“My thoughts remains to be sharp and my fingers work simply high quality, so I’ve no real interest in getting assist from AI to attract or write tales,” says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist greatest identified for his seminal sequence A Daunting Group, a 1983 manhwa concerning the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball gamers. “Nonetheless, I’ve joined fingers with AI to immortalize my characters Kkachi, Umji, and Ma Dong-tak.”
By embracing generative AI, Lee is charting a brand new inventive frontier in South Korea’s internet comics trade. Since comics magazines light on the flip of the century, internet comics—serialized comics that learn from high to backside on digital platforms—have gone from area of interest subculture to world leisure powerhouse, drawing in lots of of thousands and thousands of readers all over the world. Lee has lengthy been at its forefront, pushing the boundaries of his craft.
Lee drew inspiration for his renegade baseball avengers from the Sammi Superstars, certainly one of South Korea’s first skilled baseball groups, whose journey of perseverance captivated a rustic stifled by navy dictatorship. The sequence gained a cult following amongst readers in search of a inventive escape from political repression, mesmerized by his daring brushstrokes and cinematic compositions that defied the conventions of cartoons.
Kkachi, the rebellious protagonist in A Daunting Group, is an alter ego of Lee himself. A scrappy outcast with untamed, spiky hair, he’s a fan favourite who challenges the world with unrelenting ardour and a courageous conscience. He has reappeared all through Lee’s signature works, painted with a brand new layer of pathos every time—a supernatural warrior who saves Earth from an alien assault in Armageddon and a rogue police officer battling a robust legal syndicate in Karon’s Daybreak. Over many years, Kkachi has turn into a cultural icon in South Korea.
However Lee worries about Kkachi’s future. “In South Korea, when an creator dies, his characters additionally get buried in his grave,” he says, drawing contrasts with enduring American comedian characters like Superman and Spider-Man. Lee craves creative immortality. He needs his characters to remain alive not simply within the reminiscences of readers, but in addition on their internet comedian platforms. “Even after I die, I would like my worldviews and characters to speak and resonate with the individuals of a brand new period,” he says. “That’s the sort of immortality I would like.”
Lee believes that AI can assist him understand his imaginative and prescient. In partnership with Jaedam Media, an online comics manufacturing firm based mostly in Seoul, he developed the “Lee Hyun-se AI mannequin” by fine-tuning the open-source AI artwork generator Secure Diffusion, created by the UK-based startup Stability AI. Utilizing an information set of 5,000 volumes of comics that he has revealed over 46 years, the ensuing mannequin generates comics in his signature fashion.
This 12 months, Lee is getting ready to publish his first AI-assisted internet comedian, a remake of his 1994 manhwa Karon’s Daybreak. Writers at Jaedam Media are adapting the story right into a modernized crime drama starring Kkachi as a police officer in present-day Seoul and his love curiosity Umji as a daring prosecutor. College students at Sejong College, the place Lee teaches comics, are creating the art work utilizing his AI mannequin.
The inventive course of unfolds in a number of phases. First, Lee’s AI mannequin generates illustrations based mostly on textual content prompts and reference photographs, like 3D anatomy fashions and hand-drawn sketches that present cues for various actions and gestures. Lee’s college students then curate and edit the illustrations, adjusting the characters’ poses, tailoring their facial expressions, and integrating them into cartoonish compositions that AI can’t engineer. After many rounds of refinement and regeneration, Lee steps in to orchestrate the ultimate product, including his distinct creative edge.
AI corporations envision that artists might automate the grunt work of drawing and channel their inventive vitality into storytelling and artwork route.
“Beneath my route, a personality may glare with unhappy eyes even after they’re indignant or ferocious eyes after they’re completely satisfied,” he says. “It’s a subversive expression, a nuance that AI struggles to seize. These delicate particulars I must direct myself.”
Finally, Lee needs to construct an AI system that embodies his meticulous method to human expressions. The grand imaginative and prescient of his experimental AI challenge is to create a “Lee Hyun-se simulation agent”—a sophisticated technology of his AI mannequin that replicates his inventive thoughts. The mannequin could be educated on digital archives of Lee’s essays, interviews, and texts from his comics—the topic of an exhibit on the Nationwide Library of Korea final 12 months—to encode his philosophy, persona, and values. “It’s going to take a very long time for AI to study my myriad worldviews as a result of I’ve revealed a lot work,” he says.
The digital clone of Lee would generate new comics together with his creative instinct, perceiving its surroundings and making inventive selections as he would—maybe even publishing a sequence far sooner or later starring Kkachi as a post-human protagonist. “Fifty years from now, what sorts of comics would Lee Hyun-se create if he noticed the world then?” Lee asks. “The query fascinates me.”
