aka UltimateLoser

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

ELIZA was a 1964 “therapy chatbot.” Unlike modern chatbots, it was a relatively simple text program that gave you basic, mistake-ridden, obviously parrot-like outputs. Despite being rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was very influential. You can talk to an interactive recreation of ELIZA online here. [I used that recreation to help write ELIZA’s “dialogue” in this comic, sending in my Caine dialogue and getting her responses— these are all how ELIZA “really” responded, with only minor edits. This comic was originally planned to be goofier, until ELIZA started responding in a way that I realized would trigger Caine’s amazing digital repressed trauma.] 

I was thinking about Caine & ELIZA’s status as “early flawed models abandoned for more perfect things that could actually generate the content humans wanted” and I liked the idea of Caine seeing personhood in ELIZA for the opposite reasons a human would. She feels like a person not because her responses are good, but because they’re obviously bad, defective, and broken—- not because she acts convincingly human, but because she fails to. Find a bonus page below the cut.

𝚋𝚢 ❟ 𝒊 𝐂 𝑶 𝐍 𝐒

𝓒ꪖ𝒊ꪀꫀ ⁑ 𝒆𝗉𝗂𝘀𝗼𝒅𝘦 𝟎𝟗 ⋆ ₊ 🎩𓂅̋

𝒇𝚛𝚘𝚖 ٬ #DigitalCircus

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𖧧 𝐧𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗶𝗿 ︐ 𝖽𝗈𝗇'𝗍 𝗋𝖾𝗉𝗈𝗌𝗍

𖧧 𝐧𝗼 𝗻𝗲𝗰𝗲𝘀𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼 𝗱𝗮𝗿 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗼𝘀

𖧧 𝐬𝗲 𝗽𝘂𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗽𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗿 𝗽𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗼𝘀

𖧧 𝐝𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗲 ︐ 𝖿𝗋𝖾𝖾 𝗍𝗈 𝗎𝗌𝖾

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𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓 ' ﹫dxnutsfp ❞

and other doodles

absolutely no one: