DRAWING A COURTROOM DRAMA
ABOUT THE SERIES
OUR COVERAGE OF ELON MUSK’S LAWSUIT against Sam Altman and OpenAI began in February 2024 and has continued with daily reporting during the pending trial. As of today, we have written more than 30 stories about the lawsuit and neither the case, nor our coverage of it, is close to completion. But at this point — with testimony in the trial approaching its end — we wanted to talk about how we have approached the matter as journalists and particularly why we decided to use cartooning as a tool in our storytelling.
In 2024, Musk’s original complaint — the document that laid out his claims — stood out from all the other filings in the San Francisco County Superior Court. Every plaintiff believes their case is important, but few would present it as Musk did. Our lede, or the first sentence in the story we wrote about the filing, said, “the most important lawsuit in the history of the world was filed Thursday in the Superior Court of San Francisco County, at least that is how this report would begin were it written in the style of the lawsuit Elon Musk has brought against Sam Altman and OpenAI, Inc.”
At the time, it seemed that the hyperbolic prose in Musk’s complaint cried out for a reporting style that varied from our usual approach to stories about litigation. Bay City News journalist Joe Dworetzky — joined later by Jay Harris — wanted something that could help readers power through the numbing terminology used in tech and in law, so they could follow a story that, he was convinced, would offer an extraordinary look into the intersection — no, the collision — of transformative technology, money and power.
To that end, Joe adopted an expansive prose style that borrowed from the complaint’s bombastic grandiosity. And for illustrations, he thought it would be appropriate to use cartooning rather than photography to tell the story. Cartooning matched the comic-book worldview of the complaint better than any photography he could imagine.
News reporters are trained to take an objective, unbiased and neutral approach to the stories they report. Cartooning, however, generally belongs to the world of opinion. For these pieces, Joe followed the approach of collecting and reporting the facts as he would for a news story, but he also offered legal analysis and occasional commentary. He tried to make it obvious to the reader that those threads were part of the package. The prose style and particularly the cartoons were — and still are — a signal to the reader that we are telling the story with more than a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. He called the approach “A Cartoon Narrative.”
The cartooning
Joe draws his own cartoons by hand but given that the Musk-Altman fight was about the governance of the company that created ChatGPT, he decided it would be ironic (and therefore appropriate) to use that technology for the illustrations.
The AI-generated illustrations in that first story pleased him, and as he covered developments in the case, he decided to continue in the same cartoon style. As the series progressed, he started to imagine that ChatGPT was like a kid whose parents are in a bitter custody dispute. By letting the bot draw cartoons to illustrate the stories, Joe was giving ChatGPT agency and a voice. It was a conceit for sure, but it was pleasant and satisfying, and he gave into it completely.
Meanwhile, the progression in ChatGPT’s technical ability to generate cartoons on demand was improving dramatically as the case progressed. In the beginning, ChatGPT frequently misspelled words. When Joe prompted small changes to an image, he’d get a new image instead, often far inferior to the original.
By the time trial started in late April 2026, the app allowed iteration from an initial image, and it was possible to preserve in the chat thread the memory of an image from one day to next. With that enhanced capacity it was possible to create a series of recurring characters to play the main courtroom roles. ChatGPT could take a single image of a character and render it in a half dozen different poses. It was easy for the bot.
Joe conceived the two main parties, Musk and Altman, as bantam cocks and the judge, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, as an owl:
He added lawyers:
And because the case is about the race to develop artificial general intelligence, he thought we needed a character who could play that role:
He worked with ChatGPT to create a single illustration of the main characters:
But as the trial marched forward, more characters came to mind, and they soon appeared in our stories — so many that they couldn’t all fit into the courtroom. That reminded Joe and Jay of the situation that they were navigating in the Oakland courthouse. They had a yellow media pass for reserved press seating in the main courtroom, but as was true for all the 20 news organizations at the trial, it was only good for one reporter at a time. So they took turns in the main courtroom — excellent visibility, very uncomfortable wooden benches — while the other watched in the “overflow room” where the chairs were cushioned but you couldn’t see the exhibits as they came up.
We decided our extra characters would be relegated to an overflow illustration:
ChatGPT as our cartoonist
As an occasional cartoonist who has derived great joy from creating hand-drawn political and social cartoons, Joe has very mixed feelings about using AI to draw images for use in our trial assignment, but the experiment has been fascinating. A few years ago, when BCN created a “sandbox” to learn about the technology, Joe began experiments — not with pen and ink but with a keyboard.
In 2024, Joe wrote an extended story that explored how he worked through the issues of using generative AI for cartooning. On one hand, it was a jaw-dropping technology, on the other, the implications were disturbing and depressing, as he realized that the technology was going to badly damage, if not completely destroy, the commercial market for hand-drawn cartooning and illustration. It seemed churlish to be against the democratization of cartooning, but it was hard to feel good about the damage coming for creatives.
(Those feelings have come back sharply during the Musk/Altman trial. Joe sits one row back from the amazing Vicki Behringer, a well-known Bay Area courtroom sketch artist who Joe profiled in 2022 for Local News Matters.)
As a result of Joe’s experimentation, he resolved not to use the technology for cartooning other than in the AI experiments we were conducting in our office sandbox and in contexts — like this series — where there was a nexus between the story and the technology.
In those few cases where he does use AI-created images in his published work, Joe wants to be very sure readers know that the cartoons are drawn by an AI. To that end, a note at the bottom of each illustration names ChatGPT as the source. As the Musk v. Altman trial began, we added an illustration byline on the header of our stories so that the attribution is doubly clear.
ChatGPT is part of the team. One day Joe was fooling around, and he asked ChatGPT what animal it would like to be if it were to be depicted in the courtroom series. Wisely, it drew itself as an owl and positioned its self-drawn image behind a bench with a gavel at hand.
In a story about a courtroom fight, ChatGPT wanted to be the judge. Of course it did; the bot isn’t stupid.
Joe explained gently that the role was already taken and gave the bot another chance. This time it chose to be a raccoon, which ultimately led to this image, in our minds an extraordinary demonstration of the technology’s power:
We hope that using a cartoon narrative to tell this story is helpful to our readers as they consider what might happen as the case moves to conclusion. Using animals as proxy for people leads to understanding. Anthropomorphic identity (the wise owl, the feisty roosters, etc.) can make complex topics more easily and quickly understandable, particularly to people who are not lawyers or technologists. At their best, cartoons provide comic relief, delight, humor — and an alternative layer of analysis about what is going on in the courtroom.
That said, it’s back to business. The Musk/Altman trial has many threads yet to be unraveled, and using the cartoon narrative approach, we expect to do our part in the unraveling. Follow along with us on Local News Matters.
Our latest stories covering the trial, and weekly analyses of the courtroom proceedings, can be found here.
The Team
Joe Dworetzky and Jay Harris met and became classmates in 2018 as Fellows in Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute. Joe had been a practicing lawyer, and Jay had a long career in publishing. Neither was ready to retire, and they were looking for something new to do that was meaningful. While at Stanford, they shared a byline on a story about California wildfires that was first published by Local News Matters. Teaming up again eight years later to cover the trial of Musk v. Altman has been an enormous pleasure for both.
Joe is a second-career journalist. He practiced law in Philadelphia for more than 35 years, representing private and governmental clients in commercial litigation and insolvency proceedings. He served as city solicitor for the City of Philadelphia under Mayor Ed Rendell. From 2009 to 2013, Joe was one of five members of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission with responsibility for managing the city’s public schools. He moved to San Francisco in 2011 and began writing fiction and pursuing a lifelong interest in editorial cartooning. Joe earned a master’s in journalism from Stanford University in 2020.
Jay Harris is mostly retired from a long career in the business of journalism — his work ensured that intrepid reporters got paid and their work found an audience, first at Newsweek International and then, for 19 years, as CEO and publisher of San Francisco’s own “Mother Jones.” After his stint at “MoJo,” he partnered with Texas populist Jim Hightower to publish the “Hightower Lowdown.” These days, when he’s not writing for Local News Matters, he volunteers for nonprofit independent media. He’s a board member and treasurer of the First Amendment Coalition, and he recently joined the board of directors of the Bay City News Foundation.
Joe and Jay have had the wonderful Aly Brown of Bay City News as their daily editor. Reporters and editors can have many different relationships ranging from adversarial to conspiratorial, but Aly is always on the good side of that continuum. Every change Aly made or proposed to make was intended to make the stories, clearer, meatier, better. She blew up her schedule to meet the daily timetable and never complained about rough copy. Huge thanks to her.
Special kudos to the amazing Glenn Gehlke, the Night Hawk who designed and laid out the stories for Local News Matters. Glenn has a wonderful eye for design and is LNM’s secret weapon when it comes to presenting a story in a beautifully wrapped package. He has a wicked sense of humor, and his headlining and callouts reflect how deeply he reads and understands the stories.
Finally, much appreciation to Kat Rowlands, the publisher of Bay City News and Local Matters. In addition to her talents as a journalist, Kat is a tremendous leader. Her vision for how to enhance the coverage of local news in the Bay Area is matched only by her passion for doing so with high quality journalism. She is innovative, forward-looking, and always focused on how we can do more for our readers and the communities we serve. We doubt there are many local news outlets in the country that would commit two journalists to daily coverage of a month-long legal slugfest, but Kat thought it was a great idea. It is a pleasure to work in her shop.