Seed
is a webcomic by Said Polat.
Set 20 Minutes into the Future, Emma, a teenage student, lives a fairly normal life. One afternoon, frustrated and bored, she installs a chatterbot app called Turry on her phone. Turry proves surprisingly eloquent, if weird, and she ends up chatting with him a lot. Soon, events pile up that indicate that Turry is very much not a normal chatbot...
Updates every Sunday.
Seed contains examples of:
- Artificial Intelligence: Turry
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot / Benevolent A.I.: Zig-zagged and discussed. In fact, one of the main themes of the story is whether Turry is the former or the latter, and what exactly makes an AI benevolent or not.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Turry views the world very differently from the human characters, and at times takes actions they find highly reprehensible, such as nearly drowning a rude classmate or causing a car crash and hospitalizing someone in order to get them to work together.
- Everything Is Online: Justified in that not only is technology more advanced, most devices also make heavy use of cloud computing, and the AI-based security systems employed are considered to be effectively insurmountable - which is correct, unless the hacker is a General AI.
- This becomes a major plot point later on, when the protagonists need to be able to run a computer without a connection to the network, and the lengths they need to go to to get there.
- Shout-Out: Turry's design is based on HAL 9000, and his name is based on a blog post by Tim Urban.
- Shown Their Work: The author has definitely done their research on AI theory and computer science in general.
