Editorial Cartooning

KAL Interviewed About The Artificial Baltimore Sun

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D. D. Degg Published: September 24, 2026 1 minute 0 comments

Kevin (KAL) Kallagher drew political cartoons for The Baltimore Sun for 30 years (1988-2006 & 2012-2025). In 2025 the new owner of the newspaper fired KAL as he possessed diametrically opposite political views the new owner wished to promote and Kal would not ease up on drawing cartoons mocking the Trump administration.

A year after that firing the editors of The Sun began using artificial intelligence (a.i.) to generate editorial cartoons that expounded the views of the owner. To be sure the firing of KAL was unrelated to the use of a.i., the two were separated by a year, and the editors did not think that far ahead.

The outrage is that there are plenty of conservative cartoonists who could be hired to willingly illustrate the editors’ ideas, instead they went with the cheap, unimaginative route. A path they continue to follow as recently as yesterday.

David Nitkin for Baltimore Fishbowl caught up with KAL to discuss the use of a.i. for political cartooning.

KAL: There’s been a lot of AI-generated content in a lot of different areas. I think what got to me was that you could imagine one person trying it once, but when they started doing it twice, every week or so, it seemed, I thought: this is a pattern. This is, I think, the first case in American journalism where AI cartoons have basically become part of a publication’s repertoire. That’s clearly instructions from the top; they like this, they’re going with this. And I thought people should know about it. It’s one more of these stories about AI taking people’s jobs. But with something like a cartoon, in the creative realm, it becomes more potent in people’s eyes, because you can see the difference between a cartoon made by a machine and one made by a person, and that a publication is choosing to go with the machine.

Here KAL discusses how does a cartoonist draw A.I.