In 1923, Cartoonist Predicted AI-Art by 2023 (1923)
Meet the "Cartoon Dynamo"
This isn't exactly how DALL-E works, but it does suggest an AI-like image generator. Electricity was quite the thing in the 1920s - reaching only a third of American homes at the start of decade and nearly three-quarters by 1930.
This 1923 cartoon was by H.T. Webster. Harold Tucker Webster (September 21, 1885 – September 22, 1952) was an American cartoonist known for The Timid Soul, Bridge, Life's Darkest Moments and others in his syndicated series which ran from the 1920s into the 1950s.
The titles of Webster's cartoons reflected the different situations, as in Our Boyhood Ambitions and Bridge. In 1924, he moved to the New York World and soon after added The Timid Soul featuring Caspar Milquetoast, a wimpy character whose name is derived from milk toast. Webster described Caspar Milquetoast as "the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick". The modern dictionary definition of milquetoast (meaning a very shy or retiring person) comes from Webster's cartoons.
Header image: Reddit
The future is now. Can AI outperform and ultimately replace humans in generating creative content? Well yes, if the creative content is a marketing tool in a capitalist economy...selling everything from toothpaste, to toilet paper to digital works of art.