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Last I knew I'd read all of Clarissa, and it's just sad. The last one I remember is a much larger comic where she does Take Your Daughter To Work Day with her dad, who turns out to work in a factory that kills animals and turns them into flavoring. Clarissa thinks it's scary and gross and her dad kind of has this human moment where he recognizes how bad it is...but he goes right back into projecting on everyone else and justifying it, and on the way home he promises to get her McDonalds...even though she "doesn't deserve it" and "has to earn it." [shudder]
There's never really a conclusion to Clarissa's story. There's another story before the factory one where she draws a family portrait in school and very obviously tells the teacher she's being raped...and the teacher doesn't care, doesn't get it, dead end. I feel so awful for Clarissa, and I get why Jason stopped drawing it.
I like to imagine an ending where Clarissa grows up and moves away, but then her father's dying and she has to come see him...and everyone's pretending like he was such a good man but she's at the foot of his bed like "I'm not going to pretend he didn't fuck me," just like that first comic. Like she's doing better alone and everyone else just sucks, and now that anyone would take adult Clarissa seriously she doesn't mince words and the pervert fucking dies having been outed as a pedophile on his death bed.
My dick was cut off recently. I was pretty bummed out about it. But then I thought whoever is milking me for lols on the internet is probably more happy to hear about it than I am sad to lose it. The total lols in the world increased.
So, whatever.
I think he mentioned somewhere that he was going to therapy for gender related stuff but he still thinks he is a cis guy that likes feminine stuff.
I don't think theres hope for him, this is no longer an if, but a when will he troon out?.
I give it the rest of the year, it will be a miracle if he doesn't troon out after going to "gender therapy" and getting hundreds of comments from troons calling him an "egg"
I don't think theres hope for him, this is no longer an if, but a when will he troon out?.
I give it the rest of the year, it will be a miracle if he doesn't troon out after going to "gender therapy" and getting hundreds of comments from troons calling him an "egg"
It could go either way. He knows this shit would get him attention, and I don't know how his numbers are doing since the Bike Cuck days when he was a bigger deal.
I miss when comics were just posted to their own website and you had a Project Wonderful ad you could click on to see what numbers they were doing, made it so much easier to see who was doing well and who was about to have a sperg out because their numbers were dropping.
I've been out of the loop for a while. But I don't believe Questionable Content has touched upon the more... widely condemned aspects of AI, or has it?
Robots are featured in the comic (initially called 'AnthroPCs' in-universe, now just called 'AIs'), usually as an oppressed minority, liberated by the technological singularity but still Oppressed. They deserve all the same rights and affordances as people, and no reasonable character has a problem with this. Interestingly too, they are mostly female, at least among the current cast of recurrings.
Meanwhile in the real world, Jeph's audience are the usual libbed-out AI haters. I can't be the only one to notice this discrepancy.
The media-literate will point out that the robots in the QCverse, and the recurring theme of the prejudice they face, are really just symbols for people and the prejudice they face in real life. It has nothing at all to do with actual AI.
But it does seem an odd choice of a symbol to use, even 10-20 years ago. Not only does it present oppressed people as inhuman, inanimate. But also, it presents them as dangerous - something any competent sci-fi writer would see the dangers of. Military and police robots are canon within the story's setting. But the wider implications of sentient AIs with deadly weapons, or even just a libido, are never actually explored.
A recent strip (5873) might appear to touch upon the subject, but only ever intersects it on a tangent. The modern problem of attention-grabbing news feeds is brought up. Yet the equally modern problem of generative AI is conspicuous in its absence.
At first glance, you might think footage of an AI dancing seductively is obvious social commentary on AI-slop. But it actually isn't. The QC characters (and by extension, readers) would either see the machine producing the footage as a person with agency or a person being exploited. So no, while the behaviour in question is undesirable, the machine's existence is not. Compare and contrast with the discourse on actual AI, in which the behaviour of the machine AND the machine's existence are soundly condemned in the same breath. One of these things cannot be a metaphor for the other.
Given the author's history of seething about Elon Musk, it's hard not to imagine him drawing a Grok-style robot that praises Hitler and undresses women without their consent (or at least looks at them leeringly and says "I'm imagining you in a bikini"). Handstab must have at least thought about doing this.
