I mentioned in last week’s article that I enjoy introducing anachronism into my artwork. Hence, I sought to see how a long-dead Victorian caricaturist might handle Donald Trump and Joe Biden. So, I asked the AI platform Midjourney to do both. First, I requested, “Donald Trump pen-and-ink caricature, drawn in the style of John Tenniel.” The result, shown here, was quite good. It employed a reasonable facsimile of Tenniel’s cross-hatched, pen-and-ink style and produced four immediately recognizable and highly expressionate renderings of Donald Trump in different moods. “Success,” I thought. ...

Then, I issued an identical request to Midjourney, replacing “Donald Trump” with “Joe Biden”: “Joe Biden pen-and-ink caricature, drawn in the style of John Tenniel.” The image didn’t appear in my feed, so I figured I had done something wrong. I tried again. Still nothing. Then, I noticed that no images appeared because Midjourney had, instead, sent me a message titled:

“Banned prompt detected”

As shown below, the message warned:

• “Sorry! Our AI moderator thinks this prompt is probably against our community standards.”