Cult webcomic Achewood is again, and there’s an AI, too

The historical past of the twenty first Century may be advised any variety of methods; Chris Onstad has chronicled a lot of it from the POV of a thong-wearing cat named Ray Smuckles. Ray is the de facto protagonist of Achewood, the award-winning webcomic Onstad began in 2001, up to date every day for a couple of decade, and then sporadically for 5 extra years. From 2016 onward, Achewood principally belonged to the web: chopped and remixed in memes and panels shared on social media, or referenced by folks desirous to sign to others that they too are followers of one of many net’s earliest cult hits.

Now, Achewood has returned to an web in violent upheaval, principally the identical, but in addition courting the disruptive tech du jour. The strip is again in its authentic kind, an absurdist webcomic about Ray and his friends in and round 62 Achewood Court, solely now on a brand new Patreon with different bonus content material (all earlier Achewood strips can nonetheless be learn totally free at their previous house). And additionally as… an AI bot that provides recommendation within the chill voice of Ray Smuckles “himself.”

“The inventiveness of it was surreal and deeply engaging,” Onstad advised Polygon, impressed on the “RayBot’s” mimicry of his work. “The coherence was like 90%. It very rarely lost its train of thought.”

And, as you possibly can learn within the listing of prior queries on the RayBot homepage, RayBot does sound disconcertingly like Ray Smuckles. Most of the time.

Image: RayBot.assist/New Tradition Labs

The street main from Achewood to AI was a winding one, spurred by two model revivals that didn’t fairly pan out. First was a sequence of good-looking collected editions gathering the whole lot of Achewood in print. The books have been almost able to go, and then the COVID-19 pandemic started, stopping them useless of their tracks.

Then got here a Netflix present, co-created by Pendleton Ward of Adventure Time and The Midnight Gospel fame and based mostly on the fan-favorite Achewood arc “The Great Outdoor Fight.” As Onstad tells it, he and Ward had a demo they felt nice about able to go, however their huge pitch assembly fell on the identical day Netflix posted its first main subscriber loss, suffered an monumental inventory hit, and started making drastic cuts to programming. The assembly by no means occurred.

This month’s Achewood return is the results of Onstad selecting himself up after these twin disappointments; a return to Achewood as a personal enterprise and a playground for experimentation. Hence, RayBot.

An Achewood AI experiment — embraced and co-developed by its creator, no much less — could be alarming to longtime Achewood followers. The webcomic, along with being a formative textual content to comedians and laypeople alike, was beloved for Onstad’s distinctive ear for language and dialog; his characters’ turns of phrase have been simply as thrilling as the subsequent punchline. The craft put into Achewood’s language — a single strip, Onstad, says, takes him 8-16 hours to jot down — juxtaposed in opposition to its crude visuals make for a piece that largely holds as much as this present day, barring the occasional 20-year-old gag that has aged poorly. In different phrases, it’s stuffed with the kind of human idiosyncrasies that might result in a disaster in artistic industries, ought to AI ever grasp their supply.

Onstad is conscious of the skepticism. His response is to think about LLMs — Large Language Models, the ChatGPT-style applications which are in a position to generate coherent prose in response to consumer prompts — as a software. RayBot is a singular use case in comparison with different viral AI experiments, like asking ChatGPT to jot down a 30 Rock episode or to function a private stylist. These, and most of the most sensational AI use instances, are experiments of alternative, makes an attempt to see if LLMs can carry out the perform of an individual convincingly sufficient to not want that particular person.

RayBot, as Onstad tells it, is extra of a piece of collaboration. He’s closely concerned with the group of engineers engaged on it (all Achewood followers, I’m advised) and has began up an LLC, New Tradition Labs, with enterprise associate Ben Porter to make it official. RayBot is skilled on Onstad’s physique of labor — Achewood strips sure, but in addition the weblog he wrote in-character as Ray, years and years of phrases spoken by the dirtiest dude on the town.

That RayBot appears like his creation delights him.

“You know, the very first instance that I saw content that felt deeply familiar and eerily so, I was absolutely elated, because for that to have been accomplished was unthinkable before now,” Onstad says. “There is plenty of chatter about authors who are worried that AI will take us over, but on our team, we’ve come to see that, for the next several generations, AI is just going to have the potential to be a critical writer’s tool or assistant, like the way that we use word processors or Wikipedia or Google to help us in our writing.”

According to Onstad, he hasn’t truly performed this but. All of the Achewood content material on his Patreon — a number of months’ price able to go, he says — was written far upfront of the RayBot experiment, and he’s been too deeply concerned in growing the bot to truly incorporate it into his artistic course of. But he thinks it might be good to, ultimately.

“I don’t feel like it’s entirely cheating to say, like, ‘Hey, Chris’s entire body of work with perfect recall and statistical weighting, give me a Chris-type idea,’” Onstad says. “This technology really helps you recognize that there is no hard barrier, no distinct point at where the artist’s mind stops, and the outside world begins. And so for me to have some of this information stored physically outside of myself, is still a valid way to achieve new ideas.”

Again, Onstad is talking from a singular place — many aspiring customers of ChatGPT gained’t be utilizing a model of it skilled on their very own prior work, nor will they’ve a big physique of labor to feed it, as an alternative specializing in the mass unconscious of the web to regurgitate one thing they hope to search out helpful. He admits that there are some writers on quota, maybe knocking out books on Kindle or making an attempt to inflate their authority on a topic, that may make use of LLMs as they exist now to provide themselves an synthetic enhance. But actual artwork? That’s not one thing he thinks these instruments are able to but.

“It takes me 8-16 hours to write a strip. Anything that RayBot says as a generative idea is going to get reworked and redeveloped and spun upside down so much that I can say, ‘Ray kept me from the blank page,’” Onstad says, “but no AI content has any chance of appearing in any of my work in its final form. Because psychologically, I’m a writer, and I do what I do because I love doing it. That’s my work. It’s not interesting to me, if a bot just throws up content, and I put characters under it. There still needs to be my contribution for me to feel like I’m offering anything of value.”

At one other level, he places it this manner:

“I don’t find it profitable to distinguish between RayBot’s ability to help me generate ideas and a bottle of whiskey,” Onstad says. “Except this is much more sustainable and doesn’t cost any money.”