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In 1923, an editorial cartoonist named H.T. Webster drew a humorous cartoon for the New York World newspaper depicting a fictional 2023 machine that might generate concepts and draw them as cartoons robotically. It presaged current developments in AI picture synthesis, one century later, that really can create art work robotically.
The classic cartoon carries the caption “Within the 12 months 2023 when all our work is finished by electrical energy.” It depicts a cartoonist standing by his drawing desk and planning for social occasions whereas an “concept dynamo” generates concepts and a “cartoon dynamo” renders the art work.
Apparently, this separation of labor feels just like our neural networks of right this moment. Within the precise 2023, the “concept dynamo” would doubtless be a big language mannequin like GPT-3 (albeit imperfectly), and the “cartoon dynamo” is most just like an image-synthesis mannequin like Steady Diffusion.
In 2014, the weblog Paleofuture profiled Webster’s work and this cartoon particularly, noting that in the beginning of the Twenties, solely 35 p.c of People had electrical energy at residence. Electrical energy and the gadgets it powered represented a radical new technique to get issues finished. Yesterday, somebody on Reddit seen the cartoon once more, and it went viral on social media.
Apparently, regardless of fast advances in generative AI know-how over the previous two years, image-synthesis fashions aren’t that nice at line artwork but, as a cartoonist named Douglas Bonneville typically notes on Twitter.
However enhancements in AI fashions that grasp hand-drawn cartoons could also be simply across the nook. And in contrast to different early-1900s future projections that concerned private butterfly wings and citywide networks of pneumatic tubes, this prediction from Webster appears to hit pretty near the mark.
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