Expecting

I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.

And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to the Secret Symbols.

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Hi, guys. We’re traveling this week so I may keep this short. (Yeah, right.) 

We were chatting this morning with some folks about artificial intelligence and I began to better understand my instinctive objections to it. Maybe you feel the same, maybe not.

The two most common uses for AI that I hear people talking about are how it can write for you, or create art from your written instructions. If you’re unfamiliar with the art part, it works like this: you type something like “a gothic castle protected by a fire-breathing rodent in yellow shorts in the style of Leonardo da Vinci,” and it will instantly come up with numerous versions of detailed, finished illustrations that look like Renaissance paintings by someone obsessed with Game of Thrones and Mickey Mouse.

Understandably, numerous people have asked me if I’ve tried this kind of text-to-art program. At a friend’s suggestion, I played around with one of them for a few minutes one day but I found it profoundly unsatisfying and, based on that brief experiment, have never tried the writing functions of AI. 

The most obvious reason these art programs don’t appeal to me is simple: drawing is one of my favorite things to do. I’d no more turn that process over to a computer than I would buy an android that could have sex with my wife for me.

I also love to write, so getting a computer to do that for me would be like using a device that would bypass my mouth and deposit food directly into my stomach. Where’s the fun in that?

If you’ve no writing or art abilities, I can see why you might want to employ this technology, but consider this: being busy makes time pass quickly while having nothing to do can bore you out of your skull. If having everything done for us were a gateway to ecstasy, there would not be so many grievances among British royals, and the super-rich would stay home and enjoy their downtime instead of running around trying to dominate the world and change the results of elections.

Simply put, doing things is satisfying—being indefinitely idle leads to depression. Sure, it’s exciting to create an amazing illustration by typing a few words, but my guess is that most people will become bored with the ease of it and would find far greater satisfaction in grabbing some real art supplies and making a mess. More fundamentally, how satisfying can it be to hold up a piece of art and say, “I typed this”?

Regarding getting AI to write for you, a friend pointed out that AI derives its results by recombining stuff that humans have most often said or written. Anything AI writes is by definition a kind of well-disguised, rehashed plagiarism. If you’re looking for new perspectives and unique ideas, you can’t beat the human brain. It is by far the most complex system we know of in the universe and each one is unique. Do you really want to put that out to pasture?

On top of all that, there has never been a shortage of artificial intelligence (plagiarists) among us humans; why are we so anxious to build machines that can throw gasoline on that bonfire?

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Let’s find out now what Wayno’s authentic intelligence has invented in this week’s Bizarro cartoons…

Coming first is a dubious accolade to say the least.

A comment on our IG feed said this hand gesture is obscene in Turkey. Maybe that’s why Bizarro doesn’t appear in the Istanbul Herald.

It’s true; most pot heads love garlic.

He’s on his lunch break from his job at Mom’s Machine Shop.

If there is an intruder in my shower, I prefer they have a squeegee over a butcher knife.

You may think this is a non-existent stereotype but when I was a teen, I dated a girl from the Ozarks—her grandad was this guy. No kidding.

That’s what we’ve got for you this week. Olive Oyl and I are a few minutes away from trusting our lives to the untamable forces of chaos, which is to say we’re on our way to the airport. Pray for us, light a candle, send us good energy, whatever you got. We can use it.

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