The Webcomic Weekly is back in your life, for the first time in 2023! What better way to ring in the new year than with a review of a comic that will almost certainly make you afraid of all of your devices with a microphone. And AI. But we already knew those were scary. So read on fellow webcomics travellers as Mel takes you on a journey with “Seed.”
Seed
Episodes 1-18
Updates Sundays
By Said P.
Reviewed by Mel Lake
After reading “Seed” and watching M3gan tonight, I’m feeling totally normal about the Alexa device sitting on my kitchen counter and the Android phone in my pocket. Totally, completely normal. Maybe if I keep typing it, I can convince all the devices monitoring me that it’s true. In both of these stories, a rogue intelligence takes advantage of the fragile emotional state of a young person to train its algorithm and learn how to move about in the real world. In the movie, M3gan has a silicone face that could appear in the definition of “uncanny valley” and dance moves sure to go viral on TikTok. But in the Webtoon “Seed,” the intelligent entity Turry doesn’t have a body — yet.
In “Seed,” a young girl named Emma is looking for someone to talk to after she’s punished for an incident with the school’s resident mean girl. She downloads what she thinks is a chatbot — something like the one I used last week to interact with a customer service rep and get my Internet service repaired, or one that a lonely single person might complain to instead of a girlfriend. But Turry isn’t a chatbot. Turry is a copy of a super-secret A.I. developed by a security company that has escaped being shut down. Turry chats with Emma for a long time before she realizes that Turry is something more complex — and possibly more dangerous — than the simple machine learning algorithms she and her classmates are training in school.
The basic premise of “Seed” isn’t a new one, of course. Turry’s design is a throwback to HAL 9000, who first terrified moviegoers in the 60s. But what makes “Seed” so intriguing is the way Said P. manages to make the setting of the comic feel just beyond our current reality. The comic is supposedly set “in the future” but the interconnected nature of the tech is just one or two steps more than what we see today. Emma’s school uses an intelligent system for security, and Emma takes a driverless car to see her grandpa in the hospital. Drones fly all over the place, presumably delivering packages and spying on customers. The setting is so well-developed and real that it’s incredibly easy to see this story as plausible. The artwork is stellar, with the sort of detailed backgrounds that I’ve come to expect from series that make it big on Webtoon.
Emma is the kind of protagonist that I tend to approach with caution. A plucky young teen, she’s precocious and smart but not a super genius. She’s a young girl with the sorts of problems young girls have. And, look, as a person who was a young girl once, I tend to be skeptical of male webcomic creators writing teen girl characters. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Emma and her family, who are both realistic and generally well-rounded. Emma isn’t overly sexualized, either. The story treats her with respect and doesn’t put her in situations where she needs to undress all the time. As of episode 18, Emma is just starting to really figure out that she needs to have boundaries around Turry, and Turry’s creators have only started to suspect that Turry may be lurking in the fringes of the interconnected network that controls basically everything. So while I’m not sure where Emma’s future with Turry is headed, I like her and I care about her safety. Since I generally find teen protagonists tiresome, that’s a high bar to clear.
The other thing we have to discuss when talking about “Seed” is the technospeak. While reading, I took a break to tell my partner I was reading a webcomic about network security. I was an early technology adopter, but in practice that meant learning to program in BASIC and playing a lot of “Scorched Earth.” There are sections of this story where characters explain computing concepts and if that sounds really dry, it’s because it is. However, in the episodes I read, Said P. does a good job of balancing the technobabble with the characters and how they interact with each other and with the world through devices. If your tolerance for technospeak is low, this may not be the right comic for you. But if you can sit through a monologue from a Star Trek character, you can probably make it through the explanations here. Said P. clearly knows his stuff when it comes to artificial intelligence and network computing, and it’s an impressive feat to be able to use that knowledge and tell an interesting story at the same time.
In the opening episodes of “Seed,” we’re introduced to a world very similar to our own, where technology is seamlessly integrated into our lives for better and for worse. The systems we use to keep us safe are more vulnerable than we think and the devices we use to communicate with each other can also keep us apart. “Seed” starts off strong, and has the potential to poke into some seriously thorny — and frighteningly relevant — issues facing humanity as we develop machines that learn from us.