Lee’s quest for a long-lasting creative legacy is a part of a broader inventive evolution pushed by expertise. Within the many years since their emergence, internet comics have remodeled the artwork of storytelling, providing an infinite digital canvas that integrates music, animation, and interactive visuals with the consequences of recent instruments like automated coloring packages. The addition of AI is spurring the following wave of innovation. However even because it unlocks new inventive prospects, it’s fueling anxieties over creative company and authorship.
Final 12 months the South Korean startup Onoma AI, named after the Greek phrase for “identify” (a sign of its ambition to redefine inventive storytelling), launched an AI-powered internet comedian generator known as TooToon. The software program permits customers to create synopses, characters, and storyboards with easy textual content prompts and convert tough sketches into polished illustrations that mirror their private creative fashion. TooToon claims to streamline the labor-intensive inventive course of by chopping down the manufacturing time between idea improvement and line artwork from six months to simply two weeks.
Firms like Onoma AI champion the concept that AI can assist anybody be an artist—even for those who can’t draw or afford to rent a military of assistants to maintain up with the trade’s insane manufacturing calls for. Of their imaginative and prescient, artists would emerge as administrators of their very own AI-powered solo studios, automating the grunt work of drawing and channeling their inventive vitality into storytelling and artwork route. The productiveness breakthrough, they are saying, would assist artists brainstorm extra experimental concepts, tackle big-scale productions, and disrupt the studio monopolies that dominate the market.
COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHER
“AI would develop the online comedian ecosystem,” says Tune Min, the founder and CEO of Onoma AI. Tune describes the trade in South Korea as a “pyramid”—powerhouse platforms like Naver Webtoon and Kakao Webtoon on the high, adopted by big-shot studios, the place artists collaborate to mass-produce internet comics. “The remainder of the artists, these exterior the studio system, can’t create alone,” he explains. “AI would empower extra artists to emerge as impartial artists.”
Final 12 months, Onoma AI partnered with a gaggle of younger internet comedian artists to create Tarot: A Story of Seven Pages, a thriller thriller unraveling the twisted fates of strangers cursed by a hand of tarot playing cards. Via these collaborations, Tune makes use of the artists’ suggestions to refine TooToon. Nonetheless, at the same time as a champion of AI-generated artwork, he questions whether or not it’s “a great factor for AI to be good.” Simply as engineers must maintain coding to hone their abilities, he wonders if AI ought to go away room for artists to maintain drawing to nurture their craft.
“AI is an inevitable tour de power, however for now, the massive hurdles lie in artists’ notion and copyright,” he says.
Onoma AI constructed Illustrious, the massive language mannequin powering TooToon, by fine-tuning Secure Diffusion on the Danbooru2023 information set, a public picture financial institution of anime-style illustrations. However Secure Diffusion, together with different fashionable picture mills constructed on the mannequin, has come underneath hearth for indiscriminately scraping photographs from the web, sparking a barrage of lawsuits over copyright infringement. In flip, internet comedian mills are going through intense backlash from artists who concern that the packages are being educated on their artwork with out their consent.
“Are you able to create with no soul? Who is aware of?”
As corporations silo their coaching information, artists and readers have launched a digital marketing campaign to boycott AI-generated internet comics. In Could 2023, readers bombarded The Knight King Returns with the Gods on Naver Webtoon with blazingly low rankings after discovering that AI had been used to refine parts of the art work. The next month, artists flooded the platform with nameless posts protesting “AI internet comics created from theft,” sharply criticizing Naver’s contract coverage requiring artists who publish on the platform to consent to having their works used as AI coaching information.
To settle the standoff, the Korea Copyright Fee issued a set of pointers in December 2023, urging AI builders to acquire permission from copyright holders earlier than utilizing their works as coaching information; articulate the aim, scope, and length of use; and supply honest compensation. A 12 months later, amid rising calls from AI corporations for entry to extra information, the South Korean authorities proposed carving out an exemption to copyright legal guidelines that may enable AI fashions to be educated on copyrighted works underneath the doctrine of honest use. However no laws or regulation has but established a transparent authorized framework, leaving artists in limbo.
Whereas seasoned artists like Lee embrace the expertise as a software to develop their legacy, wholeheartedly licensing their mental property to AI, youthful artists see it as a menace. They concern that AI will steal their art work and, extra essential, their id as artists.
“Drawing is probably the most troublesome and probably the most enjoyable a part of making comics,” says Park So-won, a younger internet comedian artist based mostly in Seoul. Park grew up dreaming of changing into a cartoonist, watching her mom, an animator, deliver characters to life. After years of juggling gigs as an artist assistant at an online comics studio, interrupted by a quick inventive hiatus, she made her breakthrough on the platform Lezhin Comics with Legs That Gained’t Stroll, a queer romance noir a couple of boxer who falls in love with a mortgage shark chasing after him over his alcoholic father’s debt.
