Manga vs Ai: Auto-generated images are disliked by fans

A similar case occurred at the artificial intelligence company NovelAI, which launched a manga image generator in early October 2022. Social media quickly filled with complaints that the program was simply stealing illustrations drawn by professional artists. NovelAI also had to scrap its software before long. pixivthe online community of Japanese artists, has announced that it will launch tags to filter the work generated by the artificial intelligence in its search engine and rankings. Japanese manga programs resembling software such as Dall-E and Midjourney were short-lived.

Legal issues on artificial images

Manga and anime are acting like a first testing ground for the ethics of art made with Ai and related copyright. Japanese laws permit the reproduction of copyrighted characters for so-called works doujinshi (publications created by fans), but the matter changes if the products are then marketed or if the author is not a simple fan but an automatic bot. “If the generated images are identical or too similar, their publication could violate copyright. Such a result could easily happen if the image generator is trained only with images from a particular author“said al Rest of the World magazine the Japanese lawyer Taichi Kakinuma. A Twitter user who wanted to pay tribute to a deceased cartoonist, Kim Jung Githrough the publication of works made by a computer system with his style, had to stop the posts after the many protests from the community.

For the for many workers in the Japanese comics industry the fear is real. “There is concern that the demand for illustrations will decrease and requests will disappear due to AI. Technological advances have both the benefits of cost reduction and the fear of job losses“, said the manga artist Haruka Fukui. At least for now, art generated by artificial intelligence is legal, as long as it’s not exactly the same as the input images. However, the response from fans of Japanese comics may have sparked the first real debate about copyright issues surrounding bot drawings.