You know that hoary old cliche, “the more things change, the more they stay the same?” We kinda disagree on that one. It feels like it ought to say, “The more things change, the more complicated they get.” We already went over new car radios in last week’s blog, but smart refrigerators requiring you to know which shelf to put the milk on, smart watches telling you it’s time to stand up (while you’re driving your smart car), theaters and ball games that only accept tickets on a movie phone, not the paper kind, it’s all getting a tad overwhelming, but just a tad. How do we cope? By writing a comic strip of course. And our mutual confusion leads to an endless supply of stories, so there’s that.

Our baseball comic was inspired by an actual incident a few weeks ago when one of us, (I won’t say who so as not to embarrass John), fell asleep at a baseball game, despite it being over in a crisp 2 hours and 10 minutes. Okay, okay, it was me, but I’m blaming it on the pregame tequila shot. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it. Besides, while baseball is played at a much faster pace than in previous years, it’s still…baseball.

And onto A.I. We’ve all heard the horror stories about how it’s going to replace us, the same way robots did, only worse. We’ve read accounts that say that the more sophisticated A.I. becomes, the more apt it is to decide it doesn’t need us anymore. That we are inefficient and respond at a much slower rate than A.I. can. For instance, for the low, low price of just $20 per month (sorry, you can take the boy out of advertising, but you can’t take advertising out of the boy), you could ask it to write you an article about the deficit ceiling. And then ask it to rewrite it the way William Shakespeare would have written it. And then ask for it to be a poem. In iambic pentameter. And then make it into a Broadway show tune in the style of Lin Manuel-Miranda. We have no idea why you’d want to do this, but the point is that a program like ChatGPT could do all this in a matter of seconds. When it comes to writing commercials, I’m sure it would do a great job of that as well, and I would’ve been fine with that so long as I was still getting paid. I’d imagine the copy would flow beautifully without ever revealing it was artificially generated. Something along the lines of, “Hey, members of the baby boom generation born after 1955, have a Pepsi. It’s the preferred drink of world leaders, movie stars and top athletes that people in your demographic are sure to admire!”

At any rate we officially welcome you to the Summer of ‘23. And we will see you again next week with two new comics. And we’ll keep on going until we get taken over by A.I. By the way, if A.I. and Al were in a fight, I’d put my money on Al.

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John