Drawfee

Drawfee is a live-illustration and improv comedy show founded in 2014 by CollegeHumor artists Caldwell Tanner and Nathan Yaffe, independent since the 2020 collapse of its parent CH Media. It is currently hosted by Yaffe, Julia Lepetit, and Jacob Andrews (with editor David Clarke); longtime co-host Karina Farek departed in June 2026. The premise — skilled professionals sincerely rendering absurd audience prompts — has made it one of YouTube’s most beloved showcases of human draftsmanship, with 1.9 million subscribers.

From novelty prompts to a hard no

In 2021 and 2022 the crew happily mined early neural networks for comedy — drawing AI-generated Pokémon and Digimon, Janelle Shane’s neural-net Halloween prompts, and DALL-E Mini fever dreams. As image generators trained on scraped artwork detonated into an ethics crisis for working illustrators in late 2022, that well quietly closed: the AI-image episodes stopped, and by a March 2023 ChatGPT episode the technology appeared only as a punchline about “these robots that are going to kill us all one day.” The crew’s view of image generators hardened into open derision — in a February 2024 episode, Farek deadpanned that stealing art is fine because “then it’s called AI art.”

The refusal extends to their side projects: in April 2026, Andrews and Lepetit’s Secret Sleepover Society stream swapped out a planned game on the spot after learning of “AI allegations” against it. Like much of the illustration community, Drawfee anchored its social presence on Bluesky as artists fled X over AI-training terms, and the show’s entire format — hours of visible, fallible, human drawing — now reads as a standing argument for the thing generative AI skips.