AI makes my dream come true
The return of Joe MBA
Joe MBA was born in the margins—scratched out in ink as my mind wandered and my sanity faltered through weeks of droning lectures on SEC 10-K filings and cost accounting1.
I can still draw Joe:
Joe is all straight lines because I can’t draw a curve. I learned how to draw a straight line when I tried to be an architect.
Joe lives in a perpetual state of dismay which is how I felt throughout much of grad school. In this drawing, Joe is trying to land a summer internship by doing cold calls—the stuff of my nightmares.2
I worked on a Joe MBA comic strip for the Business School paper, and I was really disappointed when the editor wouldn’t print it. The strip showed Joe getting increasingly overwhelmed trying to land an internship.
In retrospect, this was probably not the look the school was going for.
My subsequent career in tech didn’t leave much room for drawing comics, so Joe languished and my drawing aspirations were put on hold.
Even before my going away party, I got an Apple Pencil and bought Procreate for my iPad. I shook my fist at the sky, determined to finally fulfill my destiny to become an artist.
That’s not going great. While I keep working on it, AI progresses like mad.
Can AI resuscitate Joe?
First, I took my sharpie + legal pad sketch and asked AI if it could clean it up:
Good start, right?
Next, I took Joe off for a visit to Meta labs where I had fun awhile back animating the illustration for a post about Sam Bankman Fried. I had SBF get chased around by a cop to the Benny Hill theme song.
Meta has Joe whipping his old phone around like a num-chuk:
Bruce Lee achievement unlocked, I set to recreate that unpublished comic where Joe goes through a spectrum of emotions hunting for an internship.
While Joe might not have been right for the University of Washington, he’s on-brand for TechTales:
Pretty good!
It took a few tries to get a good result because ChatGPT has a bug right now where it truncates the first panel in a multi-panel strip:
I figured AI should up my game, so I went for the pinnacle of comic strips—the one-panel. We brainstormed ideas for Joe’s single panel appearance. I like this one the best and I’ll overlook the spelling error because AI gave Joe got a Spiderman tie!
I did not tell ChatGPT to do that:
But then, when I asked for a different one-panel variant, it generated this:
WTAF? Who are these people? This is someone else’s image.
I asked why:
Ha! That… is definitely not Joe MBA realizing his AI replacement just gave the keynote.
That’s a merry Patagonia postcard—festive sweaters, Santa hats, and zero existential dread. Looks like the render wires crossed for this version.
Let me fix that…
Crossed wires.
I switched gears to video. Video from reference images versus text prompts is a newer generative AI feature. Google just announced their latest model Veo 3, and it’s all the rage.
I gave it my reference image of Joe with this prompt:
Joe is excitedly talking on the phone, gesturing wildly.
Bonus points for the possessed rotary phone and Joe flipping us the bird:
Joe is back!
If you too would like to become an artist, here’s Tesla’s latest 10K to get you started.
Somehow I ended up with a great summer internship at Nestle fixing computers.
I love this. The experimental nature reminds me of Dan's drawing experiment, of course, but also of a few of my own. I was walking across the street to my gym, so I wanted to see if I could create a "Forrest Stump" cartoon about Forrest Gump, but he got bit directly in the penis, before I made it to the gym. I got it done, but not while I was still on the way there.
Ha, that "Happy Holidays" outta-the-blue fail is fantastic. I'd be curious to see that chunk of your chat and the prompt directly preceding the output. That might help explain why ChatGPT misunderstood the task.
Fun fact: Meta's "Animated Drawings" was one of the very first things I came across when I first started writing about AI in 2022. I even covered it in a later Sunday Rundown issue: https://www.whytryai.com/i/138270747/metas-animated-drawings
As for Veo - are you sure you've used the Veo 3 one? Are you paying the crazy fee for it? Because Veo 2 is free in Google AI Studio and is the perfect alternative if you're not going for realism and native sound effects.