The year now closing soon on the East Coast of the United States has already exited in other parts of the world. For many it was a memorable year, but not in a good way. So, good riddance to all that!

But, also for many around the world, already 2024 is looking like it might be a clone of 2023, or possibly worse. For one thing, the year coming up will bring to the United States, directly, a consequential election year. Whatever the outcome and whoever ends up being President in January 2025 will have major impacts on this country and by extension the rest of the world.

Then, there is whatever is happening to the world’s climate, the world’s food supply, public health situation, monetary circumstances. I could go on, but I refuse. By that, I mean I refuse to play the Doom Game, not that I refuse to go on, period. The Doom Game is worse than a zero-sum game; it destroys value, so let us call it a negative-sum game. I do not play games I cannot win. Doing that is a waste of my time and energy.

In the past few weeks I have been experimenting using Artificial Intelligence tools for graphic design work. Mostly I have been using the Magic Media app inside of Canva. I used it to create a New Yorker style cartoon I posted on my Molly Joss Out Loud Instagram page (see below), and then I wrote my own captions including the one on the image and this one: “Darling, something tells me we may have forgotten to send the Conehead family a holiday card.”

I also used the app to create a series of images for a brief article for an upcoming issue of the Seybold Report. That article is much more thoughtful than the cartoon. I was amazed at how quickly the app was able to generate usable images and how useful it has been for brainstorming ideas. However, it was the underlying biases in the images it created which caught my attention the most. No spoilers, but if you are interested in reading that article, let me know.

So, searching for a way to brainstorm content for this post past the first few opening paragraphs, I asked the tool to create a new image, again in the style of a New Yorker cartoon. Here is the prompt I gave the AI: “New Yorker cartoon style woman sitting at her desk with cat nearby looking out window as world ends.” As it is designed to do, the app then created four images. All of them were alike; below I present two of the four. I was surprised to the app did not complete the task in any of the images. In my prior use of it, it added elements and tried its best to render what I had asked for. For this prompt, though, it got most of it done, but none of the four images showed anything other than a clear sky out the window. No doom. No destruction. No end of the world as we know it.

Well, I wondered, where is all the end-of-world imagery I asked to be included? Then I thought maybe the AI does not know how to picture the demise of all we know, so I did a new batch of images. Below is the best of the four images it created from the prompt “End of the world.”

Now that image definitely shows destruction and landscapes having been reduced to rubble, even if it does look a bit like an unused scene from the 1996 Sci-Fi movie Independence Day. So, I tried again and gave it this prompt, “End of the world due to global warming.” Below is one of the four images it created from that nudge. Clearly, the AI has a little catching up to do if it is going to generate imagery for the Doom Game, as the image below is not as graphic as any of the images I have managed to generate in my own mind when considering the two prompts “end of the world” and “end of the world due to global warming.”

I am not sure what, if anything, asking the AI to render my nightmarish thoughts in graphic form and it presenting me with these results means. But, looking at the images of the two women (see above), I caught myself feeling a bit more hopeful than I felt when I began this post and thought exercise. I think, then, I will leave this here and try to take 2024 a Day at a Time, at least I can try to do that for the next few days.

Update

I published this post on New Year’s Eve 2023. I was shocked when I saw the cover of the January 1-8 issue of the New Yorker magazine (see below). I had not seen it before I created the images or this post. The magazine cover image must have been created in November 2023 or earlier, so it is amazing to me how much the magazine cover matches up with the prompts I gave the AI about a woman in her office looking out the window, down to having a cat in the room with the woman!