'Cyberpunk: Peach John': Japan's first AI-generated manga comic
Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and several other online AI imaging tools have exploded in popularity since they became publicly available last year. Yet they remain in their infancy, meaning that the author sometimes struggled to produce what he called "the perfect image for a specific scene."
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FollowManga author Rootport, in his comic "Cyberpunk: Peach John" imagines the Japanese folklore hero Momotaro — who is said to have been born from a giant peach — living in a dystopian future. While the writer created the storyline and dialogue, his sci-fi-inspired imagery was produced entirely by artificial intelligence.
It is reportedly said that the 37-year-old has never drawn a comic by hand.
Shinchosha, the publishing house behind the work believes that "Cyberpunk: Peach John" is the world's first complete AI manga work. The comic, that went on sale in Japan from Thursday, was illustrated using Midjourney, an online image generator that can produce detailed pictures based on users' prompts.
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To create the panels, Rootport entered a string of text descriptions, which he then refined using trial and error, to create images that matched his storyline.
Speaking to a news organisation, the anonymous author, who uses the pen name Rootport due to privacy concerns, said he completed the work in just six weeks. Spanning more than 100 pages and — unlike many manga publications — rendered in full color, a work of this scale would take over a year to complete by hand.
Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and several other online AI imaging tools have exploded in popularity since they became publicly available last year. Yet they remain in their infancy, meaning that the author sometimes struggled to produce what he called "the perfect image for a specific scene."
For one thing, Midjourney was not able to directly replicate existing characters in new poses or with different facial expressions. To get around this, Rootport gave his characters distinctive features (such as pink hair, dog ears or a red kimono) that would help readers recognize characters as the story progresses.
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These imaging tools also struggle to accurately render human hands, which often appear with too many (or too few) fingers. For this reason, Rootport said he made a "significant compromise" by limiting scenes that pictured characters' hands.
Ken Akamatsu, a lawmaker and manga artist from Japan, has been one of the most vocal advocates for new rules governing AI-generated art. Akamatsu, a member of the upper house of the Japanese Parliament, advocated for giving creators the option to opt out of having their work included in datasets used to train artificial intelligence (AI) programs in a video he posted to his personal YouTube account.
