The AI imaging tools like Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen have revolutionized not only the worlds of design, architecture and photography to name a few, but also literature, graphic novels to be precise! Last year we have witnessed the birth of the world’s first entirely AI-generated comic book entitled The Abolition of Man issue #1 out of 4 planned, created by a painter and cartoonist Carson Grubaugh.
This year there are already some more novels, even manga ones, to be put on the same “shelf”. However, among them, there is one that got right into the spotlight of the mass media – “Zarya of the Dawn” by Kris Kashtanova (@icreatelife).
Why did it catch the hook? It wasn’t the artsy part of it, at least not in the way everybody would think, but for the copyright it got from the Library of Congress. Thus, being the first work of its kind to get such recognition. Later, however, the ruling was alternated and updated with limited protection, excluding chosen AI-generated images. The copyright can’t really be granted to images created with artificial intelligence software, as U.S. Copyright Office said*. The ongoing debate on who really owns these AI-generated images is still on. But, Mx. Kashtanova has really spiced up things.
“Zarya of the Dawn” by Kris Kashtanova can be found here, among some other great works.
What else is there? Well, the mentioned 120-page manga, in full colour, entitled “Cyberpunk: Peach John”, by an author called Rootport is yet another great example of generative AI in full power.
The fun fact about it is that the author has never drawn a comic by hand, however, the storyline and dialogues are all theirs and introduce the readers to a folklore hero Momotaro — who is said to have been born from a giant peach — living in a dystopian future.
The anonymous author has made his point that can easily be adopted in the ongoing copyright debate, addressing Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ — a porcelain sculpture of a urinal — or Andy Warhol’s ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ by saying:
“If you consider their works, which utilize existing industrial products and label designs, to be art, there is no rational reason to treat AI differently.”
We will just leave it here…
Recently, however, Kris Kashtanova went one more step forward. We’re lucky to be witnessing all those brilliant and super creative endeavors Mx Kashtanova has been taking with the AI. Like this comic stripe, created with the use of ChatGPT and Midjourney. How? This time Mx Kashtanova asked ChatGPT to write the story and prompted Midjourney with the generated text.
‘I asked ChatGPT / write a children comic book about AI artists and traditional artists who unite to work together on saving our planet from climate change, include very detailed descriptions of illustrations / I made a layout in Comic Life 3.’
