1923 Comic Predicted AI Art Generators Would Be The Norm In 2023
Photo 139475314 © Davinci | Dreamstime.com
Art-making artificial intelligence tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion make up a new frontier that continues to amaze—and frighten—humans every day. Yet, it seems like people of our grandparents’ time had already seen them coming.
“In the year 2023… all our work is done by electricity,” reads the caption of a comic created by editorial cartoonist H. T. Webster for the defunct New York World newspaper in 1923.
Well, it gets more bizarre. The illustration appeared to sum up how AI art generators work today, a revelation that has astounded the Stable Diffusion community on Reddit.
Cartoonist from 1923 predicts automated artwork in 2023 from StableDiffusion
It features an ‘Idea Dynamo’ generating ideas and sending them to a ‘Cartoon Dynamo’, which dreams up the artwork. There are stacks upon stacks of machine-made cartoons, because everything in 2023 is automated.
Meanwhile, a human cartoonist stands at the corner and makes afternoon plans with a friend over the phone, since he doesn’t need to draw anything.
As Ars Technica notes, the real ‘Idea Dynamo’ of 2023 would be a language model like GPT-3, while the ‘Cartoon Dynamo’ is likely an image-creation model like Stable Diffusion.
Also, there’s writing on the comic panels, so this unintentional premonition might have foreseen ChatGPT too.
Interestingly, the concept sounded ridiculous to tech insiders even as recently as 2014, when Gizmodo featured the comic and described the technology of outsourcing creativity to robots as “more spoof than sincere.” Nevertheless, Matt Novak, the article’s author, concluded: “Sometimes the most outlandish predictions have a way of coming true.”
AI generators skyrocketed into popularity almost overnight only a few months ago, so it’s impressive how an artist from an era where electricity was a luxury was able to picture an AI brain and an AI imagination. In fact, according to Novak, the majority of Americans (about 65%) had no access to electricity in their homes in 1920.
[via Boing Boing and Ars Technica, images via various sources]
