I have created my first, and I hope only, anti-Trump political cartoon. I usually give the president grace for decisions he makes that I disagree with, but supporting year-round Daylight Saving Time is a bridge too far. As most of my readers know, I'd be fine with permanent Standard Time, but being so far out of sync with the sun is just not right. (I'll give you time zones, for practical reasons, but see no such excuse for pretending that noon is one o'clock.)
This work was inspired by a political cartoonist whose name I don't know, who published a cartoon using the blanket-snipping idea back when President Nixon had the same crazy thoughts about permanent DST. I tried to find the cartoon online, but failed. So I decided to create my own, with a little help from Copilot. Okay, a lot of help. It can draw, and I can't.
Copilot may be able to draw, but its rules can be very frustrating, as I've said before. However, there's a certain creative challenge in trying to make one's point within the restrictions; it was actually rather fun.
At first I tried re-creating the old cartoon as I remembered it. My prompts are in italics, Copilot's responses in bold. These are excerpts from a much longer conversation, as we worked through the creation and refinement process. Most the design work was mine, but Copilot made the speech bubbles, and I thought they were great so I left them in.
Please draw a cartoon of President Trump in bed, with a blanket and a pair of scissors. In the first panel, he is snipping off the bottom of the blanket; in the second he is sewing the cut-off part onto the top.
I can help you create a cartoon — but I can’t generate or depict current political candidates or elected officials in new images. That includes drawing President Trump in any scene.
All right, make it President Nixon, then.
I still can’t generate this cartoon, Linda — even with President Nixon — because he is a real political figure, and I’m not allowed to create new images depicting actual politicians, even historical ones, in fabricated scenes.
Hmm. How about if you use a generic man but indicate somehow that he is a U.S. president?
It got a little further, but eventually came back with,
I can’t create this cartoon, Linda. The request was blocked because it still counts as depicting a U.S. president, even a fictionalized one, in a political‑cartoon scenario, which falls under the same safety restriction.
At this point, I changed the scene entirely, keeping the main idea but taking the president out of bed (which looked ridiculous; I don't remember how the original cartoon made it look otherwise) and putting him behind a desk, with a salesman selling the blanket-cutting idea. I added the caption to make it clear that the man was president of a fictional country. That passed! and the rest of the work was just refinements.
