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Mark is invited by Cricket Bro to speak against AI at his AI Conference in New Your City. Mark has to deal with an empowered Kelly Welley, a pumped up Cricket Bro, and the discovery that everything “AI” is not necessarily bad.

Ellis tries to humble Mark to take the assignment.

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Last week (or so) I proposed a thought experiment about what Bill Ellis did in his spare time. I found a possibility:  Moonlighting as a meteorologist for ABC under the assumed name of Lee Goldberg.

Bill Ellis⏤when not forecasting the weather⏤doesn’t seem to treat Mark seriously. He is happy setting up Mark as a punching bag for Cricket Bro (aka Rob Bettancourt), as Mark rightly assumes. But to what end? What does Ellis get out of this besides a cut of Mark’s fee?

Nothing mentioned (so far) about how this assignment has anything to do with journalism, much less which magazine this assignment is destined for. Is Mark supposed to write up the conference for publication? It’s a puzzle. Maybe Jules Rivera is finally transitioning Mark into more of an outright, independent troubleshooter, troublemaker, “Edward Abbey” type of activist, with Ellis more as his handler or manager than an editor. So “journalist” then becomes Mark’s cover job, rather than his actual job. If so, let’s get Diana Daggers in on this as his partner. She could definitely stand some hardening up in this strip. I don’t want to see her go the way of Kelly Welly or Dirty Dyer.

Ol’ Bill Ellis gives a job, A-I-A-I-Oh!

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Clearly, Mark has a limited view on AI and has not investigated areas that might hold positive benefits, the energy-hogging data centers notwithstanding. There’s no end of people pooh-poohing and raising flags about AI’s problems. For once, Mark is right (panel 1). So there must be something else, right?

Once again, Rivera plays Mark like the Batman in those 1960s TV shows, where he fights the same circle of comic villains, over and over. We’ll have to see if this really unfolds the way it is presented or is just a smokescreen for something else. Most of you have probably recalled a prior story about Mark investigating a missing journalist and bear activity at a mountain retreat for STEM professionals, (“Bear Necessity”, begun Feb 2023), only to run into a bevy of returning guest villains and a hidden agenda.

So what is Cricket Bro’s real motive? He was the behind-the-scenes inspiration for the recent conspiracy-based manatee kidnapping farce in Florida. Do you think that Cricket Bro is looking for revenge (once again)?

Does Bill Ellis hate Mark Trail?

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Okay, I’m going to withhold judgement for just a bit. We’ll assume the tie-in could have something to do with the environmental impact of large, energy-consuming data centers that also use lots of fresh water for cooling. Or, perhaps this audience of IT professionals is interested in how AI is being used in various environmental industries and programs. Who knows? But I would bet there would already be at least a few experts on those topics at this “tech conference.”

In any event, this topic involves detailed, technical issues and policies. Is Mark at all qualified to speak on them with any authority? Investigating wild horses in Utah and uncovering a hidden data center in the desert doesn’t amount to a lot of experience, but it’s better than nothing, I reckon. 

Maybe Mark doesn’t have to be a technical expert. Maybe he can take an ethical and philosophical position, assuming he is still aware of the current issues and ideas and how they are being handled. But I share Mark’s reaction in panel 4. This is not exactly in his wheelhouse and he runs the risk of looking ignorant and incompetent. Why does Bill Ellis think Mark Trail is qualified to give such a talk in the first place?

Perhaps Bill Ellis should have suggested Mark write a “weekly column” for Teen Sparkle Magazine or have Mark investigate an active volcano, as regular readers Daniel and Downpuppy commented yesterday. 

Coming up … Bill Ellis and his red-hot offer

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I’m hoping that this offer was so red-hot that Bill had to give it to Kelly Welly, Mark’s “old timey” competitor for choice assignments. At least, she used to be, in the pre-Rivera tradition. And she did make an appearance or two in some of Rivera’s earliest Mark Trail strips, but has never been seriously retained. At first I thought that Diana Daggers was going to be the new replacement “female rival”, but maybe Rivera thought that it played up to old-school stereotypes.

In any event, I reckon we’ll learn about this bigtime assignment soon enough. But this brings up another point, doesn’t it? How is a “hot assignment” relevant to magazine publishing, unless the magazines Ellis represents have already transitioned to online? And what happened to all of those magazines Ellis represents? It’s all become just so much background, hasn’t it?