A Japanese artist will launch Cyberpunk: Peach John, the first manga created with artificial intelligence
The author of a sci-fi manga about to be released in Japan admits he has “absolutely zero” talent for drawing, so he used artificial intelligence (AI) to create his dystopian saga. The gadgets and creatures in Cyberpunk: Peach John were intricately crafted by Midjourney, an AI tool that turns the art world on its head, alongside the likes of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2.
It is the first Japanese manga drawn entirely by the technology, and it raised questions about the threat it could pose to jobs and copyrights in Japan’s multibillion-dollar comic book industry. Rootport, the author’s pen name, took just six weeks to complete the 100-plus-page manga, when a cartoonist would have done it in a year.
“It was a fun process, it reminded me of playing the lottery,” the 37-year-old creator told Afp.
Rootport, who has written manga plot lines, entered text combinations such as “pink hair,” “Asian boy,” and “stadium jacket” to generate images of the comic book hero in about a minute. Subsequently, he organized the best images in a comic format to create the book, which already generated interest on social networks before its release, by the Shinchosha publishing house.
Unlike traditional black and white manga, his is in color, although the faces of the same character sometimes present very different shapes. Still, the AI generators have “opened the way for untalented people to enter” the manga industry, as long as they have good stories to tell, the author said.
Rootport said he was fulfilled when his written instructions, which he calls “spells,” created an image that resonated with what he had envisioned. “Will it be the same satisfaction you feel when you have drawn something by hand? Probably not, ”he admitted. Midjourney was created in the United States and achieved worldwide popularity after being released last year.