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In his latest comic « Cyberpunk: Peach John, » manga author Rootport imagines the folklore hero Momotaro — who is said to have been born from a giant peach — living in a dystopian future. But while the writer created the storyline and dialogue, his sci-fi-inspired imagery was produced entirely by artificial intelligence. In fact, the 37-year-old has never drawn a comic by hand. The publishing house behind the work, Shinchosha, believes that « Cyberpunk: Peach John » is the world’s first complete AI manga work. On sale in Japan from Thursday, it was illustrated using Midjourney, an online image generator that can produce detailed pictures based on users’ prompts. To create the panels, Tokyo-based Rootport entered a string of text descriptions, which he then refined using trial and error, to create images that matched his storyline. Speaking to CNN via email, 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, he estimated.Online AI imaging tools like Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen 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. « (But) even in legendary manga works, it is commonplace for the character drawings to differ between the beginning and the end of the series, » he explained. AI imaging tools also infamously 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.
