89 Crooks Editors nd AI 4K RushGood
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Daryl Cagle, and today we're talking about crooks, bad editors, AI, and plagiarists, and all things that are killing our editorial cartoon profession even faster than newspapers are dying. So let's take a look. I've got all kinds of provocative examples. This is a well-known one. This is the cartoon that got The New York Times to say that they would never print editorial cartoons again.

This is by a Portuguese cartoonist, Antonio Antunes, and it ran in the international edition of The New York Times. It caused our cartoonist, Patrick Chappatte, to lose his regular job drawing for the international edition of The New York Times. The Times claims that this cartoon was approved by a junior editor in the middle of the night at their Hong Kong bureau.

When newspapers print cartoons that are objectionable, they often don't blame the editor, but just blame the cartoonist. Here, The New York Times is blaming all cartoons. I think cartoons are just so provocative that The New York Times can't stand them by any artist in any form. So [00:01:00] cartoonist Patrick Chappatte gets kicked out because another cartoonist drew a cartoon that they didn't like that he had nothing to do with.

So what's up with this cartoon? I'm the guy that kills the cartoons for the syndicate. We're fine with cartoons that criticize Israel, that criticize Netanyahu, but there are certain tropes that are offensive that we want to avoid. And we get a lot of that from the foreign cartoonists because cartoonists like to draw Nazis, and cartoonists are generally insensitive to all of these tropes that are antisemitic and, uh, just ground where cartoonists should no longer tread.

We have to be a little more careful about this because of the history of cartoons in this area, and that, that, that job falls to me at the syndicate level. But here, The New York Times, which should have killed this cartoon and should have done a better job of having an editor judge it, they're going crazy by banning all cartoons forever.

You know, it's unfair to cartoonists who didn't draw this cartoon. Now, here is a cartoon that I drew that has some [00:02:00] similarities that didn't get any complaints. This was a few years earlier in the Obama administration, and I drew Netanyahu as a dog. I drew, uh, a Star of David around his dog collar, like you saw in the previous cartoon.

All right. But, you know, this seems to be kind of similar. It doesn't have the trope about Jews being the bosses of the world leaders, but, you know, it does have them kind of taking advantage of a world leader. Anyway, I thought this was similar, didn't get in any trouble, which shows that these are not real clear lines that you can draw as to what's gonna cause trouble and what needs to be killed.

So I thought I would take my own lumps and show you that one. Here's another one that caused a bunch of trouble for us. This is by Monte Wolverton, our Cagle cartoonist. This ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer and caused quite a hubbub in Philadelphia. The newspaper apologized for running the cartoon, and they printed an editorial and had, uh, a lot of debate on social media about this, and the media [00:03:00] covered it.

Fox News had stories, "Liberal Cartoonist Draws Antisemitic Cartoon." It was quite the hubbub. Well, I didn't catch this one before it came up, and we did have our prohibition against Star of David without an Israeli flag on it, so I should have caught this and killed it earlier. But I caught it a few minutes in, and Monte made this change, which is kind of an insignificant change.

Anyway, this first cartoon made the rounds in the media, and Monte and I have to acknowledge that any boot is a Nazi boot, so this is violating our policy in two areas, the not a flag and the Nazi reference for any Jews or any Israeli metaphor cartoons. So this one got an apology from the artist. The newspaper ran the apology very big, and that was the end of the hubbub on this one.

This is an example of a kind of cartoon that we get all the time. I would say we've probably gotten a dozen of these. This is b- again, by, uh, Antonio Antunes from [00:04:00] Portugal, and it's, uh, one of those antisemitic tropes that you see recurring, the Jews killed Christ trope. They call them blood libels. And we would not allow this, but this wasn't our cartoons.

Here's another one from Aris, Cuban cartoonist. There are ideas that we just get over and over and over again, and we're constantly killing cartoons that, for us, cross the line into being antisemitic. So this is, I guess, the number one area of what I kill after sexual, explicit, and obscene cartoons. This is another area where we have, uh, problems these days.

