Shortly after South Korean comic-book artist (or should that be graphic novel illustrator?) Kim Jung Gi passed away unexpectedly in October at the age of 47, French motion designer 5you fed Gi’s work into a neural network as a form of tribute. Apart from a few telltale signs that the images were AI-generated, the results (see below and on Twitter) were detailed and representative of the original. The backlash from manga, anime and manhwa artists and aficionados has been fierce. It’s safe to say that AI-generated art is not universally popular in areas of the Far East where purism in the art forms remains strong. Fan art and doujinshi (fan-made publications) are OK, but not this.
Artists who make their living from the thriving comic-art market are worried that their livelihoods are at risk. Stable Diffusion and Dall-E have got them rattled, especially the former, which is open source. 5you got the images he used via a Google Images search. Are the floodgates about to open on AI-generated art in these genres?
In August, Japanese AI startup Radius5 launched an art-generation beta called Mimic that targeted anime-style storytellers. Artists were able to upload and adjust their own work to produce new images in their own style. Cue online abuse, forcing a statement from Radius5’s CEO. IT had little effect. Mimic is now no longer available for use, mainly because users were uploading others’ copyrighted work to create theirs and Radius5 had done nothing to stop it from happening.
NovelAI launched an image generator in early October. Rife rumours that it was harvesting human-drawn illustrations from the internet led NoveAI to react, arguing that the negative feedback was a result of their technology being so accurate and nothing sinister. Nevertheless, the service was taken down for “maintenance”. The company was further hampered by a cyber attack and a big spike in usage that kept it down.
Elsewhere, Japanese artist has had to defend herself online by posting screenshots of her work-in-progress to prove she’s not doing the unthinkable, while others are campaigning for a clampdown on (unlicensed) AI art generators and the use of search filters to hamper their use. In Japan, this would be consistent with the country’s general policy regarding copyright infringement.
Things are not so clear-cut when it comes to scraping copyrighted data from the internet without permission to feed machine-learning models. This is the case in other parts of the world too. There is a feeling that battle lines could be drawn along the border between personal use and commercial gain.
Source: Rest Of World
Main image: YouTube/Screenshot/SuperAni