excel
Explanation
This comic features a conversation between a person and sentient trees (or tree-like creatures). The trees declare that machines will never excel at art. When asked why not, a tree explains that its language training is "deeply internet-y" -- it learned language by reading Reddit communities, making its prose sound like internet comments. The tree claims there is "nothing more horrifying in a writer than seeing how the language sausage is made." When asked to show its writing, the tree refuses, saying "beauty is for premium-level subscribers."
The comic is a pointed satire of large language models (LLMs) and AI-generated writing. The trees stand in for AI systems whose language abilities are trained on internet text -- particularly Reddit and similar forums. The joke hits on several real criticisms: that AI prose has a recognizable, generic "internet" quality; that knowing how the model works (the "sausage" of statistical text prediction) makes the output feel hollow; and that despite grand claims about art, the actual output is locked behind paywalls. The final "premium-level subscribers" punchline skewers the commercialization of AI art tools, where the product is simultaneously presented as revolutionary and gated behind subscription fees.