Baltimore’s most-acclaimed editorial cartoonist doesn’t like what he’s seeing from his former employer, with outcry over the use of AI illustrations in the Baltimore Sun reaching new heights.
Earlier this month, The Sun published its latest editorial “cartoon” that had clearly been created by artificial intelligence. It showed a likeness of Mayor Brandon Scott receiving what was likely intended as sarcastic praise from a group representing business owners in Fells Point. Late-night weekend disturbances in the popular bar district prompted a security crackdown by Baltimore Police that began in July that drew mixed reviews.
The illustration drew criticism from many quarters, including the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists. In an open letter to The Sun’s publisher and editors, association president Marc Murphy called on the news organization to reverse course and renounce the use of AI for cartoons and editorial content for “creative and moral reasons.” [Sun representatives have not yet responded to a request for comment.]
In publishing the illustration, “the only message The Sun actually delivered was that it has finally and completely surrendered any remaining claim it may have had to journalistic legitimacy and its former place among the nation’s important newspapers,” Murphy wrote.
The alarm has been sounded by one of the Sun’s most renowned illustrators, two-time Pulitzer finalist Kevin Kallaugher, who goes by KAL and whose work appears in The Economist. Baltimore Fishbowl reached out to KAL to discuss The Sun’s current editorial policies and his concerns. The following conversation has been edited for length, clarity and organization.
BFB: How did you find out about the AI-generated cartoon from a couple of weeks ago?
KAL: I’d seen the one before that, a previous AI one. Someone sent it to me and said, “Did you see what they’re doing here?” I told a few people about it. Then when the second one came around, people got more lit up about it and got in contact with me. Since then it’s gotten some traction, this anti-AI sentiment. As you know, the cartoonists’ association has rallied against it, for, I think, good reason. But other folks are turning their eyes to it too. I just got interviewed for the Columbia Journalism Review.
BFB: What was going through your head this time? What was the level of concern that prompted you to be more public about it?
KAL: There’s been a lot of AI-generated content in a lot of different areas. I think what got to me was that you could imagine one person trying it once, but when they started doing it twice, every week or so, it seemed, I thought: this is a pattern. This is, I think, the first case in American journalism where AI cartoons have basically become part of a publication’s repertoire. That’s clearly instructions from the top; they like this, they’re going with this. And I thought people should know about it. It’s one more of these stories about AI taking people’s jobs. But with something like a cartoon, in the creative realm, it becomes more potent in people’s eyes, because you can see the difference between a cartoon made by a machine and one made by a person, and that a publication is choosing to go with the machine.
BFB: As an artist working in the modern world, is there a role for AI in producing art or editorial cartoons? Where do you fall? Are there cases where you might use it?
KAL: Two areas come to mind. First, when you’re doing a cartoon or any visual artwork, you need reference. If I’m drawing Donald Trump, I’m looking through scores of photographs of him from certain angles. If I want him at three-quarters looking upward, I’ll look and look until I find that photo. AI can do that much quicker. Say I want a rhinoceros from behind at three-quarters, you can find some reference. You don’t trace the cartoon, but I’ve always used reference my whole life. You could use it to generate a reference, say a sunset over Baltimore. I wouldn’t copy it, I’d just look at it and think, oh yeah, that would reflect behind this guy. Cartoonists are working on deadline, so anything that can help is valuable.
BFB: Is there another place you could see yourself using it?
KAL: One place I haven’t used it yet, but I anticipate could be useful, is that I’ve been working for quite a while on a graphic novel, and it’s massively labor intensive. If it’s going to be 200 pages and I want to paint it in watercolor, that’ll take me a year. But I might be able to say, “Okay, Claude, here are my five characters, here’s what they’re wearing, here are the colorrs. Go through and paint those guys for me.” You can imagine that sort of thing. But what’s being used here, in these cartoons, seems to me to be in a different category entirely.
BFB: The Sun cartoon did seem kind of juvenile. The prompt must have been something like, “show the mayor, show people in Fells Point sarcastically thanking the mayor.” What was wrong with it, from your perspective as a cartoonist?
KAL: Every staff cartoonist has stories about editors who say, “I’ve got a great idea,” and it’s really convoluted and ineffective. And effectiveness is the key word for getting across an opinion. Part of the reason good cartoonists dismiss that kind of input is that they’re working on another level entirely. These cartoons in The Sun smack of somebody, or worse, a committee, trying to come up with something creative.
I think I’m looking at this with two hats on: the art side, and the content side. On the art side, cartoonists like metaphors, so here’s one: imagine a class of six-year-olds learning to write their names. The teacher shows them her particular, orderly handwriting, and the kids all try to copy it. So at first they’re fairly similar. Fast-forward 25 years and all those kids’ signatures are completely different, because their individuality has come out. Now hand those 30 signatures to an AI agent, and it’ll merge them together, mush them together, and push out something and say, “This is my signature.” It won’t have any of that individuality; it may even crush it.