This is the cartoon that got cartoonist Michael De Adder fired from his job. He was a cartoonist for the Halifax group of newspapers in Canada. He was also a cartoonist for two or three years for The Washington Post, along with Ann Telnaes. He's a great cartoonist. He's, he's in our group Uh, and I think this is a great cartoon.

That was a, a famous [00:05:00] photo of a drowned refugee that was making the rounds at the time, so people recognized that and they recognized Trump's indifference and his playing golf every day. And I, I think it's a great cartoon, but it got him fired. And the problem with this cartoon, I think, was just that It was strong and it was criticizing Trump, and that's not what the newspaper group wanted, and that's what got the cartoonist fired.

Here is another cartoon that caused a big hubbub for us. This is our Cagle cartoonist at the time, David Fitzsimmons, who was drawing for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. This is during the George Floyd protests, and it just shows that this George Floyd incident is nothing new and a continuation of history.

This was run in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and editorial cartoons are part of state-mandated AP History testing in 11th grade. And a teacher who's required to use editorial cartoons in her [00:06:00] lessons picked this out of the Texas newspaper and used it in her Texas classroom as part of a lesson plan where she didn't present any opinion with it.

She was asking, "Well, what is the cartoon saying? What's the cartoonist's point of view?" Which is typically what you see on the AP History test. Well, this caused a conflagration in Texas, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott demanded that the teacher be fired and launched an official state investigation into the teacher.

It made a lot of press, and Abbott was screaming about it for a while, and I've got to say, to the school district's credit, they didn't release the name of the teacher, which was very nice. And the Star-Telegram ran a nice article that, uh, Dave Fitzsimmons and I wrote. So I think this is a great cartoon, and I think it makes a point very effectively.

This is a cartoon that I drew some years ago about an event in Mexico where there was a massacre and drug dealers killed a bunch of people, and, uh, the cartoon simply means that [00:07:00] the violence in Mexico is bad. They're-- The biggest newspaper chain in Mexico ran my cartoon on the front page of their newspapers.

Um, scandalous cartoon in the United States. This terrible American cartoonist is disrespecting the Mexican flag. And I got tons of mail from people that were angry and offended by this. The State Department in Mexico filed a formal complaint with the United States State Department about this insult, and they contacted the heads of MSNBC.

I was the cartoonist for MSNBC at the time, and they complained directly to MSNBC. And to their credit, MSNBC was very nice and supportive on this and didn't apologize, didn't take the cartoon down. And I've got to say that I am not sensitive to the criticism about people being offended when their revered state symbols are not respected.

Because state symbols like a flag, that's regular fodder for editorial cartoonists. We use [00:08:00] flags in cartoons all the time, and I'm not gonna worry about it. I think this was a bunch of hubbub about nothing. But this, you know, this newspaper group has Tons of newspapers in all the metropolitan areas of Mexico, and boy, did I get the angry email on this one.

This one was kind of crazy. So this cartoon is by our cartoonist in Slovakia, Martin Sudovic, who goes by the name Shootie. You see he signs his cartoons Shootie. That's something foreign cartoonists do. They have pen names, and that's kind of fun. I like pen names. This is Slovakia's terrible president, Fico, who is still their president.

Fico, I guess, had back problems. He had a sore back. So this shows Fico going to the doctor, and the doctor says wording that essentially means, "You don't have any back problem. You can't have any back problem because you're spineless." And this offended the president of Slovakia so much that he sued Shootie and his [00:09:00] newspaper for the emotional distress that it caused him for the insult that he has suffered.

Well, around the world, one way that authoritarian governments have of punishing dissent and punishing cartoonists is lawsuits. Because lawsuits are expensive, cartoonists can't afford them unless their newspaper defends them, and then it's a way of attacking newspapers because it's expensive for the newspaper, too.

This court case went all the way to the Slovakian Supreme Court. And I should mention Slovakia is an EU country. By their charter, they're supposed to have a free press, and this is an example of exactly what a free press is not. At least to their credit, not much credit, but to their credit, the Supreme Court found for the cartoonist and the newspaper in this case.

