As a college student in the early 1990s, I created a daily comic strip named “Dexter” for the student newspaper.
Over the weekend I dusted off some of those old strips and asked AI to make photo-realistic versions of them. The first one was among my favorites – a large cartoon called “The Salesman” which was a spin on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”
I initially used Claude to generate the revised cartoon because it’s the agent that in my experience makes the fewest mistakes, but it turned out not be the right choice for image manipulation. I switched to Gemini and it did a great job with the images but I had to spend a couple of hours convincing it to do what I asked. It kept resizing panels, changing the wording, and hallucinating extra images. The end result, though, was almost exactly what I wanted. There are a few typos in the wording which Gemini maddingly failed to correct without making other unwanted changes.
Here’s the original cartoon:
And here’s the photo-realistic AI version:
Aside: Gemini initially chose a dog breed closer to my original Dexter, but my wife suggested I change him into a Boxer because we have a two-year old Boxer named Suki, and it just works.