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

Chris Onstad’s account of 21st century history is told from the perspective of Ray Smuckles, a cat in thongs. Ray Smuckles is de facto the protagonist. AchewoodOnstad, the webcomic that won an award, was first published in 2001. For a period of about 10 years, it was updated on a daily basis. After this, updates were made only occasionally for another 5 years. Since 2016, AchewoodInternet is the most popular. chopped and remixed in memes and panels shared on social media, or referenced by people eager to signal to others that they too are fans of one of the web’s earliest cult hits.

Now, AchewoodHas returned to a violently upheaval internet, most of the time the same but courting disruptive technology du jour. It’s back to its original format, an absurdist website comic featuring Ray and his buddies in and around the 62 Achewood Street, but now with bonus content on Patreon. AchewoodStrips can be viewed for free on their previous home. And also as… an AI bot that gives advice in the chill voice of Ray Smuckles “himself.”

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

As you can see from the previous queries listed on the RayBot home page, RayBot is a very powerful tool. You can also read about how to get started.Ray Smuckles is a disturbing sounding character. Most of the times.

New Tradition Labs Image: RayBot.help

From the road to Achewood to AI was a winding one, spurred by two brand revivals that didn’t quite pan out. A series of beautifully packaged collected editions was released first, containing all of AchewoodIn print They were almost ready for publication, but the COVID-19 outbreak stopped them in their tracks.

Pendleton Ward, a co-creator of the Netflix series Adventure TimeThe following are some examples of how to get started: The Midnight GospelThe fan favorite is the basis for fame Achewood arc “The Great Outdoor Fight.” As Onstad tells it, he and Ward had a demo they felt great about ready to go, but their big pitch meeting fell on the same day Netflix posted its first major subscriber loss, suffered an enormous stock hit, and began making drastic cuts to programming. This meeting was never held.

This month’s Achewood Onstad has recovered from his twin disappointments. AchewoodAs a private venture and an experimentation playground. Hence, RayBot.

The following are some of the ways to get in touch with each other Achewood AI experiment — embraced and co-developed by its creator, no less — might be alarming to longtime Achewood fans. The webcomic, in addition to being a formative text to comedians and laypeople alike, was beloved for Onstad’s distinctive ear for language and dialog; his characters’ turns of phrase were just as exciting as the next punchline. It is a craft that takes a lot of time and effort. Achewood’s language — a single strip, Onstad, says, takes him 8-16 hours to write — juxtaposed against its crude visuals make for a work that largely holds up to this day, barring the occasional 20-year-old gag that has aged poorly. In other words, it’s full of the sort of human idiosyncrasies that would lead to a crisis in creative industries, should AI ever master their delivery.

Onstad understands the doubt. His response is to think of LLMs — Large Language Models, the ChatGPT-style programs that are able to generate coherent prose in response to user prompts — as a tool. RayBot has a different use than other AI viral experiments. For example, asking ChatGPT for a coherent prose is not a common request. 30 RockThe AI can be used to create an episode, or as a stylist. Many of these and other AI-based use cases are replacement experiments, aiming to determine if LLMs could perform the functions of people convincingly enough that they would not require a human.

Onstad says that RayBot is more a collaboration. He’s heavily involved with the team of engineers working on it (all Achewood fans, I’m told) and has started up an LLC, New Tradition Labs, with business partner Ben Porter to make it official. RayBot is trained on Onstad’s body of work — Achewood Yes, he has strips, but a blog that he has written in his character, Ray. This is years and years worth of dirtiest words said by the dirtyest man in town.

The RayBot sound is like a man who loves his own creation.

“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 actually done this yet. All the Achewood content on his Patreon — several months’ worth ready to go, he says — was written far in advance of the RayBot experiment, and he’s been too deeply involved in developing the bot to actually incorporate it into his creative process. He thinks it’d be nice, one day.

“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 speaking from a unique place — many aspiring users of ChatGPT won’t be using a version of it trained on their own prior work, nor will they have a large body of work to feed it, instead focusing on the mass subconscious of the internet to regurgitate something they hope to find useful. He acknowledges there are writers who use LLMs to boost their artificial authority. They may be chasing quotas, or publishing books via Kindle. But real art? That’s not something he thinks these tools are capable of yet.

“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.”

Another point he makes is:

“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.”