More About Baltimore Sun’s A.I. (Anti-Integrity) Cartoons
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First there is a mistaken impression that many seem to have taken from The Daily Cartoonist’s (TDC) news of The Baltimore Sun using A.I. cartoons. When TDC noted the horrible practice it was specifically stated that “The Daily Cartoonist does not know if this is the first such occurrence (emphasis added) or if it has previously happened.” The image shown on that post was from the Sept. 4th edition of The Baltimore Sun.
Today local news site Baltimore Brew carried a story about the increasing indignation over The Sun’s use of A.I. and even they pointed to the Sept. 4 cartoon as the first instance. But, as far as The Daily Cartoonist can discern, the paper started using A.I. “cartoons” the month before.
Without a Baltimore Sun subscription or access to the physical papers the best TDC can suss out is that the first Sun A.I. cartoon apparently appeared on August 14, 2026 (we are not putting our hand on a bible about that date). Other instances include at least Aug. 25 and 31, and Sept. 1 and 5.
Ironically that is only a couple months after the editors chose to publish a Pedro X. Molina cartoon about A.I.
Anyway the objections over The Sun’s use of A.I from the AAEC and The Herblock Foundation and a host of editorial cartoonists, including fired Sun cartoonist KAL, has not dissuaded The Sun editors from continuing the practice (the latest being Sept. 11).
This weekend Ted Rall and Scott Stantis invited Rick McKee (editorial cartoonists all!) to their DMZ America Podcast for a discussion about the blasphemy. At one point Stantis imagines the editors of the paper admiring their A.I. slop and exclaiming, “Damn, this is good!.” And that is probably their thinking.
A couple days before that podcast Rall mentioned the possibility of cartoonists gathering together for a class action lawsuit against Open AI’s ChatGPT and those who use it for scrapping the cartoonists’ art.
Neither cartoonists nor, for that matter, writers were approached by these giant multi-billion-dollar technology companies to rent or purchase the training rights. Operating under the “move fast and break things” dictum that it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, they stole copyrighted material worth billions of dollars without asking, much less obtaining, permission from the copyright holders.
When editors or staffers at the Baltimore Sun input their prompt to ChatGPT or whatever other model they used, it drew on that illegally purloined material to create their abomination of a cartoon…
Rall’s “Grand Theft A.I.” column can be read in full at the Breeze Courier or at Ted’s website.
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