Open letter from The Herb Block Foundation to the publisher and editors of The Baltimore Sun, as well as any other journalists who try to pass off AI images as legitimate editorial cartooning:
On September 4, 2026, The Sun published an insipid AI-generated image and tried to pass it off as an actual editorial cartoon. As staunch defenders and promoters of the craft of editorial cartooning, we find this highly offensive and borderline immoral. The illustration, which is nothing more than an ad for local neighborhood businesses and storefronts, certainly does not qualify as satire or opinion journalism.
The Sun is not the only outlet doing this. The Herb Block Foundation condemns this practice across all platforms, especially those claiming to offer journalistic content.
The Baltimore Sun’s poor judgement is compounded by the fact that for decades they had a brilliant award-winning editorial cartoonist working for their opinion pages. Kevin (KAL) Kallaugher, who also draws for The Economist, worked for The Sun until 2025. KAL came up with his ideas for his cartoons without the aid of robots and drew everything by hand. His excellent work was awarded the Herblock Prize in 2015.
This is a textbook example of the threat AI poses to human jobs. AI companies scrape artists' work from the internet without permission, credit, or compensation to train generative models. These corporations make billions at the expense of others.
The great Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herb Block (Herblock) once said that “cartooning is an irreverent form of expression, and one particularly suited to scoffing at the high and the mighty. If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism.” We, the free press, are losing that cutting edge to AI slop.
During the Cold War, Herblock’s ominous character Mr. Atom embodied our collective fears of nuclear annihilation. If Herblock were alive today, one can only imagine the kind of creature he would draw to represent the threat of AI.
written by Rob Rogers, Board Member
Herb Block is among the world’s best known and most admired political cartoonists. Born on October 13, 1909, the native Chicagoan spent his 72-year career fighting against abuses of the powerful.