You could argue that any social commentary about generative AI would date the story very quickly. But not mentioning it at all and to continue with the "robots are our fwends!" narrative already makes it a complete throwback to the 2010s. Funny to think that this how 2010s progressives saw "AI" before it left the domain of science fiction.
Given what we now know about AI, it seems almost inevitable that QC's setting would contain gangs of bad AnthroPCs that consume too much energy, fill public spaces with their chatter, pass themselves off as human, and commit crimes. Even if AIs themselves weren't depicted as evil, how about the companies that make them? But of course, Handstab's stuck between a rock and a hard place: he can't afford to be too anti-AI or else he stops being pro-minority.
But I have not read every QC page. Maybe there's something in the comic that addresses this? Or am I being autistic and overthinking it?
I've been out of the loop for a while. But I don't believe Questionable Content has touched upon the more... widely condemned aspects of AI, or has it?
Handstab is a futurist/transhumanist who is able to use the same logic people try to use to give animals likes dolphins and niggers the same rights as humans.
Also as a hipster art fag, he was prostate massaging to a "post scarcity future" where Robot/AI do all the grunt work and everyone is on UBI and he doesn't have to work and just be a hipster faggot all day.
This nigga has nightmares of Roko's Basilisk.
What I'm saying is no, he has never seriously addressed any negative aspects about AI except extremely obliquely. There was an implied Robot War where the good AIs & Humans triumphed and a bunch of shit got put into law that is never written down and only addressed when Handstab needs to wave away the obvious consequences of the extreme availability of cognitive computing.
But not mentioning it at all and to continue with the "robots are our fwends!" narrative already makes it a complete throwback to the 2010s. Funny to think that this how 2010s progressives saw "AI" before it left the domain of science fiction.
I mean, this is the core of the issue. The comic has been running for like 20 years or something. Pintsize was introduced as a wacky funny side-kick character, he added a bunch more funny side-kicks to the main cast over time, and then pivoted to elevating all the "second class citizens" of the story to main-line characters. The fact that they are robots is much more important than the fact that they are AI. There is essentially one non-embodied AI character that is referred to very infrequently from Hannelore's space plotline which we have never revisted even once even though the Cubetown arc would have been the best time for a science-based crossover. Every other "AI" is a fully embodied robot. The idea of a non-embodied AI is distressing to these characters, as well as being poorly embodied.
This is the main point of divergence between "AI" in his story and LLMs. All AI's are embodied robots and thereby treated as artificial people with agency. There's basically no question that they are sapient, and there never was in QC. The societal pivot was "is it wrong to use these things as tools/slaves", not "are these things people".
It's a shame Jeph pivoted into full time fetishbaiting and softcore porning because I was mildly invested in this as a plotline for a long, long time before the Clairening and Mommy Milkers.
This is the main point of divergence between "AI" in his story and LLMs. All AI's are embodied robots and thereby treated as artificial people with agency.
A neat theory. However, there is one problem with it: the reason people hate AI in the real world is not because AI lacks a body. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if (when?) consumer-grade robotics advance to the point where LLM-powered humanoids become as ubiquitous as Microsoft Copilot, today's AI-haters will become tomorrow's robot-haters. They already use the word "clanker" to insult non-embodied AI by way of comparing it to a robot. Think of how much more loathsome those clankers could become when they have hands with which to throttle you, and occasionally work for the police.
If anything, the main difference between fictional AI and real AI is that non-crazy people understand that the latter is not conscious. Putting ChatGPT in a robot body won't make it conscious either, but this scenario was easier to believe within works of fiction for the longest time. And that's because we had no real-world frame of reference to compare to a machine that walks and talks like a human, besides of course, humans themselves.
If anything, the main difference between fictional AI and real AI is that non-crazy people understand that the latter is not conscious. Putting ChatGPT in a robot body won't make it conscious either, but this scenario was easier to believe within works of fiction for the longest time. And that's because we had no real-world frame of reference to compare to a machine that walks and talks like a human, besides of course, humans themselves.
This comic sucks but as as someone who LOVES characters that are robots and AIs, I can only imagine it must be HELL to have written any story about robots and AI and see that everyone's view of "AI" now is just chatgpt and llm sex chatbots designed to give dystopian addictions to teenagers while making somebody who's pissing you off nude on Twitter.