As an impartial artist, Park is consistently at work. She publishes a brand new episode each 10 days, typically pulling all-nighters to provide as much as 80 cuts of drawing, even with the assistance of assistants dealing with background artwork and coloring. Often she finds herself in a movement state, working 30 hours straight with no break.
Nonetheless, Park can’t think about outsourcing her drawings, which she sees as the center of her comics, to AI. “The crux of a comic book, nonetheless essential the story, is the drawing. If the story have been written in phrases, individuals wouldn’t have learn it, would they? The story is only a thought—the execution is the drawing,” she says. “The grammar of comics is the drawing.” Handing over her drawing would imply surrendering her creative company.
COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHER
Park thinks algorithmic artwork lacks soul—like “objects that exist in a void”—and isn’t frightened about whether or not AI can draw higher than she does. Her drawings have developed through the years, formed by her shifting outlook on the world and breaking new inventive floor over time—an inventive development that she thinks an algorithm educated to emulate current works might by no means make. “I’ll maintain charting new territory as an artist, whereas AI will keep the identical,” she says.
To Park, artwork is supreme indulgence: “I’ve come this far as a result of I really like to attract. If AI takes away my favourite factor to do on the planet, what would I do?”
However different comedian artists, whose strengths lie in storytelling, welcome the innovation. Bae Jin-soo was an aspiring screenwriter earlier than debuting as an artist on Naver Webtoon’s novice comics web page in 2010. To show his screenplay into a comic book, Bae taught himself to attract by photographing completely different compositions and tracing them on paper. “I can’t draw, so I’ll guess on my writing,” he thought.
After his debut sequence Friday: Forbidden Tales took off, Bae rose to stardom together with his three-part sequence Cash Recreation, Pie Recreation, and Humorous Recreation—brainy psychological thrillers full of plot twists and witty, thought-provoking narratives a couple of group of contestants enjoying eccentric video games to win a money prize. They’ve even impressed a preferred Netflix adaptation, The 8 Present.
“I nonetheless have so many extra tales I wish to inform,” Bae says. A prolific author, he retains a operating listing of recent concepts in a pocket notepad, the genre-bending plots spanning horror, politics, and black comedy. However together with his thoughts racing forward of his hand, respiratory life into all his concepts would require commissioning a studio to execute the illustrations. For Bae, an AI-powered internet comedian generator might be a sport changer. “If AI might deal with my art work, I’d create an countless stream of recent comics,” he says.
Bae can be desirous to discover AI as a “backup battery for story concepts,” like a author’s assistant. Even so, to carry his floor as an artist, he plans to dig deeper into his creativeness to generate unique and experimental concepts that might be discovered nowhere else. “That’s the area of [human] creators,” he says. Nonetheless, Bae wonders if his personal inventive edge would slowly erode by way of intensive collaboration with AI: “Would my very own colours begin to fade?”
In the meantime, comics college students at Sejong College in Seoul are studying to combine AI into their software kits. The budding artists are being educated as “inventive coders,” turning strips of comics into information units by meticulously annotating their content material, and as immediate engineers who can information AI to provide characters that align with their aesthetic sensibilities.
“Creativity takes time—to mirror and ponder in your work,” says Han Chang-wan, a professor of comics and animation at Sejong College, who teaches a category on AI-generated internet comics. Han says that’s what AI will purchase for his college students: the time to “create extra numerous characters, extra kaleidoscopic plots, and extra eclectic genres” that problem the formulaic comics mass-produced by studios. Finally, he hopes, they’ll “faucet into a wholly new readership.”
As artists navigate this uncharted future, generative AI is elevating profound questions on what powers creativity. “AI might be a technical assistant to artists,” says Shin Il-sook, the president of the Korea Cartoonist Affiliation and the famend cartoonist behind the historic fantasy romance The 4 Daughters of Armian, which follows a brave-hearted princess exiled from a matriarchal kingdom as she embarks on a journey of survival and self-discovery by way of battle, love, and political energy battles. Nonetheless, she wonders if AI can actually be a inventive companion.
“Creativity is about making one thing by no means seen earlier than, pushed by a need to share it with different individuals,” Shin says. “It’s deeply intertwined with the human expertise and its afflictions. That’s why an artist who has walked by way of life’s struggling and honed their craft produces exceptional artwork,” she says. “Are you able to create with no soul? Who is aware of?”
Michelle Kim is a contract journalist and lawyer based mostly in Seoul.
