My Readers Spoke Out

And I Listened

Everybody loves footnotes. That’s what I’ve learned and I’ve got a boatload of them for you in this issue of The Bob.¹

Cartoon from last week’s Wall Street Journal.²

There’s a lot of threatening to leave and de-friending among many I know on social media who are either using or denouncing AI. It looks like half the people on my feed, have either posted an AI portrait or shared what they claim was an earnest conversation with a new ChatGPT companion. Many sheepishly confess, “they just had to try making one.” The two groups I see butting heads in the Comments are usually; 1) Creative people, who dabble in the arts, enter the caption contest, or just admire its power, versus 2) Creatives, who make art as their sole source of income, and may have experienced or witnessed some form of job loss.³

I am not going to risk boring my readers, going down another AI rabbit hole and rehashing the obvious—I just did. But if you want to hear more of what I advise on this subject, I recently discussed at length how AI is affecting publishing and freelance illustration on The Publishing Guide podcast with Vanessa Gomez.

• Spotify:

• Apple:

I will add this last word,⁴ in response is to why this is different from the “radio & photography” argument I am often given.

“Historically, whenever there have been technological advances people have worried about mass unemployment… So, there’s a part of me that is a little bit sceptical [sic] that all the jobs will disappear, but at the same time there is a reason to think that this technology might be different, in the sense that humans always maintained some type of absolute advantage over technology in certain domains. And that may no longer be true.”

— Lucy Knight, The Guardian

The caption in Vietnamese loses something in translation; “Son, one day all this will belong to the government.”

Here’s a cartoon, generated by AI, that was on Facebook⁵ that sure bears a strong resemblance to my cartoon below.⁶ I did notice the caption is now in Vietnamese. Tell me what you think.

Often it is reused by cropping out my name. This one got 19K Shares but it’s appeared on 100s of posts with similar numbers, making it likely to have over a million (uncredited) Shares.

I’m working on not oversharing so much.⁷ But maybe I can share the answer to a common question I get in interviews; what is a typical workday like for me? So, to that end, I made a log yesterday of everything I accomplished. I was home all day;

9 am Breakfast. Oatmeal with raisins and almond milk.⁸ Watched a taped match from the evening before of the Gold Medal for Mixed Doubles Curling match, USA versus Sweden.

11 am Watched the Olympics. Something to do with flipping on skis. Missed two calls.

1 pm Made lunch. Ate homemade chicken soup and multi-grain toast. Put on the Women’s first round curling match against South Korea.

4 pm Took a nap while watching of the Gold Medal for Mixed Doubles Curling match, USA versus Sweden, again.

7 pm Over dinner (salmon, green beans, and a yam⁹), watched the USA Women’s Curling team play Sweden.

9:30 pm Wrote some work emails. Retire for the day and watch more Olympic curling in bed.

So there you go. I have started journaling. It’s just for the bathroom; Ex., “Today I took two Dulcolax—it’s all hands on deck. I daydream of marketing slogans for them while I await the product’s effectiveness. Dulcolax, when every second counts. Dulcolax, for people on the run.”¹⁰

From Barron’s magazine

Thanks for reading. Stay sane.

1. My first book, The History of the Snowman was initially obsessed with footnotes. The book had multiple editors due to a shake-up at the publisher and one of them nixed my idea of extensive footnotes. Annoyed, I later wrote two books that start with the word footnotes: Footnotes From the World’s Greatest Bookstores (NY Times bestseller) and Footnotes from the Most Amazing Museums (ABA Bestseller).

2. A friend and cartoon editor cracked me up commenting on this cartoon, “That is a very timely cartoon. Unfortunately, the time is 1956.”

3. I’m in this group, as someone who was forced to fire a dozen illustrators when I was Art Director for an art dept that was totally replaced by AI.

4. There is also the Fortune magazine piece by Matt Shumer, who appeared Thursday on CNN. It’s behind a paywall, so if you don’t subscribe to Fortune, let me share the gist of it; we’re screwed.

5. I believe someone I know was doing this as just an experiment. I’ve been tied up with some things and it’s possible I don’t know the whole story, but I’m just sharing this to illustrate AI’s capability of damage.

6. This is my biggest selling cartoon and so I am, you can understand, protective of it. It can be legally used HERE on the Cartoon Stock.

7. This would be a helluva newsletter if I did, with everything going on personally, and politically. Would be a good ploy to get paid subscribers, but I’m unable to, at least not for now.

8. Trader Joe’s ancient grains organic oatmeal, with raisins, cashew nuts, prunes, blueberries, plant protein powder, ginger root powder, cinnamon, and sprinkled in with Fiber One and granola. Cooking time, 5 minutes. Preparation time, 90 minutes, minimum, to find everything. Point is, it ties up the whole morning.

9. Just learned it’s best to just slice them up, skin and all, I place them on a copper air fryer basket in the oven.

10. I think, It’s the devil’s underpants! has already been taken.