Same with artwork. The style we’ve seen in AI political cartoons feels like a kind of mushy 1960s pastiche. It’s slop, a mixture of a lot of stuff, but it’s basically built by plagiarizing hundreds of thousands of cartoons to arrive at that style. That’s the objection on the art side.
On the content side: to be a successful cartoonist — a visual commentator — you need to be engaging, and cleverness is essential. If it’s not funny, and if there are a lot of elements the reader has to work through, there’d better be a good payoff, because a cartoon takes 10, 15, maybe 20 seconds to read. If people think it’s going to take longer than that, they’ll decide it’s not worth reading. So I think these AI cartoons are deeply ineffective, and that’s the barometer I judge a cartoon by. Not all my cartoons are effective, but I try to make them effective, partly by engaging people on the other side. My favorite letter to the editor at the Sun was from someone who wrote, “I hate KAL’s cartoons, but I can’t stop looking at them.”
BFB: You were let go from the Sun a little over a year ago — I hate the word “fired.” Did you stay a subscriber? How have you followed the paper since you left?
KAL: For a short time I was a subscriber, and then we let it lapse, partly because between you guys [at Baltimore Fishbowl] and the Banner and other places, we can get enough information about what’s going on in the city. I was also getting annoyed with some of their political commentary and the way they were dancing around some truths, and when they started running articles that were basically coming from the Sinclair organization. Look, we’re all under an onslaught of information we have to ingest. For the Economist, I have to know what’s going on around the world. I used to be very happy reading the Sun because it gave you so much valuable storytelling for the city and the state. Now it’s kind of more dubious, to be honest.
BFB: Were you interested in staying under the current ownership?
KAL: Before David Smith bought it, I figured my days were numbered. I’d done at least three blistering cartoons about Sinclair, including one about David Smith in particular. So when he came in, I thought, my days are numbered. I’d done those in the previous half dozen years or so. But I think he had other, more pressing priorities before he turned around and got to the cartoonist. Finally, when I had a face-to-face with David Smith, he made it clear that he’d bought the paper for the purpose of being able to interject his conservative perspective into the Baltimore and Maryland political conversation, and he wanted a cartoonist who would do the same with the local stuff.
At one point I told him I was not his guy. He said, well, we’re going to look for a cartoonist. I said, okay, but this is hard to do. He said: “Oh, no problem. I’ll come up with all the ideas, and then we’ll just get somebody to draw them.” Which is what’s happening right now.
BFB: With the state of the media and now AI, the number of paid editorial cartoonists must be in pretty significant decline.
KAL: Amazing decline. Here’s an example: in 1996 I was president of the Amercian Association of Cartoonists. We had a convention in Baltimore with maybe 300 attendees. Not all political cartoonists; some were tangential, academics, syndicate people, that kind of thing, but a lot of cartoonists. We had a meeting last year with 35 people, in person. There are a lot of people scraping a living together. They’ve gone freelance. Staff cartoonists are really very few now. It might be down to under 10 in the whole country. It’s also happening around the world.
BFB: It’s almost literally a dying art. Someone will be the last staff cartoonist at a publication. Have you ever seen your own style mimicked by AI, or your work incorporated into something?
KAL: There was one person, or several people, mining a bunch of us political cartoonists who are working today. They’d take our cartoons of the week, run them through an AI engine, and spit them out. They didn’t look like ours, but it was our idea, our exact layout — basically plagiarized. They took our names off, strung them together into a video, and put it up on YouTube to try to generate income. We got a couple of them shut down, but shut one down and it pops up again elsewhere. I’ve tried a few times myself — asked an AI tool to do a cartoon in the style of KAL — and it doesn’t come anywhere close.
I’ve published 11,000 cartoons, so if somebody feeds a machine that whole body of work, it’ll probably come up with something interesting ; a lot of my characters will have six fingers, but it’ll still be quite good in other ways. You were saying before about being kind of the last, and it’s true that I’m one of a literal handful of cartoonists in the country who still work pen on paper, which is how cartoons have been done for centuries.
You feel like you’re the last one in line. In two years, in 2028, I celebrate my 50th anniversary with the Economist, and we’re planning a touring exhibition that will start in Washington, D.C. Part of it is looking back at this — the cross-hatching and all of it — and whether that whole era has seen its term, a bit like the Cubists and other art movements that had their limited time.
Thank you for this piece on KAL, very well done with the rise of AI. I agree with his decision to drop The Sun after takeover by David Smith, this was personally difficult for me because my father was a proud Sun employee for forty years.