I Am a Digitoonist: Experimenting with AI, Humor, and Cartooning

I create AI-generated cartoons to capture ideas, observations, and memorable moments from my reading and daily life. Sometimes it's simply a word or phrase that catches my attention and feels worth preserving, much like a selfie captures a moment in time.

I've long admired the lyricists who adapt A. R. Rahman's songs into different Indian languages. Their task is not just translation. They must match the actors' lip movements while crafting lyrics that remain meaningful and hummable.

When I create cartoons, I often reshape a scenario to fit an idea or joke. It reminds me of the same creative challenge: working within constraints while trying to produce something that feels natural. In that sense, my cartoons are a form of improv.

Since the ideas are sometimes forced into shape rather than discovered organically, the result doesn't always work as intended. They don't always land as jokes for readers. Sometimes they end up feeling more like puzzles that need to be decoded than humor that is immediately understood.

I continue this experiment nevertheless by asking AI assistants to develop and critique my ideas. The outcomes are often imperfect, but the process itself is educational and remains valuable to me. The exercise feels worthwhile. It helps me better understand how large language models think and operate, while also teaching me more about the craft of humor, cartooning, and why some jokes work while others do not. 

Here's a recent insight from a brainstorming session with Grok AI -

Real cartoon humor requires contempt or ridiculous escalation. Comedy needs blood on the floor.

Having grown up on a steady diet of Mad magazine and the single-panel cartoons that filled newspapers and magazines, I developed an appreciation for how much can be conveyed in a single image. The black-and-white single-panel format appeals to me not only for its economy but also because it avoids the additional complexity of maintaining visual and narrative continuity across multiple panels.

The cartoons themselves are not often perfect on the first attempt. When the issues are minor, I prefer to make the edits manually. AI assistants can often handle such revisions as well, but sometimes a quick human touch is the more straightforward solution.

My cartoons are my way of preserving ideas, phrases, observations, and passing curiosities. They are shaped by constraints, refined through experimentation, and often developed in conversation with AI. Somewhere between cartoonist, editor, prompt writer, and collaborator, I occupy a role that did not really exist a few years ago. That is why I have adopted the title Digitoonist.

The cartoons may be digital, but the curiosity behind them is entirely human.