But the fact that it even went beyond the, the first courts and went to the Supreme Court and cost them all that money to defend this case is terrible and why our profession is suffering around the world. The worst regimes send the cartoonists to [00:10:00] jail or beat them or even kill them. But the moderately bad regimes, like Slovakia, sue them.

Yeah, so they just can't afford to criticize the government, and it creates a situation where cartoonists have to double think what they're saying, and it is chilling and effective. Another nail in our profession's coffin. This is a cartoonist, Adam Zyglis, a Cagle cartoonist who is the cartoonist for the Buffalo News in upstate New York, and he drew this cartoon that's critical of the Trump supporters.

The MAGA guy and the MAGA h- holds a, a help sign, and government is the problem, not the solution, as he's being swept away in the Texas floods that FEMA didn't help him deal with. This cartoon got death threats for Adam. He and the newspaper were so troubled by so many death threats that they had to cancel some events and put more protection around Adam, and this was, uh, you know, a very, uh, disturbing event.

What [00:11:00] happens when you offend someone with a cartoon is that it's almost always a minority of readers that are extremely offended by the cartoon for whatever reason that is dear to that minority of readers. And typically, there is an organization or some organized effort to spread the word to threaten the cartoonist or to ma- demand that the cartoonist be fired or to create so much unpleasantness for the newspaper or the cartoonist that they'll think twice about making the, the criticism or the type of statement that was so offensive to the minority group of readers.

Uh, this cartoon was drawn by Mike Thompson for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Now, you know, the Minneapolis Star Tribune had our cartoonist, Steve Sack, as their cartoonist for decades. He was a real star, and he retired for health reasons. And the newspaper, having just gone off of their beloved cartoonist, decided that they wanted to have [00:12:00] another cartoonist who made his home at the newspaper, and which is very unusual these days.

You know, cartoonists are all losing their jobs. So they held a open submissions call, and, uh- cartoonists from all over the country submitted. They got lots of submissions. They got a small group of finalists that they followed up on and held interviews. And cartoonist Mike Thompson, who, uh, drew for years for USA Today and drew in Detroit, he won the job at the Minneapolis StarTribune, and we all gave him our congratulations, and that was very exciting.

It was a big deal for him. The first cartoon that he ever drew on his first day at the StarTribune was this cartoon, and they were having a controversy about broadcasting loud Muslim call to prayer through the night, and neighbors were complaining about that. And his cartoon compares that to their noisy crime in Minneapolis.

Well, what people do is they look at the Muslims at the top, and they assume [00:13:00] that the criminals shooting their guns at night are all Muslims, and this is a racial trope of Muslims committing crimes. And it was read that way, and it was protested that way, and the Muslims were offended, and it made a big, loud hubbub, and the newspaper apologized.

And that was unfortunate for Mike. It set the tone for what his short stay at the Minneapolis StarTribune would be. He was demoted from being a employee to being freelance, and then, uh, they dropped Mike, and then they dropped their subscription to Cagle Cartoons, and they've pretty much dropped cartoons now.

And they've dropped their idea that they would have a regular cartoonist, and they are no longer a cartoon-friendly newspaper as they had been with their rich tradition of editorial cartoons as with Steve Sack for so many years. And that's a big loss to our profession, and I'm sorry to see it, and I think it comes from a cartoon that I would not have killed that [00:14:00] could be misunderstood.

And that is just, uh, unfortunate and an overreaction from the paper, and I'm sorry to see the Minneapolis StarTribune disappear. 

Hi, I'd like to let you all know about our new 

premium newsletter, which gives you all the cartoons every day. You know, we have a free newsletter that, uh, gives you, uh, the top three cartoons that are reprinted in newspapers in America every day.

