It Could be Worse. 10/09/26

Isn’t AI fun? First we worried about how it would kill creativity. For instance, it could take a bunch of Aaron Sorkin scripts, figure out he likes fast, punchy dialogue and one-take traveling shots and write a new Aaron Sorkin-like movie. But it could never BE him. We worried it would put writers and actors and directors and art directors out of business. It could take John’s illustrations, my blog-writing, our comic sensibilities and make future New 60 comics for us. Killing our jobs is one thing. Killing us is quite another.

I once almost walked out on a dinner with friends when one of them insisted AI could do anything better than anyone. Not just better than me, better than anyone. It might be able to do things without emotion better than anyone. It might come up with a cure for a once seemingly incurable disease. It might figure out how to save Social Security. It might be able to copy someone’s writing style, but it couldn’t get to their emotional core. A comic book compadre, Sarah Andersen (of Sarah’ Scribbles) was once hacked, she has an easily recognizable style, and AI copied her illustration style and came up with material that was both racist and anti-semitic or politically alt-right. She isn’t any of those things. Could AI come up with a grandchild wondering how the scarecrow would sing if it didn’t have a brain. Nope. A fully formed 5 1/2 year old human (who happens to be my granddaughter) came up with that.

But when it comes to mass human extinction? Kind of makes the copy-cat stuff seem less important. So how can AI do us in? There’s a funny topic for next week’s comics and blog. Unless we let AI handle it.

Have a great weekend and watch out for bots, they’re hiding everywhere,

Andy and John

Human Intelligence 09/18/26

Are you becoming more and more dependent on artificial intelligence? Do you turn to Claude, or Chat or Gemini to figure out almost everything? We do. And yet all we read about is how scary AI is. At the New 60 Worldwide Headquarters we have another problem with AI. It’s almost indistinguishable from the spelling of our main character, Al. Case in point, I just asked ChatGPT while writing this blog, “What’s the proper way to spell AI? Should there be a period between the A and the I?” And it told me, “no period.” I then asked them how I should refer to each of them moving forward and it said “Context is important. Example: AI: I asked Al to write my biography.” This is a word for word response from AI (artificial intelligence). I’m glad that clears everything up. Huh???!!!! In comic parlance the combo of question mark and exclamation is called an “interrobang.”

Here’s the thing. We could probably figure all this out ourselves but the more we depend on Al (artificial intelligence), nobody in their right mind would depend on Al, (the human being). Well actually he’s not a human being, he’s a character in a comic strip, but you get the point.

At any rate this week’s comics show us how AI can work for or against us. If you use it to figure out how to get the best deal from a car dealer, they can also use it to find out how to squeeze the most money out of you. We also explore human intelligence, which led us to this question: how smart are we if we create something that doesn’t need us anymore? But I guess that’s sort of like having children.

Have a greatest last official weekend of the summer solstice ( I checked it out with ChatGPT who told me the Fall Equinox doesn’t happen until Sept, 22),

Andy and John