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Heavenly Hosts
American Cartoonist Partners With AI
Dan Youra is an American cartoonist who cultivates Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) to harvest the fruits of its artistic creations. Youra is a respected caricature artist. His specialty is producing characters who mirror the appearance of American politicians and world leaders.
The result of blending the art of graphic AI with his own artistic prowess is a captivating, single-panel cartoon that could be a scene of Charlie Brown and his cartoon friends playing in a Claude Monet landscape. In Youra’s world, the scene would more likely be the artist’s depiction of Vladimir Putin driving a tank over an AI -generated battlefield.
Youra’s cartoons conjure up the improbable, depict the unreal, and create the future. Elon Musk has already landed on Mars. The president of the United States competes with Mexico and Canada in a bumper car race. COSTCO sells cloud computing. Youra’s caricatures of world leaders play poker to decide the planet’s future.
Artists who use graphic AI do not ask questions of the AI wizard inside the machine. They are not looking for answers. Rather, the aficionado of graphic AI describes the desired image that the artist wants. AI paints the artist’s dream. The artist acts as a partner with artificial intelligence to create an image. Is the image art? It may or may not be art.
Can the image that the AI creates in response to the artist’s prompt be copyrighted? Maybe. The U.S. Copyright Office (CO) ruled in January 2025 that images, which are entirely the creation of AI, cannot secure copyright protection. To be eligible for copyright protection, an image produced by AI , must contain some evidence of a creative contribution from the artist.How much is “some?” The U.S. Copyright Office reserves the authority to decide how much is “some,” on a “case by case basis.”
Copyrights are crucial for establishing ownership. To secure copyright protection, Dan Youra blends one or more of his hundreds of characters into each of his single-panel cartoons in order to satisfy the U.S. Copyright Office’s criteria of “evidence of the artist’s creativity in the AI image.”
It is instructive to recognize that the right of an artist to secure a copyright is protected by the United States Constitution, which grants “authors and inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (Article I, Sec 8) US courts have consistently found that the “exclusive Right” is granted to “persons,” not to elephants. Artificial Intelligence is a software code; it is not a person.
Publishers do not distribute writings and images, which are not copyrighted. Moreover, they definitely do not pay for works, which lack copyrights. The liability to the publisher is too great to potentially publish a writing or image whose ownership is questionable or unknown.
In this age of crypto and block chains, an alternative technology to guarantee an artist’s ownership of artistic works, including cartoons, is by securing their registration as NFTs (abbreviation for Non Fungible Tokens) on block chains listed on authorized NFT Exchanges such as Ethereum, Rarible, and OpenSea.
Dan Youra is a recognized artist who lists his cartoons as NFTs for sale on the Ethereum block chain on the Rarible exchange. The NFT market was manic a few years ago. At that time, artists were selling cartoon characters for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even millions of dollars.
Dan Youra is reviewed as a “computer whiz” and a “Public Relations Whiz.” He is commended as a “pioneer in the Global Village” and as a “Trail Blazer in the niche-tab-business.”
View Dan Youra’s AI cartoons at AIToon.co
