Grand Theft A.I.: Baltimore Sun Outsources Cartooning - w/ Rick McKee | DMZ America Podcast | Ep 257

DMZ Co-hosts Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) take aim at a new threat that may destroy editorial cartooning once and for all. A year after The Baltimore Sun fired Pulitzer Prize-winning staff cartoonist Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, the paper published an editorial cartoon created by unidentified staffers using generative AI tools, with a credit line that read “Produced using artificial intelligence tools by The Baltimore Sun editorial staff.” Ted Rall wrote a column calling the episode a watershed moment in the decline of the profession. Guest Rick McKee, longtime Augusta Chronicle cartoonist and creator of the syndicated panel Pluggers, joins to discuss what the Sun’s experiment means on the ground: how AI slop undercuts rates, how it floods the market with uncredited pastiches of living artists’ styles, and whether any newspaper that replaces a human cartoonist with a language model still has a claim to an opinion page. The three cartoonists debate whether this is inevitable cost-cutting, a unique threat to visual journalism, or both, and what—if anything—working cartoonists can do about it besides draw faster than the machines. X: @tedrall and @scottstantis Web: rall.com