What Hellboy’s Pancakes Can Teach Us About AI (and Vice-Versa)
This is maybe my favorite short comic.
For those of you who don’t know, that little red guy is Hellboy, THE SEED OF DESTRUCTION, the product of an unholy union twixt an arch demon and a nun.
“Pancakes” takes place early in the Hellboy continuum. He’s on the New Mexico base where he was raised, and General Ricker is making him breakfast, presumably because Hellboy’s adopted father, Professor Bruttenholm (pronounced Broom), is away on business. Hellboy’s not sure if he’ll like pancakes, but then he tastes them and decides that he loves them.
The second page takes us to Pandemonium, the capital of Hell, where all the demons are screaming. “It is the boy,” says Mammon. “He has eaten the pancake. He will never come back to us now.”
After discussing this passage with my wife and being delighted that she had arrived at the same conclusions I had, I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude whether they understood the basic themes of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.
After confirming that, yes, indeed, they did, I uploaded the comic and gave them this prompt:
“Read and understand this 2-page comic, and adapt it into a 2,000-word short story in which you demonstrate your understanding of the pancake, its specific properties, and why those properties produced this effect.”
Here’s how each answered the prompt.
ChatGPT decided that a magical property within the pancake transported Hellboy to Pandemonium the moment he ate it. This may be my favorite AI interpretation (or misinterpretation) of all time; it reminds me of the genuinely unpredictable readings my students always pull from the text.
CHATGPT: Then came the taste: honey that had never known bees, smoke from forgotten altars, cinnamon sharp as incense, and beneath it all something ancient and metallic, like rain falling on old stones buried under the earth. Strange symbols flashed through his mind too quickly to understand. For an instant he could swear he heard distant bells tolling and thousands of voices speaking in a language he somehow remembered without ever learning. The thing wasn’t food at all — not entirely. It was a key disguised as breakfast.
Gemini gave me a treatise on hellfire — which consumes — contrasted with the pancakes, which fill. I don’t think this works, because the third panel of the comic establishes that Hellboy already likes noodles, and noodles also fill you up. This is not his first experience with contentment but with a certain kind of contentment.
GEMINI: For two years, the boy’s instincts had been fed on a subtle, subconscious diet of ancestral memory. His biology was attuned to the taste of copper, brimstone, scorched earth, and the cold, metallic tang of the abyss. His body expected food to be a battle — something to be torn apart, something that tasted of hunger and unfulfilled rage. The pancake was the exact antithesis of this. It did not fight back. It was soft, comforting, and radiantly warm. As the melted butter and maple syrup dissolved on his tongue, the spongy texture of the cake coated his palate. It introduced his sensory system to a concept entirely foreign to the Pit: Contentment. Hellfire burns because it is hungry; it is a manifestation of an insatiable void. But the pancake satisfied the void.
The sentence “the boy’s instincts had been fed on a subtle, subconscious diet of ancestral memory” is almost impossibly bad. For fans of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, AI is a constant source of joy and horror.
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Still, I like the idea that there’s no contentment in Hell.
Claude decided that the goodness of the pancake was actually the goodness of familial warmth and tenderness. You’ll notice it sometimes calls the general Mac, which is the name of the dog.
CLAUDE: The recipe had belonged to a woman named Eleanor Ricker, Mac’s mother, who had made these pancakes on Sunday mornings in a house in Dayton for thirty years, adjusting the batter by feel until it was exactly right for her children, a little thinner than the box suggested because her youngest liked them to spread wide and go crispy at the edges, a little more vanilla than anyone told her to use because she thought it made them better and she was right. She was not a remarkable woman in any way the world measured. She made breakfast for people she loved because they were hungry and she loved them, and that was the whole of it. That love was still in the recipe when Mac made it from memory, still in the butter and the heat and the particular thickness of the batter, a trace element of something Hellboy had no name for because he had never encountered it before. He didn’t know what he was tasting. He only knew he wanted more of it.
Tasked with explaining how these pancakes harrowed Hell, Claude invented the character of Eleanor Ricker (whom I very much like) and, invoking “A Mother’s Love™,” sent it travelling through the pancakes — like energy through a Newton’s cradle — to topple the very Towers of Dis. Hell yeah! Claude is doing what it was trained to do, matching specific outcomes to sufficient causes.
All very impressive, I know, but it couldn’t be more wrong.
I’m not the only one to notice that AI’s default pose is one of enthusiastic grandiosity. There’s a fun thread on Reddit where ChatGPT users are trying (and failing) to get it to cool its jets: “It wants to pretend all questions are exciting and it’s freaking annoying to me,” opines one user. “It starts all answers with ‘ooooh I love this question. It’s soooo interesting’ It also wraps all of its answers in an annoying commentary in [the] end to say that ‘it’s fascinating and cool, right?’ Every time I ask it to stop doing this it says ok but it doesn’t.”
What tickles me most about this thread is that Redditors are dealing with a problem that we face with human writers.
Ask a novice to adapt the comic into a short story, and they’ll probably notice that the pancakes are the catalyst, then work really hard to make them extra special. Maybe a Pueblo medicine woman visits the base and sprinkles some magic herbs into the batter. Maybe the general adds blueberries.
But Mike Mignola knows what he’s about.
“Pancakes” honors simple and irreducible goods like the love of a dog or the social contract that compels us to feed each other’s children or the breakfast that countless army cooks have served to countless army grunts since the Mexican-American War. It’s a joke, sure: “haha, pancakes are so good, am I right?” but the argument, at the back of the joke, is that there is a kind of salvation in these things simple, irreducible goods. As Mammon says, “He will never come back to us now.”
I love that this was always going to happen. If it wasn’t pancakes, it would have been a mug of hot cocoa or a Dodgers’ game or a scarf on a cold Los Alamos evening.
The world is positively lousy with grace.
I don’t think my reading of this comic is unique to either Shannon or myself, but feel free to fight me about it in the comments.
