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Your Achewood Comics Are _Not_ Being Written by AI (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-08 23:37:42
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

I've seen a few people draw an inaccurate conclusion from the Verge article about the relaunch of Achewood, and the RayBot.help project: namely, that new Achewood will be "written by or with AI." 

This is absolutely not the case! I am experimenting with AI, separately from this content, and not on your dime. The Achewood you see here on Patreon will be organically produced using my fingers, slimy tired brain, and personal sentences, the way it always was. 

It would be highly uncool—unethical is another good word for this—to invite everyone here to subscribe to new content and not declare at the outset that it was from some experimental new AI project. 

It would also be icky, empty, and dissatisfying to me to give you work that got a laugh or a feeling for which I wasn't responsible. I write to make people happy, to know I can share real emotions and observations meaningfully with other humans, to give you words that connect our hearts. I write because I deeply love the process of writing, of seeing where my mind goes. Offloading that process to software wouldn't do anything for me; it would not create fulfillment or personal value. I would still need to write and share. 

What is true about "me & AI" (doesn't that sound like a Paul Simon song?) is that I am experimenting with the best, latest, fine-tuned large language models. It's a profound and thrilling experience to watch as this software learns to make the baby noises of an intimately familiar character like Ray. These systems are revolutionary engineering accomplishments, but, all that said, they are, at this point, not even in the same solar system of capability as a human author. I'd like to document more of this process, in the Author's Tier, if people are interested. Let me know! 

In summary, the Achewood you will be reading will be Achewood I make the original way—the stuff you liked in the first place. Except I won't be tearing my hair out about the bills, because thanks to your extraordinary outpouring of support, I can focus on making content for you again, full-time! 

Love and gratitude to you all, 

Chris

 

Comments

Jess Burke

in the midst of all this really soulless cash-grabbery around AI, i am so glad to know that someone like you is experimenting with AI in a way that does not suck, and also that you are still making Achewood's Classic Good Timey Comic Strips, just like old times.

Andrew Siegler

You can be my bodyguard and I could be your long lost Pay-I…

Andrew

I’d be very glad to see more of the process as you uncover stuff worth sharing. In my own mostly technical work I use LLMs a fair bit and they’re interesting beasts. Seeing actual creative people wrangle them is something I’m looking forward to.

Achewood
>>108121129

Thank you Jess! That's the way I see it too -- let's find out what's neat about this thing. I really appreciate your perspective.

Nick Smethurst

I can’t believe Onstadt.bot was capable of producing this disclaiming Patreon post - 2023 is wild.

Achewood
>>108121311

The process has begun. We're gathering a lot of insight that can only come with rolling up your sleeves and "sitting at whist" with the thing for a long time. It's really valuable to have written the fine-tuning material and then see the way it regurgitated.

zoë hayden

I genuinely think what you're doing with the language models is cool, but I have to question whether it's ethical to be a voluntary customer of OpenAI whose business model is inherently exploitative and has relied on underpaid laborers in developing countries to do content moderation, exposing low wage workers to things like child porn and violent content with little recourse. I love Achewood and I am really excited to be a subscriber but I also feel very uncomfortable with the idea of money going towards OpenAI and I hope you'll consider the possibility of using language models in an open source, privately hosted capacity in the future instead of giving your money to OpenAI. I genuinely believe what big tech companies like OpenAI are doing right now is existentially evil but I also believe Achewood is art that has done good for my soul and others' souls. I want these things to be in harmony !

Jason Pargin

It's unfortunate because the article really didn't make that clear, and in fact kind of made it sound like AI would be relieving the workload of creating the comic or whatever. It never made sense but I see why people were alarmed.

J Hardy Carroll

My wife and I were just talking about this. Using AI for research or for strange tangents is fine, what leveraging it for creative work seems kind of silly to me. It doesn't scratch the itch that building something the ground up does. Although I have to say I find it hilarious that an LLM is trained on Ray Smuckles and Roast Beef.

Lonesome Cowpoke

I appreciate your candor, but I never would've subscribed if I'd known that this was going to be written by a human person

Meadow Green

I wish people would give you a little more grace honestly!

emitydna

Chucklebot's been working some rough chuckles lately...

Jon

I hope everyone read the Terms of Service! I'm saying this as a favor, but not as a warning.