But this one gives you everything. And, you know, the newspapers reprint cartoons that are pretty tame. When you get everything, you get the tough, hard-hitting cartoons that, uh, you- it's probably preferable on the internet. So- Give it a try. You know, the, the price is, uh, uh, flexible because we appreciate it as a donation to the cartoonists, and the cartoonists appreciate your support.

And, uh, I, I hope you'll, uh, take a look. Another problem that we have with cartoonists, cartoons that I choose to kill, is the left and the right don't agree on what's true. From my perspective [00:15:00] as a liberal cartoonist, I have that problem more with cartoons from the right, and this is an example of that.

You know, cartoonists can present an idea as being a true fact in a cartoon, depending on how they organize and present that idea. So this was during COVID, and the man's watching the TV, presumably the news, where it says, "Studies show ivermectin is highly effective against COVID-19 and potentially could have saved millions of lives."

The crazy cow says, "Popcorn?" And the man says, "How is it you media morons spent months feeding us bull that it was just horse paste?" Well, actually, ivermectin is a medication for de-worming horses. And the right, along with President Trump, picked this up as a COVID cure during the height of all the COVID madness, and it was no cure at all, but it became a left-right issue.

And I had to decide on issues of fact like this, whether to kill [00:16:00] cartoons when half our audience, the audience on the right, believes that something's a fact and it is, in fact, not a fact. And I decided that I need to draw the line where a falsehood that's believed by the right or the left, if it can cause harm to people in some way that I can discern, then I'm gonna kill the cartoon.

And I killed this cartoon, and I killed other ivermectin cartoons to the dismay of our conservative cartoonists. And I killed cartoons blaming Dominion Voting Systems for throwing the election between Trump and Biden, and just because it wasn't true and it was unfair to Dominion Voting Systems. And, you know, our cartoonists believed very fervently that Venezuela had been creating crooked voting machines that fraudulently threw the election, and that just wasn't true, and I wasn't gonna have it presented as true even in cartoons where you're not presenting facts, but you can say things in such a way as you seem [00:17:00] to be presenting facts.

So this is one of my rules. I have to draw the line between truth and not truth when truth is not common to all newspapers and all readers, and that's what I do. I'm the guy who kills the cartoons. Okay, this cartoon by cartoonist Sandy Huffaker, this is an old one. This was during the Iraq War and President Bush.

This cartoon got us more death threats than any other cartoon we've ever had, and these were directed at me, so this was, you know, a little more disturbing to me than the usual, uh, hubbub that we have about cartoons. So you've got the American soldier who's in Iraq, and he says, "Anything in there about gratitude?"

At the time, the argument was, "Well, they got rid of that evil Saddam Hussein, but nobody seems grateful for that." And the Iraqi, who is not drawn in a very flattering way, is reading the Quran for Dummies. Well, this was offensive to, uh, a very motivated minority of readers, and this group called [00:18:00] CAIR, C-A-I-R, Council of American Islamic Relations, put out a call to their membership to email me because they perceived that I was the person who could fire the cartoonist, demanding that I fire the cartoonist.

And I got literally thousands of emails, more than 10,000, uh, emails demanding that I fire the cartoonist. And of those emails, I would say about 600 were in the form of death threats, "Fire the cartoonist or else." And not specific death threats like, "I know where you live," but, uh, you know, "You're gonna die."

kind of death threats. So this was, uh, you know, this is, this is scary stuff. Um, what can I say? I didn't draw the cartoon, but as the guy who's perceived to be able to fire cartoonists that offend, I often draw the fire. So here's another one of those. This is a cartoon by Sean Delonas, and this is depicting Trump and Netanyahu.

And Sean [00:19:00] described this as, uh, being a kind of a Dante's Inferno Hieronymus Bosch kind of takeoff with Trump and Israel and Lindsey Graham there, and Ted Cruz and Pete Hegseth. Anyway, this group called Pens into Swords, they have about a half a dozen WhatsApp groups, each with more than 10,000 subscribers.

