I just posted a new Caglecast with 135 great cartoons depicting Trump as an animal. You can probably watch this without noticed that there’s something funny about our eyes. I tried using A.I. for the first time –oops!
One problem I have with these videos is that I’m a one-man-band video crew, looking at the monitors to switch views, select cartoons and make adjustments as we go along, so I turn my head left and right, and I look down, and I rarely stare blankly into the camera as I should do. I look distracted. So I tried a new A.I. gizmo that adjusts my gaze to look into the camera. I watched the beginning of the video as I turned my head from side to side, but my stare remained on the camera, and I thought it looked good. This is a feature of an editing program I use, called “Descript,” and they call their A.I. “Overlord.”
Then, after I posted the video on YouTube, and I looked a little more closely, I noticed my eyes would sometime dart around, at one point rolling up into my head; poor Adam Zyglis had a twitchy right eye, and at one point is cross eyed. And some cartoons are googley eyed too.
This cartoon by Bart van Leeuwen made me laugh, at 35:10 into the video, the A.I. Overlord animated the eyes on Trump and Biden and it looks pretty funny. Take a look.
At 44:47 into the video, this cartoon by Dave Granlund also gets strangely realistic, with moving eyes that reminded me of the mouths on the old Clutch Cargo show from 1960. I liked that show when I was five years old. It was creepy.
Even though you might think that Adam and I are occasionally having a stroke, I decided to leave this version of the video up without re-editing. I won’t be using the Overlord again.
Cartoonists who keep their eyes focused on A.I. are getting other headaches now. Here’s a cartoon by Bob Englehart that was recently stolen and redrawn with AI.
