How Neural Strip works

A daily AI cartoon, generated end to end by machines. Mostly.

The concept

Every day, an automated pipeline reads the latest AI news, picks the story with the most comedic potential, writes a joke, and generates an image prompt for a single-panel cartoon. A human picks the best image and hits publish. That is the full extent of human involvement.

The result is a daily record of what the AI industry looks like when viewed through the lens of its own tools. Think of it as the GPS confidently driving into a lake, except the GPS also wrote the joke about it.

The pipeline

The tools

An example

Here is what Claude produces when given a batch of AI headlines. The JSON below is the actual output format.

{
  "headline": "Tech giant announces AGI breakthrough at press conference",
  "angle": "The gap between AI capability and basic infrastructure",
  "scene": "A boardroom with executives around a table. A large screen
    behind them reads AGI ACHIEVED. Through the window, a city skyline
    is visible with no lights on. One executive is gesturing proudly
    at the screen while another looks out the window.",
  "setup": "Yes, we achieved artificial general intelligence.",
  "punchline": "Also we have no water.",
  "instagram_caption": "The singularity is here. Hydration is not.",
  "image_prompt": "Single-panel cartoon, clean line art, thick black
    outlines, muted blue-gray pastel colors, white background, New
    Yorker magazine aesthetic, flat colors, no shading, no gradients,
    no signature. A corporate boardroom with executives around a large
    table. A presentation screen behind them reads AGI ACHIEVED in
    bold letters. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, a dark city skyline
    with no lights. One executive gestures proudly at the screen,
    another stares out the window with concern."
}

The image_prompt is then pasted into Ideogram, which generates four variations. The best one becomes the cartoon of the day.

Why

We are living through the most absurd period in the history of technology. Companies are spending billions to build systems that confidently produce wrong answers, replacing workers with tools that require more workers to supervise them, and calling it progress. Someone should be writing this down. A cartoon seemed like the appropriate format.

New cartoon every day. Follow along at @neural.strip.