And they put out a form letter that they want the people in these groups to forward to me to demand that I fire the cartoonist who drew such an antisemitic cartoon. Now, I should say, this doesn't, this doesn't hit the tripwires for us of what is antisemitic. You see the, the blood money at the top of the tree, which is a, another antisemitic trope. Uh, but mostly these Pens into Swords people focused on Netanyahu's nose being an antisemitic trope, Jews having big noses. But, uh, [00:20:00] I, you know, I, I don't see it. Uh, his nose looks kinda like any cartoonist would draw his nose.

So I got quite a lot of these demand emails, a lot of them just forwarding the form letter. And what's interesting about what this Pens into Swords does is that they'll pick a bunch of CC email addresses for people that they think will be especially annoyed by getting copied on the thousands of emails that are demanding something of me.

So they had people on the list like the editor of The New Yorker, editors of popular big newspapers, other syndicates, so that they would all get bombarded with the, the same emails that I get. And I understand this group does a, a number of these kind of emails on different topics. Mostly, I think, punishing BDS organizations that boycott Israel.

They don't like the boycotting Israel companies, and they want them to feel the unpleasantness of all of these carbon copies to people that are also annoyed [00:21:00] by getting all these emails. So that's the story of this one. And this, you know, this one had some stuff in it that I think was getting close to the line.

In particular, the one that bothered me was the blood money at the top. But I didn't think it went so far as to be something that I should kill, so I let this one pass. But, you know, it's not a It's not a clear line. This is another one that we had trouble with Sean Delonas on. He's got the street gangsters, uh, holding up the couple.

The man says, "

Now, honey, I believe they prefer to be called Dreamers or 

future Democrats." Sean is a conservative and, uh, this is a cartoon that, uh, offended people and they bombarded the newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal, with email and the Journal was troubled by that and they wrote, uh, an apology editorial and, uh This one went on for a while.

The cartoonist did not apologize in this case, and, [00:22:00] um, it, uh, faded away. This is a very interesting cartoon. This is a rough draft for a cartoon that Ann Telnaes drew for The Washington Post. And, you know, she had to present this to the editor there for approval, which is something that some newspapers do.

They don't let the cartoonists just draw whatever they want. They have the cartoonists get them approved, and this one was not approved. And at this time, there was controversy about The Washington Post moving to the right and kissing up to Trump, and that is disturbing and has caused a drop in readership and a drop in credibility for The Washington Post.

So here she's showing Jeff Bezos The Washington Post publisher , and I guess that's the publisher of the LA Times and Mark Zuckerberg and the ChatGPT CEO presenting their money and their tribute to Trump, along with Disney, represented by Mickey Mouse. And I think it's a great cartoon. The editor killed it. And there's an issue that cartoonists [00:23:00] have.

You know, "Draw whatever you want," they'll say, "but don't draw the publisher's pal that he plays golf with." There are lines you don't cross because that's where the newspaper's bread and butter is. And in this case, that should not be where the newspaper's bread and butter is, and this was a, a good statement for her.

The Washington Post editor said that they killed it because they've covered this topic before, which is a nonsense reason. Anyway, Ann took this as an opportunity to resign. I call it an opportunity because she made a very effective argument, and this really carried a lot of press. And this has gotta be about the most effective cartoonist resignation that I can think of ever happening.

I'm very impressed with her for this, and she, she won the Pulitzer Prize this year, I think largely because people appreciated her making this statement with her resignation [00:24:00] and making it so professionally and effectively. So kudos to Ann for this. I'm just very impressed with this, so, uh, very good. This is another example of kind of the same syndrome of the, who's the publisher having golf with.

I was the cartoonist for the Gannett's Honolulu Advertiser newspaper. And a- at that time, there was an incident with a, a submarine. They had guest celebrities driving the submarine, and they were letting them have a joyride, and they could make the submarine go up- Real fast and pop out of the water and pop back down, and that was exciting, like a carnival ride.

So wh- what happened was they were not being careful with this. They hit a school boat teaching Japanese school children how to be fishermen, and killed a bunch of Japanese students, and it was a terrible tragedy. I drew cartoons that were critical of the Navy. Here's celebrities driving the boat. And, uh, the newspaper, uh, killed my cartoons.