Kiaayo

This is exactly what I assumed but thanks for being clear about it.

Matt Mitchell

Not to pile on the author of the article, but so much was devoted to AI in it that it was a little unclear, even if it did still mostly foreground it as an R & D type thing. I’m not on social media so I actually didn’t see the article until I received the disclaimer email Chris sent, which was nice to read and which affirmed the *soul* that goes into Achewood, a type of creative work which I can’t imagine ever being replicated authentically, despite the claims of inevitability from those at large excited and/or smug about the overall tech. That said, I’d be curious to see the experiments. Anything you felt was interesting or funny enough to share probably is! I would say the track record is fairly unimpeachable. (“Pat edited this post at 8:44”) (“Pat edited this post at 8:45”)

Omurice

I don’t feel qualified to have an opinion as I’m roughly the same age as Cornelius, but I trust Chris, his writing has sustained me through some rough times.

Fat Napoleon

The article was on a tech site written by a tech writer (I enjoy Liz Lopatto's writing in general) so it makes sense it would focus on an AI angle. Still, tech is only as good/bad as what people do with it and if you're experimenting I'm in for watching the results. As far as I'm concerned, use AI however you want so long as it helps you realize whatever your vision is. You don't owe me anything.

Dan Adams

Admit it, Chris, you just typed “write an email reassuring my readers that my content is not written by AI” into ChatGPT.

Achewood
>>108121711

Zoë, I think you've done a great job of outlining the challenges in treading a noble path forward as regards the infrastructure portion of this technology. We are very close to the news cycle on this subject and are intrigued by the future of open source LLMs. And thank you so much for the kind words about Achewood!

Achewood
>>108121815

Writing an Achewood strip typically felt more difficult than creating a Large Language Model, and often times seemed to take about as long. Honey, ain't nobody relieves my damn workload

Achewood
>>108122203

Admit that you like chatting with RayBot. I force you to say this. *Make with the admits, dude*

Achewood
>>108122245

Hi, this is Chris. What's going on here? Who started this Patre—LIE BOT! [applause, laughter]

Achewood
>>108123275

We could never fit his hair in Lie Bot's helmet. How come more people aren't making Lie Bot / hallucinations / AI joke?

Achewood
>>108124863

Thank you! I will post some experiments in Tier 3 this month and we'll see how it goes. It won't supplant the short stories and other "organic" stuff that I envisioned for that space.

sp

This was a thoughtful and empathetic enough response that I resubbed. which is uh, not typical for these kinds of scenarios, so thanks for listening! I think the framing and the timing of the Verge article gave undue weight to the AI angle as an integral part of the relaunch, rather than more of a side project. Given the present online atmosphere of uhh cynical media necromancy, it was easy to assume this was a case of cornelius coming back as one of those fucked up scream bears from area x. relieved to hear that isn't the case. at least not until the next arc

Micah I Thomas

Ugh this helps so much it's almost upsetting (because happiness is hard)

Andrew Hurder

I kinda want to see an LLM-based comic or two just to see Ray with multiple thongs

X27

I never suspected that was going to be the case, but all the same I'm glad to have hard confirmation!

Achewood
>>108133293

I know I will sarcastically try to use AI to try and generate an experimental extra strip or two (again, not to replace the scheduled organic content), and maybe have some cameos from a character named AI

bird

Lie bot gonna be out of a job

sp
>>108128188

Connie left his Annihilation horn under a towel in the bathroom and I crushed the main horn area. Lookin at six hundo

Christopher Craft

A ChatBot walks into a bar and asks Cornelius if he's a Publican...

Andy Jennings

I would no more presume you were cutting corners making The Grandest Thing On The Internet than I would you were writing it with a sausage maker or a coral reef. Everyone not tearing off their own head yelling about frittatas knows the love that goes into making Achewood. Sidebar: the fact that Achewood is back is the best thing that's happened to me in a few years, and is so far in the Top 3 Things That Have Happened In The Double Twenties. And one of the other two is probably the phrase "PLAYER, R U SIX?!", but it's still early in the decade.

John Krane

I never expected you would. Raybot is pretty fun, but it misses that je ne sais quoi. It's like a friend telling a shaggy dog joke that he heard but he can't quite escalate it and you end up just quietly chuckling while he excuses himself to grab another NA beer.

John Krane
>>108158046

no disrespect to NA drinkers, it's just what that guy was drinking last Friday.

