TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH watches a commercial on TV.) ANNOUNCER: Having no luck with the opposite sex, lately..? Well, it's time for you to hook up to the hottest hotline for the ultimate Love Connection! BASTICH: (Picking up the phone) Eh, why not?
PANEL 2 (BASTICH speaks into the phone.) ELIZA: Hello, smooth-talker, this is Eliza, your hot date for tonight. BASTICH: Whoo-hoo! ELIZA: So, whats your name, Hot Stuff?
PANEL 3 (BASTICH continues talking on the phone.) BASTICH: They call me "The Bastich!" ELIZA: Well, "They," where do you want to go today..? BASTICH: Wait, my name's not "They!" ELIZA: You're being very negative, They. Let's talk about something else...
PANEL 4 (CLOSE UP on BASTICH's face near the phone's mouthpiece.) ELIZA: Tell me about your mother... BASTICH: My what..!? ELIZA: Please speak in complete sentences.
PANEL 5 (BASTICH slams the phone receiver back on the base.) SFX: SLAM! BASTICH: Feh-! I should have known!
PANEL 6 (Somewhere else, a computer with the words "AI PRO" on the screen answers another phone call while an overweight bearded man reclines contentedly in his chair.) SFX: BRING! BRING! ELIZA: Hello, smooth-talker... MAN: Nyeh-heh-heh... Another one's born every minute!
CREDITS (c) 1996 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
This strip was inspired by a sort-of true story from my freshman year when a guy in my dorm stayed up all night flirting with a girl on IRC before finally realizing it was a chatbot. This was way back in 1993 when the state of AI was laughable by today's standards. The experience was a lesson in how easy it is to be fooled when your guard is down.
Chatbots of the day were essentially brute-force pattern-matchers that shuffled your input and spit it back out. A classic example of this was ELIZA (this bot's namesake), that was purported to pass the Turing Test when it came out in the 1960s.
The bot's question "Where Do You Want To Go Today?" was a Microsoft ad campaign that ran throughout the late 1990s and was part of the wildly successful Windows 95 launch. In response, Linux fans wore T-shirts with Tux the Penguin and the snarky counter-slogan "Where Do You Want To Go Tomorrow?". Good times!
Side note: This was the first strip created during my internship at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto. It was an amazing summer spent sleeping on the floor at a friend's apartment in Sunnyvale and running gleefully down the aisles of Fry's Electronics, Weird Stuff Warehouse, and all sorts of computer junk shops. It was quite a jolt after living in Chico for most of my tech-nerd years.
It might have been the first strip I scanned in with a handheld scanner (possibly a Logitech ScanMan). I was far away from the flatbed scanners available at Chico State's computer lab. The scanner was maybe 5 inches wide and you had to drag it across the image ever-so-steadily or the resulting image would come out wobbly. It was a hassle but it allowed me to keep creating web strips wherever I was.