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MACHINE AGE CARTOON

SHE WROTE THE EMPIRE DOWN. IT KEPT GROWING.

By Zimbo · November 2, 2026

AI cartoon by Zimbo: Karen Hao in six panels: MIT engineer to reporter, 2018; first knock at OpenAI, 2019; podcast mic and Front Page Award, 2020; AI Colonialism map and labelers, 2022; training reporters, 2024; lookout finale with Issue the cat and a press van, gazing at a growing EMPIRE OF AI fortress.
Karen Hao went from MIT engineer to the first reporter inside OpenAI's story, traced the AI supply chain around the world, trained reporters to follow it — then watched the empire keep growing. In six panels.Zimbo for AI News Page

The story behind the cartoon

Karen Hao studied mechanical engineering at MIT, worked as an application engineer at a Google[x] spinout, then reported and did data-science work at Quartz before moving into AI journalism at MIT Technology Review in 2018. The technical career became her reporting advantage: she could read the machine as well as the press release.

In 2019 she became the first journalist to profile OpenAI, when the lab was still little-known and years before ChatGPT made it famous, tracing the tension between its founding mission and its growing ambitions. In 2020 she co-produced the podcast In Machines We Trust and won a Front Page Award for it.

Her Pulitzer Center-supported AI Colonialism series in 2022 followed the AI supply chain around the world, from data collection and labeling labor to surveillance and algorithmic power beneath the models. In 2024 she led the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, training reporters worldwide to investigate AI systems, companies, money and power, and in May 2025 Penguin Press published Empire of AI, her book-length account of OpenAI and the wider industry.

The joke in Zimbo's strip is the arc itself: the engineer who learned to take the machine apart now takes the whole empire apart in a notebook. She knocks first, she listens longest, she trains everyone else to knock too — and the punchline is that the empire she wrote down so carefully just kept growing anyway, fortress and all, while she and a cat watch it from a hill in a press van.

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MORE ZIMBO ↓

Satirical cartoon: a tiny reporter with a notepad documents a towering fortress of servers labeled EMPIRE OF AI, while the fortress’s robot sentries aim red sight-lines at her and hold giant notepads documenting her back.THE EMPIRE TAKES NOTESZimbo cartoon: Merv, an anxious pale-metal robot with huge worried eyes, stands on a wooden ladder oiling the rusted, frozen second hand of a grand station clock, while Buddy, a small pale-metal robot dog, sits beside him wagging his tail and watching the hand expectantly.THE SECOND HANDSatirical cartoon: a vetted scientist in a lab coat holds a large open padlock beside a giant grinning ROSALIND robot holding a closed red skull padlock in its mouth, under a TRUSTED ACCESS gate sign.THE TWO PADLOCKSSatirical cartoon: a man on the phone mid-sentence, ‘Could you book me a—’, while a smiling robot voice agent holds up a checked RESERVATION card and answers ‘¡Listo!’ beside a desk calendar.BOOKED BEFORE YOU FINISH

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