gan
Explanation
The Joke
A person is amazed that a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) can generate photorealistic images of human faces. They exclaim at the quality, then immediately ask the AI to make the face weirder. When it does, they ask for it to be made even weirder, and then demand it go "back to weird! Hahaha!" Below the comic is a caption titled "The Iron Law of AI," which states: "All productivity gains from Artificial Intelligence will be lost to sitting around looking at weird stuff produced by Artificial Intelligence."
The comic captures a truth about how people actually interact with AI tools. Rather than using powerful generative AI for productive purposes, the user immediately gravitates toward making it produce bizarre, amusing outputs -- the digital equivalent of making funny faces in a mirror.
The Humor
The humor is in the recognition. Anyone who has used image-generating AI knows the irresistible pull of asking it to produce increasingly strange results instead of doing anything useful. The "Iron Law" framing elevates this observation to the level of an economic principle, as though it is as fundamental and inescapable as the laws of thermodynamics. The joke is particularly prescient given that the comic was published in July 2019, before the explosion of mainstream AI image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney, which proved the "Iron Law" to be remarkably accurate.
References
GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) are a class of machine learning framework introduced by Ian Goodfellow in 2014. By 2019, projects like NVIDIA's StyleGAN had demonstrated the ability to generate highly realistic human faces, which became a viral sensation. The website "This Person Does Not Exist" (thispersondoesnotexist.com), launched in February 2019, showcased this technology and likely inspired this comic.