The history of the 21st century can be told in different ways; Chris Onstad captured much 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 started in 2001, was updated daily for about a decade, then sporadically for another five years. As of 2016, Achewood belonged largely to the Internet: chopped and mixed again in memes and panels shared on social media, or referenced by people eager to let others know that they too are fans of one of the web’s first cult hits.
Now, Achewood has returned to an internet in violent turmoil, mostly the same, but also looking for the disruptive tech du jour. The comic is back in its original form, an absurdist webcomic about Ray and his friends in and around 62 Achewood Court, only now on a new Patreon with other bonus content (all previous Achewood comics can still be read for free in their old house). And also as… an AI bot that gives advice in the cold voice of Ray Smuckles ‘himself’.
“Its inventiveness was surreal and very captivating,” Onstad told Polygon, impressed by “RayBot’s” mimicry of his work. “The coherence was about 90%. It rarely lost its train of thought.”
And, as you can read in the list of past questions on the RayBot home pageRayBot do sounds disturbingly like Ray Smuckles. Generally.
The road leading from it Achewood to AI was a tortuous one, spurred by two brand revivals that didn’t quite pan out. The first was a series of handsome collected editions that collected the whole Achewood impression. The books were almost ready to go, and then the COVID-19 pandemic kicked in, stopping them dead in their tracks.
Then came a Netflix show co-created by Pendleton Ward of Adventure Time And The Midnight Gospel fame and based on the fan favorite Achewood arc “The Great Outdoor Fight.” As Onstad tells it, he and Ward had a demo they were ready for, but their big pitch meeting fell on the same day Netflix announced its first major subscriber loss, suffered a massive stock market hit, and began making drastic cuts to its programming. . The meeting never happened.
This month’s Achewood return is the result of Onstad picking himself up after those double disappointments; a return to Achewood as a private enterprise and a playground for experimentation. Hence RayBot.
A Achewood AI experimentation — embraced and co-developed by its creator, no less — can be alarming for a long time Achewood fans. The webcomic is not just formative text for comedians and laymen, was loved for Onstad’s trademark ear for language and dialogue; his characters’ turns of phrase were as exciting as the next punch line. The vessel put in Achewood‘s language – a single strip, says Onstad, takes him 8-16 hours to write – combined with the raw imagery make for a work that largely holds up to this day, save for a single 20-year-old joke that is older has become bad. In other words, it’s full of the kind of human quirks that would lead to a crisis in the creative industries, should AI ever master their delivery.
Onstad knows the skepticism. His answer is to think about LLMs – Large language models, the ChatGPT style programs capable of generating coherent prose in response to user prompts – as a resource. RayBot is a unique use case compared to other viral AI experiments such as ChatGPT ask for a 30 Rock episode or to serve as a personal stylist. These, and many of the most sensational AI use cases, are replacement experiments, attempts to see if LLMs can perform a person’s function convincingly enough that that person is not needed.
RayBot, as Onstad puts it, is more of a collaborative work. He is closely involved with the team of engineers working on it (all Achewood fans, I’m told) and has started an LLC, New Tradition Labs, with business partner Ben Porter to make it official. RayBot is trained on Onstad’s oeuvre — Achewood comics yes, but also the blog he wrote in his character as Ray, years and years of words spoken by the nastiest dude in town.
That RayBot sounds like his creation delights him.
“You know, the very first time I saw content that felt deeply familiar and creepy, I was absolutely thrilled, because that had been unthinkable until now,” says Onstad. “There is a lot of talk about authors being afraid that AI will take us over, but in our team we have come to see that AI will just have the potential to become a critical writer in generations to come. tool or assistant, like the way we use word processors or Wikipedia or Google to help us write.”
According to Onstad, he has not actually done this yet. All Achewood The content of his Patreon – ready to use several months, he says – was written long before the RayBot experiment, and he was too deeply involved in the bot’s development to actually include it in his creative process. But he thinks it would be fun in the end.
“I don’t feel like it’s cheating at all to say, like, ‘Hey, Chris’ entire body of work with perfect recall and statistical weighting, give me a Chris-esque idea,'” says Onstad. “This technology really helps you recognize that there is no hard barrier, no clear point where the artist’s mind ends and the outside world begins. And so for me, it’s still a valid way to physically store some of this information outside of myself, to come up with new ideas.
Again, Onstad speaks from a unique place – many aspiring users of ChatGPT won’t use a version of it trained on their own past work, nor will they have a large amount of work to feed it, but focus on the mass subconscious of the internet to regurgitate something they hope to find useful. He admits that some writers have a quota, perhaps knocking out books on the Kindle or trying to inflate their authority on a topic, which LLMs as they exist today can use to artificially boost themselves. But real art? That’s not something he thinks these tools aren’t capable of yet.
“It takes me 8-16 hours to write a comic. Everything RayBot says as a generative idea will be reworked and redeveloped and turned upside down so many times I can say, ‘Ray kept me from the blank page,'” says Onstad, “but no AI content has any chance of to appear. in all my work in its final form. Because psychologically I’m a writer, and I do what I do because I like to do it. Thats my job. 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 to feel like I have something of value to offer.”
On another point he puts it this way:
“I don’t find it profitable to differentiate between RayBot’s ability to help me come up with ideas and a bottle of whiskey,” says Onstad. “Only this is much more sustainable and does not cost any money.”