Cult webcomic Achewood is back, and bringing AI with it

polygon.com:

The history of the 21st Century can be told any number of ways; Chris Onstad has chronicled 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, updated daily for about a decade, and then sporadically for five more years. From 2016 onward, Achewood mostly belonged to the internet: 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, Achewood has returned to an internet in violent upheaval, mostly the same, but also courting the disruptive tech du jour. The strip is back in its original form, an absurdist webcomic about Ray and his pals in and around 62 Achewood Court, only now on a new Patreon with other bonus content (all previous Achewood strips can still be read for free at their old 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.”

And, as you can read in the list of prior queries on the RayBot homepage, RayBot does sound disconcertingly like Ray Smuckles. Most of the time.

The road leading from Achewood to AI was a winding one, spurred by two brand revivals that didn’t quite pan out. First was a series of handsome collected editions gathering the entirety of Achewood in print. The books were nearly ready to go, and then the COVID-19 pandemic began, stopping them dead in their tracks.

Then came a Netflix show, co-created by Pendleton Ward