About (or is this an FAQ?)

Combine Artificial Intelligence and actual online dating profiles to create a comic strip series… …what could possibly go wrong?!

What is Robonk?

Frame 03 from Robonk #00032

The top line was written as part of someone’s online dating profile. The bottom line was written by 1960s style artificial intelligence software.

Robonk is a comic strip featuring a Robot that is a sex therapist. The robot talks to patients. What makes this comic strip distinctive is:

  • All text is either generated by 1960s-style Artificial Intelligence (AI) software or from online dating profiles. The creator writes nothing in the strip, but does edit.
    • Patient: The patient comments are from data that was released as part of a breach of an online adultery dating website. The comments are edited when needed (spelling, punctuation, etc.) but are intentionally left as written otherwise.
    • Robonk: A sex therapist robot. All lines are generated via ELIZA, the groundbreaking AI program from the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum. Robonk is voiced by the Perl version of ELIZA by John Nolan.
  • The drawings are always “drawing” free. No paper or digital stylus has ever been used to design or draw the strip. The current strips are drawn in web browser programs that create the text, text bubbles, background, and display the robot + chair + rug. The robot + chair + rug were all originally created in CAD software.

How is Robonk created?

Strips are generated from data leak sources, and those lines are entered into the Eliza AI program. New sessions are created per patient, so the influence of prior lines has been flushed out. If you are curious about what a specific strip was created from, click on “source” and you will see both the patient’s profile and the conversation with Robonk that was edited to become that strip.

Is Robonk the first AI comic strip series?

Possibly. If you set a minimum requirement of 100 strips, that is highly likely. If the floor is set at 500 strips, almost guaranteed. I could have kind of done this strip (minus the data leak) in the 1980s with ASCII art and a dot matrix printer. I didn’t, but someone may have. Unlikely they eclipsed 100 strips.

If you searched Google for “ai comic strip” during the last half decade, Robonk was on the first page of results. Sometimes at the top.

Robonk was created, and strips were first released, in March of 2017.

How often are the strips released?

Three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday).

Are you going to be releasing any identities from the data profiles?

Absolutely not. This comic strip was created to be entertaining and really, really not serious. Please have your giggles and leave everyone alone. Thanks.

Where else can I find Robonk?

There’s a facebook page and a twitter account for Robonk.

Sharing the above links as well as Robonk.com is encouraged. Thanks!

What’s with the freaky comic strip numbers like #000BE?

The comic strips are labeled using hexadecimal. Numbers are base 16 rather than base 10, so in addition to 0-9 there’s also A-F. A side effect is there’s actually more strips than it appears on the surface. #00100 was the 257th strip because the series started with #00000 and is numbered in hexadecimal.