Member-only story
When AI Writes Comic Books
According to some, and I tend to agree with them, we are at a pivotal point in the advancement of technology — a revolutionary moment that will shape the years to come. Just as we have seen the introduction of the personal computer as a game-changer, the adoption of the internet, and the rise of smartphones, we are now at a point where a new and disruptive technology is emerging: artificial intelligence (AI). AI will be a major disruptor, with large language models, stable diffusion, and many other innovations now becoming available to the wider public.
While we all consider the noble and beneficial things that AI could do for the human population, as well as the potential dangers it could introduce, there is also an artistic side to it. People are experimenting with AI to generate art, and in line with this, I have started to use AI to generate comics. Purely to understand the artistic capabilities of AI, I asked it to generate comics for me in an automated fashion, and the results are promising.
ChatGPT can generate a story for you when asked to write about a certain topic, from a reading viewpoint, in pure text. It can also write a storyline for a comic and describe each individual panel in detail and in an individual manner, if requested. For example, when asked to write a short 16-panel story about a Second World War topic in a Blake and Mortimer fashion, it did just that for me.
You can ask ChatGPT to write a story about any topic, and generate the output in a way that can serve as the input for an AI image generation model. The image below is an example of what happens when you instruct ChatGPT to do this. To be fully honest, the images may not be of the best quality or may not be to your liking. However, you have to admit that it is impressive for an untuned model and as a first outcome. This is especially remarkable when you consider that this is part of a full comic book generated from just two sentences of input.
While we may have a discussion on style or preference, there’s no denying that the future of AI looks amazing and very promising. The fact that AI can generate art and comic books is great, but it’s just the tip of…
