Akihabara News (Tokyo) — The science fiction manga Cyberpunk: Peach John is the world’s first manga created entirely with image-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The author, known only by his pseudonym Rootport, used the Midjourney program to create the images for the work. Midjourney is an AI program created by a San Francisco-based independent research lab.
Rootport has never drawn a manga by hand and, according to their own statements, is not proficient as an artist.
Rootport provided characters with particularly eye-catching features, such as dog ears or pink hair, because the Midjourney program is not able to display characters with different facial expressions or in a wide variety of poses. The character designs were, in fact, compiled by the AI based upon verbal descriptions offered by Rootport,
The production of the manga, which runs a little over one hundred pages, took only six weeks to complete.
Hand-drawn manga of a similar length routinely take several months or even years to produce.
One challenge to the spread of AI-generated manga is the issue of copyright. The images are likely to be based upon large datasets of existing works.
Another question is whether or not AI-generated manga will meet with fan acceptance. For example, many anime fans became upset when it was revealed that AI had been used to compose the entire background setting for a short Netflix film called The Dog and the Boy.
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