AI manga? Japanese artists hope to use the technology to help create new stories, art – even fresh episodes of an old series like Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack

‘God of manga’ Osamu Tezuka ‘would have surely used AI if it had existed’, says his son, part of an AI project to create new episodes of Tezuka manga Black Jack

Expectations are growing in Japan that the use of generative AI will make artists more efficient, but many creators fear job losses and copyright infringement

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A still from Black Jack, a Japanese comic series created by “god of manga” Osamu Tezuka, who died in 1989. His son is part of a project to use generative AI to help create new episodes of Black Jack. Photo: Akita Publishing

Published: 5:15pm, 27 Jul 2023

Japanese manga artists and creators are exploring the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI), and pinning their hopes on it to offer suggestions for illustration drafts and story plots and to make the creative process more efficient.

Still, the artists remain cautious about how much AI can be relied on for creating saleable work. They are also concerned about the potential for copyright infringement, given that such technology is typically trained using data from the internet.

A project was recently launched in Tokyo to create, with AI, a new episode of Black Jack – a manga illustrated by Osamu Tezuka – for release in a weekly magazine this autumn. Known as the “God of manga”, Tezuka died in 1989 at the age of 60 after writing some 150,000 pages of manuscripts for around 700 titles.

“We think that however we use AI, it won’t produce an end product that is better than the original Osamu Tezuka work but … it would be considerable if a work scoring 50 [out of 100] is achieved,” says project member Makoto Tezuka, the son of Tezuka and director at Tezuka Productions.

Black Jack is a manga by Osamu Tezuka. Photo: Akita Publishing

The project will aim to train generative AI on past plots and character relationships in Black Jack. The series is a medical drama comprising over 200 episodes about Black Jack, the story’s namesake – an unlicensed genius surgeon.