I probably [00:25:00] drew a dozen of these about that incident. It was a big, uh, local story as well as a, a world story. It's a terrible tragedy. But, um, nope, the newspaper wouldn't have it. The newspaper had a relationship with the Navy. They said, "This is a Navy town, and we're not gonna draw these cartoons that are so harsh and critical of the Navy."

Well, I had just started my syndicate at that time. This was year 2000. My cartoons were being reprinted in other newspapers, and these cartoons about this submarine thing, which was a national story, were, were very widely reprinted, I think much to the consternation of the Honolulu Advertiser. This is Aung San Suu Kyi from Burma, Myanmar, and when she was the president or prime minister, she went from being a Nobel Prize-winning hero to being just terrible to the Rohingya minority.

And I saw that as an evolution, and she was... You know, she was just among the people that were the, the worst [00:26:00] detractors of this Muslim minority in Myanmar, forcing them out of the country, abusing them, burning their towns, and that changed my opinion of her. I, I certainly don't see her as a hero anymore.

Now she's in prison again, and I think draws plenty of sympathy, and she shouldn't be in prison, but she certainly was bad in my opinion. Well, I learned how the people in Myanmar, the majority of them, really, really hate those Rohingyas, and I got some interesting cartoon commentary back on this on social media.

This is me, the evolution of Daryl Cagle, with me turning into a pig. I gather pigs are not well-respected in Burma. Here is Aung San Suu Kyi walking along on top of my heads. It's very significant to them, the bottom of your foot. The bottom of the foot is a big insult in Myanmar, so I got some interesting bottom-of-the-foot cartoons.

This is me as a [00:27:00] dog. Dogs are not well-respected, I have learned, in Myanmar, and this is the bottom of a dog's foot on my face, which is all the more uh, disrespect. So lots of anger in Myanmar when you complain about Aung San Suu Kyi. So switching to plagiarism. All these problems for cartoonists, and we keep going with plagiarism.

This is Jonathan Nacua, who is, I guess, is a college professor in the Philippines, and this was sent to me recently. I guess there had been a collection of his plagiarized cartoons on social media, and somebody sent this to me. But they've kind of been scrubbed, and it's hard to find more examples, although I'm told there are lots more examples, especially of his copying Dave Granlund and Rick McKee.

So I would like to see some more of these. If any of you have Jonathan Nacua plagiarism samples that were passed around on social media, I'd appreciate. He seems to be a respected college professor who teaches about editorial cartoons and has written a [00:28:00] book about how to be an editorial cartoonist. And, you know, plagiarism is bad.

Send me your samples. Thanks. Here is a cartoon I drew about people graduating but not finding jobs when they graduate. This is the plagiarized example from a cartoonist who drew for a major newspaper in Saudi Arabia, and you can see, look at the positions of the people falling off the cliff. They match the positions in my cartoon.

Plagiarism around the world is really not that unusual, especially when they come to our site and look back at old cartoons and figure, "Oh, this cartoon from 10 years ago, nobody's gonna notice that." This is how we feel about our taxes and how they feel about their taxes in Saudi Arabia. You know, I often draw these old couples in front of the TV.

This is an old couple in front of the TV by a cartoonist for a newspaper in South Africa. Notice the bent finger from the man sitting on the couch in his underwear, and the bent finger from the [00:29:00] man sitting on the couch in his underwear in my drawing. These, these images, they're not always traced, but they very often like to pick up all these little particular details and copy them, and it's another bane for cartoonists.

I should talk about AI. AI is a threat to editorial cartooning, and this cartoon ran as an editorial cartoon in the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Big newspaper in Baltimore, serious newspaper, which has a, a rich tradition of editorial cartooning. They, uh, had our Cagle cartoonists, uh, Mike Lane, who was a cartoonist there for many years, and Kal, Kevin Kallaugher, brilliant cartoonist who also draws for The Economist in Britain.

