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0397 - The only wrong answer. - 2025.05.12 |
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Comment: When I first started writing Forward, back in 2017, "A.I." was not quite as hot a topic as it is right now in 2025. As I write this comment file, sophisticated algorithms are churning out various forms of visual and auditory art, prose, code, and social interaction. It's a big business. Creators like myself, of course, are all complaining that the creations thereby created are nothing more than remixed variations on pre-existing work. Environmentalists are complaining that the power and water consumption are egregious. Human rights advocates are complaining that much of the algorithms' output exploits hidden workers in Africa or India, and that it can have unseen biases baked into it, nestled safely away from accountability. Tech evangelists and the venture capitalists who believe them are crowing that these algorithms can replace human workers in most jobs (although, oddly, not their own). Fascist governments are gleefully using jpegs generated from the stolen work of artists who specifically oppose it to masturbate over the tears of brown women being deported. Disingenuous schoolchildren are plugging essay prompts into a text box and handing in the slop that comes out, and bored teachers' assistants are feeding the slop into another text box to assess it. Credulous insane people across the Internet are convincing themselves that waifus are telling them to dump out their medication and dedicate their lives to sacred geometry. Of course, a lot of things were different in 2017. The aforementioned tech evangelists were still in the middle of promoting ape jpegs as the money of the future. America had only just decided to slap its collective hand onto the glowing red stove burner of nationalism for the first time, and not yet by a suicide-pact majority. Twitter was still viable. COVID-19 (as its name would imply) had not yet happened, and had not yet been made to un-have-happened. Credulous insane people were eagerly awaiting a storm of some sort that would cleanse the world of secret pedophiles and revalue the Iraqi dinar. All of which is to say - a lot can change in eight years, which means that a lot more can change in a century and a half. All of which is also to say that one can often evaluate the viability and morality of a given proposition by taking a good look at those who are already supporting or opposing it. In 2025, Lee's declaration would be a bad and impractical and insane one. In 2167, however, the movement they are proposing as a raison d'être is, as Orb and Bastacia have commented, already gaining ground on Mars, which is the same advanced society that provides much of Earth's popular culture, advanced technology, and revolutionary statecraft. "AI rights" may, indeed, have been a fairly major element of the strip up until this point, a running theme of sorts, a not-so-subtle endgame for our unfocused purple-haired biped to throw themself at. As with my previous webcomics, Forward was always intended to run for exactly 1000 strips. This is strip number 397, approximately two-fifths of the way through the project. I think it's about damn time we focus up, wouldn't you say? |
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