Machine magic or art menace? Japan’s first AI manga

TOKYO – The author of a sci-fi manga about to hit shelves in Japan admits he has “absolutely zero” drawing talent, so turned to artificial intelligence to create the dystopian saga.

All the futuristic contraptions and creatures in “Cyberpunk: Peach John” were intricately rendered by Midjourney, a viral AI tool that has sent the art world into a spin, along with others such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2.

As Japan’s first fully AI-drawn manga, the work has raised questions over the threat technology could pose to jobs and copyright in the nation’s multi-billion-dollar comic book industry.

It took the author, who goes by the pen name Rootport, just six weeks to finish…