In South Korea, some artists have completely adopted artificial intelligence. This is particularly the case of Lee Hyun-se, a designer known for In the discouraging teamA series of webcomics in the adulthood of heroic baseball players.
One of the protagonists, Klachi, an alter ego of Lee Hyun-se, has become a cultural symbol in South Korea, but the artist is worried about the future of his character once he has died. “In South Korea, when an author dies, his characters are also buried in his grave,” he deplored the American magazine MIT technology review.
The generative AI is, therefore, a form for him, to make the characters of his immortal comic strip on the webcomics platforms. For this purpose, the designer has associated with a webcomics production company, Jaedam Media. An association that allowed him to develop a model of AI capable of generating comics in his style.
A webcom created with AI
To do this, the model, which was designed with open source models Stable diffusion From Stability AI, it has a set of 5,000 comics data that it has published in the last 46 years. Read Hyun-you are preparing to publish your first website created in part with AI this year. This is a comic remake Karon’s dawnPosted in 1994.
The students of the University of Sejong, where the designer teaches, used their AI model to generate illustrations from textual applications and reference images. Then they selected and modified illustrations. After several cycles of improvements and generations, Lee Hyun-intervenes to bring his artistic touch to the final product.
And, the artist does not plan to stop there, wishing, in the long term, to conceive an AI system that embodies his meticulous approach to human expressions. In other words, he hopes to create a kind of advanced version of his AI model, which would be trained in digital archives of his tests, interviews and comic strips texts to encode his philosophy, his personality and his values. A job that will take a long time given the amount of works he has published according to him.
Between adoption and concerns
Lee-Hyun is not the only one who has adopted the generative AI in South Korea. Startups also use this technology to create webcomics. Among them are Onoma AI, who launched a webcomics generator called Tooton last year. Thanks to the latter, users can create synopsis or characters from textual applications. They can also transform drafts into ordered illustrations that reflect their personal artistic style.
These companies believe that anyone can become an artist thanks to generative artificial intelligence. But, if these and some artists see this technology as something good, others are worried about it. In particular, young artists, who consider him a threat and fear that she steals her job. The fear that many artists from all over the world share with tools such as Chatgpt or Midjourney who have been trained in works without the authorization of their creators.
“The drawing is the most difficult and fun part in the creation of comics,” said Park So-Won. Publishing Novueaux episodes every 10 days, this young independent artist often spends white nights as part of his work. But, he does not imagine to trust his drawings to AI. For her, “the heart of a comic strip, whatever the importance of history” and that returns to humans.
Source: BFM TV
