The author of a sleeve Opening in Japan on Thursday, he admits to having “zero” drawing talent: his work, the first in the country created entirely by artificial intelligence, raises employment and copyright concerns in this lucrative industry.
All the futuristic gadgets and creatures in this sleeve sci-fi titled “Cyberpunk: Peach John” are the work of the Midjourney program, an AI tool that appeared last year that stunned the planet, along with other similar programs such as Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2.
Rootport – the pseudonym of the author – made the sleeve a hundred pages in just six weeks, where a confirmed artist would normally have taken a year, he estimates.
Rootport entered keywords like “pink hair,” “Asian boy,” and “jacket,” and the machine generated images of the story’s hero in about a minute, though his face is quite different from frame to frame.
He then assembled the best results on one comic page to make the book, completely in color unlike the “classic” manga, and which was already causing a lot of debate online before its publication.
For the author, image generators that use AI have “paved the way for people without artistic talent” as long as they have good stories to tell.
Rootport recounts the satisfaction he felt when his textual instructions, like magical “spells,” engendered images.
The Midjourney program, developed in the United States, quickly achieved worldwide success with its fantastic, sometimes absurd or even terrifying, but often surprisingly sophisticated creations, which invite many artists to question their profession.
AIs have also occasionally caused legal controversy, and the startup behind Stable Diffusion has been sued for “feeding” its AI copyrighted materials.
In Japan, lawmakers have raised concerns over the issue, though experts say copyright infringement is unlikely if AI creations come from simple text commands.
Others fear the technology will hurt the employment of young manga artists, and streaming platform Netflix came under fire in January for airing a Japanese cartoon with AI-generated outfits.
Almost all the drawings of this production in the style of the pioneer of this graphic genre, Osamu Tezuka, had been made by humans. But since then, AI has become “first class” and it will certainly influence the software industry. sleevehe thinks
AI can “help me visualize what’s on my mind and suggest ideas, which I then try to improve,” he adds.
At the Tokyo Design Academy, where she teaches, Ms. Kobayashi invites her students to look at figures to improve their drawing of details such as muscles or the folds of clothing.
Computer programs have a hard time drawing hands or faces with deliberately exaggerated proportions like a real mangaka, and “humans have an even greater sense of humor,” he thinks.
Three major Japanese publishers interviewed declined to express their views on the future impact of AI on the software industry. sleeve.
Rootport doubts that 100% AI-made manga will become mainstream, but “don’t think that manga made without AI will dominate forever.”
Source: BFM TV
