with that beloved Italian cartoon character, Prosciutto Porco.

Thanks for reading this far down into the post. You're almost done, and I appreciate your eyeballs. See you next week with more visual and verbal shenanigans.

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Bonus Track

Groucho Marx: "Father's Day"

Decca Records, 1957

Happy Father's Day to all the dads reading the blog, whether your children are human, feline, canine, or otherwise.

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