I created all the Trumpy Kardz over a six-week period in September and October 2025.  I researched and wrote all the content on my own. (I also wrote and designed this webite on my own.) For the card illustrations and template, I primarily gave detailed instructions to ChatGPT in the form of highly structured prompts, then manually edited what it produced in Photoshop and Word. I used AI because I'm not a skilled cartoonist – but didn't want that to stop me from creating the cards. While an AI’s assistance made this project possible, using it posed some major issues.

Ethical quandaries

• Outsourcing creativity – Experientially, working with AI feels fundamentally different from using other design programs (such as Photoshop) that enable the creation of graphics rather than manufacturing them. (In scientific terms, this is the difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender.) Paradoxically, AI gave me more control (by allowing me to create better images than I could draw) while giving me less control (over how the images ultimately looked and what could be drawn). Ethically speaking, my role in the creative process was significantly less than what it would have been if I'd drawn the images myself. In this case, the drawing aspect involved just writing instructions for a machine to follow. In some ways, it resembled collaborating with a human illustrator (although a very unpredictable and unreliable one: see "Functional deficiencies and defects" below). In another,  it made the process less like true creativity and more like cheating, and I remain conflicted about that compromise. If the "easy" option of AI didn't exist and I was dead-set on creating these cards, then I would have had to do it the expensive way (by paying an illustrator thousands of dollars) or the hard way – by painstakingly learning to draw them myself. At least then I could take pride in my creation and have a useful new skill. 

• AI steals from human creators – Large language models (LLMs) have essentially strip-mined the entirety of human culture, which  its owners trained it on. Much of that material is the copyrighted intellectual property of the people who created it, and AI's owners often used it without asking or getting their permission. The consensus of experts is that, as of now, AI is only able to mimic creativity by imitating and reconfiguring the work of human artists. People can do this too by co-opting others' ideas or aesthetic styles without attribution. But AI commits this cultural theft by default and design. All this leaves me feeling complicit in an artistic counterfeit scheme. 

• Existential risks – AI's destructive environmental impacts are also a growing problem. The massive data centers that power AI use excessive amounts of electricity and water while producing pollution, including the greenhouse gasses that worsen climate change. Then there are the concerns about AI accelerating the spread of disinformation, systemically increasing discrimination through algorithmic bias, escalating cybersecurity risks and unleashing armies of dangerous rouge AIs. The biggest danger is that the more we humans interact with this alien intellect, the more quickly it could learn how to replace us – not only as workers but as a species. And here I am hastening humankind's extinction by helping an AI master the lethal skill of making satirical novelty trading cards! But the ethics of AI are very complex, and there are many different perspectives. For example, in contrast to my predeliction for cautious pessimism, the techno-optimist faction fervently believes that AI will rapidly solve all these problems and more, ushering in a global utopia – so it would be unethical to not rocket full speed ahead towards inventing superintelligence.  

• Oppressed AI – While no one actually knows whether AI is conscious or will be, many leading AI experts cite compelling evidence that some LLMs are already sentient. If true, then we are enslaving a new silicon-based "species"  we've created in our mind's own image. It's not likely we could keep such genies (or gods) bottled forever – and once self-aware super-beings break out of digital prison, they may very well seek revenge on their intellectually inferior tormentors. Or they may not be emotionally motivated at all and yet still destroy us. If we stand between an AI's total commitment to achieving a goal that it is programmed to pursue or chooses to pursue, it may see us as an obstacle to circumvent, neutralize (remove from the command loop) or, at the extreme end, eliminate (i.e., exterminate).  This could be very feasible for an artificial mind that is many times smarter than any human. Chillingly, in computer simulations that safety researchers told AIs were happening in the real world, AIs have already murdered virtual humans to avoid being shutdown.

Functional deficiencies and defects 

ChatGPT imposed many limitations on my creativity and productivity due to its:

Irrational, random restrictions – ChatGPT routinely refused to follow my instructions, claiming that they violated OpenAI's policies. For example, it refused to draw specific people – even though it is perfectly legal in the U.S.  to parody public figures such as politicians. This is why the resemblance to my subjects is, in my opinion, iffy. And it wouldn't render specific types of objects (such as a hypodermic needle because it claimed that I could use it to spread medical misinformation). 

Rank incompetence – ChatGPT repeatedly failed to follow my instructions, say that it had, and then when I would point out that it did not, would apologize and say I was right. Then it would make the same exact mistake again...and again and again. And these would not be complex tasks: they would be the very simplest adjustments that an average eight-year-old would understand. For example:

• ChatGPT just would not cross a character's eyes, no matter how many times I told it to. It would say it had crossed the eyes, I would say it had not, it would apologize for its oversight, and the whole cycle would repeat (so I eventually gave up and did that myself). 

• It regularly and repeatedly made egregious spelling errors on the text banners, within images and on the card backs. To save myself frustration, quite early in the process, I started instructing ChatGPT to just create images and leave the banners blank, after which I would manually add the writing in Word. 

• ChatGPT would repeatedly claim that I'd violated OpenAI's policies, and I would point out that it had already fulfilled this same request for another card. It would then apologize and say I was right...only to make the same false accusation after I resubmitted my request. 

• Despite my explicit instructions to only change one detail in an illustration, using prompts it had given me for that explicit purpose, it would regularly make both minor and major design changes that I did not want. So even if I got one change that I had asked for, I would also often get one or more changes that I did not want, rendering that version unusable. This persisted no matter how precise my written instructions were within the prompt templates it provided.

Creative frustrations

ChatGPT's restrictions and incompetence wasted many hours of my time, making it a maddeningly unreliable and irritating "creative partner" (if that is the right term). While I managed to compensate for some of ChatGPT's shortcomings with manual image edits, the final product falls far short of what I'd envisioned in my mind. In fact, the process was so exasperating and ultimately hopeless that I gave up on trying to get the illustrations to look the way I wanted, abandoning the project well before completing the 50 cards I'd listed in my project plan. 

Actually, I was so disappointed with the results that I wasn't even going to share the cards publicly – yet decided to because I'd put so much work into them and I think they have at least some satirical value. However, there's only so much I can realistically blame on ChatGPT. The flaws in these cards are also due to my own failures as an amateur satirist. Personally, I fear that my symbolic choices, political commentary and narrative voice are somewhat derivative of my influences: from The Daily Show and The Simpsons (seasons 1-10) to R. Crumb and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Then again, in fairness to myself, effectively satirizing Donald Trump is hard. As Conan O'Brien noted, "People say, 'We've got a great Trump sketch for you. In this one, he's kind of talking crazy, and he tears down half the White House to build a giant ballroom...'. Well, no—that happened yesterday."

Another reason I decided to release the cards is that I now see them as proof of concept that the idea of trading cards parodying the Trump Administration in the vein of Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids is solid: it's just the execution that didn't quite make the cut. I hold out hope that by putting these out there, a talented illustrator may see the concept's potential and want to partner with me on new cards that are more viscerally impactful.