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 may generate concepts and draw them as cartoons mechanically. It presaged current developments in AI picture synthesis, one century later, that truly can create art work mechanically.
The classic cartoon carries the caption “Within the yr 2023 when all our work is completed 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.
Curiously, this separation of labor feels much like our neural networks of immediately. 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 much like an image-synthesis mannequin like Stable Diffusion.
In 2014, the weblog Paleofuture profiled Webster’s work and this cartoon specifically, noting that in the beginning of the 1920s, solely 35 p.c of Individuals had electrical energy at house. Electrical energy and the units it powered represented a radical new approach to get issues carried out. Yesterday, somebody on Reddit noticed the cartoon once more, and it went viral on social media.
Curiously, 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 often 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 personal butterfly wings and citywide networks of pneumatic tubes, this prediction from Webster appears to hit pretty near the mark.
