Author notes

321 - Getting Rough

El Cid

on May 23, 2020

Vesna's quads and core muscles are really getting a serious workout today. It's important to me that this comic promotes a healthy active lifestyle.

The sex scene is almost wrapped up; there are two more pages of it left and then we'll learn what Abby and Delilah's fate will be. So stay tuned, more to come!





We all know that robots are going to take our jobs some day, but will they take our webcomicking “jobs” as well? Well, probably not, because this job doesn't pay anything… but they probably could.

This comic's former official unofficial science dude GMan003 did a comic many many years ago that was all procedurally generated from Google Images and slogans, with software written in Bash and Perl. It can barely be considered a true webcomic, but then it was made for a specific purpose – to prove to some guy with a spammy meme comic that he could actually write a computer program that makes better comics than he did. Point proven, I suppose!

But serious AI robo-artists are quite sophisticated. They're not just able to “create” art by reassembling imagery they've digested, but they actually have a capacity to be independently creative, whether through random processes or by imitating the style of a particular artist.



So this makes for some interesting gallery art, I suppose, but is there any useful purpose for this sort of thing? Well, it serves the same purpose as any automation, really. Artists can be expensive. Having an army of art bots churn out your company logo and advertisements, or design your clothing line, may be cheaper than hiring a bunch of artists and designers, I suppose. I don't know that the technology is quite there yet, but that's the goal, I guess.

As with all things robotics, there's a positive and a dystopian aspect to this. On the one hand, robot artists can put a lot of creative people out of work, but on the other hand, they'll also make professional quality art available to people who can't afford to hire a pro. This is especially true when it comes to music. In the indie games industry, independent game developers are already making use of AI software to generate unique music for their games, sparing them from either paying a professional composer or relying on overused public domain music tracks.

Here's a pretty cool video of some programmers using AI to generate a rap song. Basically they fed a ton of rap lyrics into a machine learning software, and from that it “learned” the vernacular of rap music, and how to mimic the way verses are constructed. The title of the song, 'Galyshogig,' should give you an idea how (un)successful the attempt was, but considering the software basically went from a blank slate to knowing how to (sort of) rap in just a couple days, that's pretty impressive, especially compared to how long it takes a human to learn anything beyond making unintelligible shrieks and noises.



It's a valid question whether anything generated by AI can be truly considered “art,” since the end result is just the result of an algorithm rather than the product of a tortured soul or some deep existential pondering. In the world of fine art, AI may never progress beyond the novelty phase, but that doesn't mean it won't have big impacts elsewhere. One thing I've always said is that it would be great if I could clone myself, so I could actually work on all the projects I want to eventually do. Well, who knows, maybe twenty years from now I'll have a virtual AI clone who can do my comics for me while I finally catch up on every episode of Start Trek: The Next Generation?