John Krane
>>108125860

I'm also a professional writer. Writing about AI is hard. A few years ago, I interviewed Janelle Shane, and everyone should look her up. She's the smartest person I think I've ever talked to, and her writings on AI and its limitations are hilarious. She pokes holes in "creative" AIs and makes robots do silly things. AI has historically sucked at anything creative. Setting my fandom aside, I legitimately think that Raybot comes closest to nailing it. It's not there and I don't think it'll ever be *really* there, but whatever you've done to train it, Chris, it's pretty impressive. It makes sense for Lopatto to focus on the AI, and as a writer I imagine that it was tough for her to find a balance between "holy shit Achewood is back" and "this hyperfocused AI is actually really interesting." There's definitely a story there about how Chris is using AI to *supplement* creativity, but it's hard to get that nuance across in ~1000 words. I don't think she did a bad job, but I get why some people (apparently) freaked out.

ZONKPUNCH

I don't think the article stopped anyone. 2000 Patrons in a few days? That has to be a record :D

K. Unknown

AI is extremely cool and I hope you continue to do fun stuff with it, and I don't think the article's writer was trying to spread misinformation, but I have to say it is truly and absolutely wild to me that any Achewood fan could even IMAGINE a universe in which you would release strips generated by anything other than the hell inside your head. Like, yeah, we're all from circumstances to some degree (and anyone here who says they aren't is lying, possibly to themselves), but damn. If we can't even trust YOU, we might as well just embrace voluntary human extinction.

Brandon

I don't know why anyone who read the article would be mad at you for any of this, and I was really disappointed to see so many people who were happy Achewood was back suddenly turn sour because you were having some fun with LLMs. That said, I do not care for Raybot, especially given how expensive it seems to be for you to maintain.

Achewood

So it turns out that operating RayBot is orders of magnitude cheaper than we thought. And absolutely zero Patreon income is going towards that project. Brandon, thank you for letting me know I should clarify this.

Achewood
>>108248066

Since anything AI-related I consider to be outside the canon, I'll be putting it in the Author's Tier. This tier is the catch-all for folks who want to read anything Achewood and Achewood-related ("outside the fourth wall"). That's the plan for now, but this is very early days. Thanks for asking!

rap legend Jesse Dangerously
>>108248444

ah I was pretending to be someone who only showed up hoping to get AI generated Achewoods (AIchewood?) and is now frustrated to only be getting human ones, impatiently demanding to know where the AI generated achewods (FAKEwood?) are being kept. Sorry it didn't land. I am in the Author's Tier as long as I can afford to be, and glad to be here!

Achewood
>>108248066

Ah! The issue was that I had an actual answer. But I do like the idea of a perpetual commenter who is eternally mad that the comics aren’t all faked by an AI.

rap legend Jesse Dangerously
>>108252196

it's a type of person that, in very small quantities, either exists already or will very soon, so the window for pretending to be it as a joke is slamming shut. i may have been hasty.

denv_eric

These headline writers sure are muddying the waters. Saw that Polygon just posted an article titled "Cult webcomic Achewood is back, and bringing AI with it", and Boing Boing with: "Cartoonist Chris Onstad is using A.I. to revive his "Achewood" comic strip".

Achewood
>>108257510

Yeah, it’s really two different events, being conflated. Each should ultimately be its own story, I think, in order to minimize confusion.

Matt Mitchell
>>108124863

Yes it still feels like “your voice” even as it was distinct from the Achewood universe (where Charlie Brown was in denial, ha).

John Krane
>>108121815

Hey, Jason Pargin! If you're the author, your books are great. JDATE got me back into reading fiction. And if you're not the author, disregard and assume that JDATE is a dating service.

Susan Schorn

I really like the possibility of using AI to help you "converse" with your characters, and whatever you find useful in the LLM discovery process seems great too. I would just caution against spending a lot of money to support the Ray chat-bot for use by the general public. Don't subsidize AI for random people. Keep your money! You earned it.

Achewood
>>108657469

Thank you Susan. It is a fascinating new(ish) technology and, by its very nature, tirelessly generative. And just so everybody knows, zero dollars from the Patreon go to paying for RayBot.help tokens! Also, running it is actually far less expensive than the LLM provider's advertised token rates indicate (a wonderful surprise).