They fired Kal, and they have been running AI-generated cartoons, which I'm told are orchestrated by the publisher of the paper, who has a little editorial committee, and they sit together and they draw cartoons as a committee. They make a list of things. Notice how wordy this is and how there are lists and how there's a bunch [00:30:00] of people in the image.

This is really very similar to the kinds of cartoon ideas that I get unsolicited from readers. Cartoons that feature a whole lot of people, and a whole lot of people you'll recognize. Say, uh, "Draw an army coming from the left and an army come over... coming from the right, and the sky is filled with helicopters."

Or, "Draw a scene in hell, and Lindsey Graham's going to hell, and all the other people in hell are the other people in the Senate." And the crowd scenes and lists are the kinds of things that you get from amateur cartoonists, and that you get from a committee. You know, uh, if any of you are illustrators, you know the worst thing about an art director who has to go back and report to a committee is that everybody in the committee wants to get their thing into the illustration.

You'll come back with a list of all this junk, and everything ends up being a crowd scene or a list. So it's obvious what's going on here. This is, this is the, what has come from the committee. And here's another example. Lots of [00:31:00] labels, lots of, uh, list of junk, lots of caricatures of particular people drawn in that terrible AI style.

People say, "Well, do you have an example of how AI has actually cost editorial cartoonists their jobs?" Well, here you've got Kevin Kallaugher, Kal, laid off from the Baltimore Sun and replaced by, uh, AI cartoons that are just, just terrible. Um, again All this wordiness, all this list of junk, all of these caricatures of people, it's a horror show.

And it... What's crazy to me is that somebody likes this. I mean, this editorial committee, this publisher at The Baltimore Sun likes this, and it's terrible. At Cagle Cartoons, our little syndicate, we don't allow this AI stuff. What can I say? This is one of our cartoonists, Michael de Adder. You saw that cartoon earlier that got him fired from the Halifax [00:32:00] group of newspapers.

A great cartoonist in Canada who's doing very well now. He draws for The, The Globe and Mail national newspaper. He's great. This is a U.S. Supreme Court cartoon and, and I think it's great. This is how the LA Progressive, one of our subscribers, uh, ran his cartoon through AI, looking like this. Actually, this, this doesn't look bad, and kind of the secret to making AI do a good cartoon is to put a good cartoon into it and ask it to render the cartoon differently.

And this is another blight that cartoonists have. This is still a good cartoon, but that's only because they put it, the good cartoon in and they didn't destroy it with the AI. Here's another example, another Michael de Adder cartoon, and in the AI, in the AI version in the LA Progressive and what that looks like.

It's not as good as the Michael de Adder original, but that's because it didn't make too many changes. And this is a threat to cartoonists. [00:33:00] Here, this one is by Bill Day. Uh, it's a cute cartoon. This is the LA Progressive's version of it, and that's just terrible. This is theft. Look at how it's credited to Cagle and ChatGPT.

Because they were a subscriber, we just found out about this and asked them to stop. Um, you know, there's a threat that, uh, a publication can say, "Well, I like this particular style. I want these things to be drawn in this style, and it'll look consistent and it'll look like we have a cartoonist." And they just feed the junk into it, and that's terrible.

Uh, here's another Michael De Adder cartoon, a lovely cartoon, and here it is in the LA Progressive. And, uh, you know, it's still a lovely cartoon, but it's not as lovely as the original line drawing. And it's just a crime to take the cartoonist's cartoon and run it through this and, and make it into something different.

Not much reason editorially. It's the same point, but [00:34:00] ugh. This is a, a group on YouTube that takes a good cartoon, the cartoon on the left by Dave Granlund, runs it through AI, and ends up with the same cartoon, but it looks like it's drawn differently, and it's drawn by AI, and it has a consistent look, and it's a lousy look, and it's not as good as what the cartoonist did.

Here you see Bob Englehart on the left and the run-through AI version for YouTube on the right. I've been sending, sending YouTube demand notices to take down their hundreds of videos with... Which were stealing our cartoons and running them without alterations. This period of when they were doing these redrawings of our cartoons was, um, in response to the takedown notices to YouTube.

We sent probably 3 or 400 For, uh, three or 400 videos, and they, um, by running them through the AI and making them look different, it, uh, I think the idea was that they would be harder to identify as being [00:35:00] stolen, and perhaps they would be testing the limits of what copyright law is, because, you know, traditionally, if something's redrawn, the, the gag is not something that might be strong enough to copyright.

Perhaps there are enough differences, make it not be a copyright violation, although it's, you know, clearly plagiarism. But in this case, with this kind of stealing by crooks, this is just a process of running things through in bulk and redrawing them in order to avoid being found in an image search or, uh, having real copyright liability.

And to YouTube's credit, they did take all this junk down. But that was in response to our demand notices, which they can be slow to respond to and sometimes argue with. But, you know, eventually, they did take them down. And now these same guys from Turkey are stealing from other cartoonists and other syndicates who don't take the trouble to send takedown notices, and not much we can do about it.

We can only send takedown [00:36:00] notices for our cartoonists who give us permission to do so. All you other cartoonists that the guys in Turkey are stealing from, it's up to you to send your own takedown notices. We can't do it for you, and sorry about that. So the abuse continues. This is a lovely cartoon by John Darkow, Trump and President Nixon, and here it is run through the AI.

You know, actually, it's a lovely cartoon run through the AI also. That's because it was such a lovely cartoon to begin with. Now, I look at this and I think, "Oh, how much better this is than this." But if you hadn't seen the better version, you could look at this and say, "Oh, what a lovely cartoon." That is the secret for how you steal cartoons.

You take the signature off, you run it through AI, and maybe somebody else drew it, and now it's gonna be hard to find and hard to identify as being stolen. This is a very real threat to cartoonists, not only from, uh, people that wanna use your cartoon without paying for it, without permission, or change a few [00:37:00] words and have it say what they intend for it to say, but also because, A, some place like The LA Progressive just likes another look.

And there's a bunch of different cartoonists with different styles, and perhaps they'd like for them to all be the same style. Some of it is due to preference, and, uh, it is just, uh, heartbreaking that people can look at AI cartoons and think that they like them better than what the original artist did.

So here I have used AI to create a cover image for this video, and this I guess is what AI thinks I look like. And it's got the burning newspapers and stuff like this, this image behind me. And I notice on YouTube that there's a heck of a lot of covers that look like this. I thought, "Well, I'm gonna try it and see if people like it better than this," which is, uh, a cartoon version for a cover for this video that I like much better.

I drew that Uncle Sam. So I'm doing an A/B test for this [00:38:00] video. We'll see which one more readers want to click on. And if you see this as the cover image for this video, I'm disappointed because that means that the YouTube readers clicked on this more than they clicked on this. If you wanna see the results of this little experiment, hey, all you have to do, just look at what you clicked on.

Thank you for listening to this long diatribe. These are all the best examples I've got of why our profession is going down the tubes and more likely to die before newspapers die. Newspaper editors are timid because as their audience grows smaller and more elderly, they are more reactive to one little email that says, "I'm canceling my subscription."

Interestingly, in the past, newspapers that were liberal would run left-right cartoons, view from the left, view from the right. Conservative papers would run just conservative cartoons. But now they all run the same cartoons. They run soft little jokes that are going to offend nobody. And the cartoonists, [00:39:00] to their credit, keep drawing strong cartoons, but they're not getting printed.

It's a very frustrating world in which we live. So, hey, thank you for watching and sharing my pain. And in the comments, please leave in the comments whether you would like to see me redo this list of all these controversial cartoons with a group of three or four other cartoonists, so you can hear their comments on the controversial cartoons.

I think that might be interesting, but I'd like to know if you would watch it having seen all the cartoons. Leave in the comments whether you'd like to see that. And thank you so much. Please like and subscribe, and see you with the next one.