Main Menu

AI Generated Books

Started by Barrington Boots, 22 January, 2024, 01:50:46 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

IndigoPrime

Right now, I suspect it's more useful for two things:

1. Content that helps you more rapidly iterate, but where a human editor can make a significant impact on any created content. (eg you throw a draft at it, or tell it to cut an existing draft by 25%, and you compare it with your original copy and create a merge doc)
2. Content where the details aren't too important, and yet that used to consume resources (such as designing eg rocks or trees for video games).

For a comic, I'd say there's currently some scope regarding script editing (but not creation), marginal use for art (even stills can be deeply weird, and output is much harder to drastically edit than text), and possibly zero use for lettering (given how dreadful generative AIs are at dealing with anything text-based).

Natch, these things may/will all improve. But the question is how and at what speed? We could end up in a kind of uncanny valley. We may even be a long way along what these things can achieve already. Hard to tell.

More broadly, though, I wish there was more interest in using gen-AI, machine learning, etc, to deal with drudge work than the fun creative bits. I don't want an AI to do my writing for me. But I'd happily use an AI if it could, say, accurately fill in the dates when 50 products were created, or fully proof an article and flag errors. Right now, neither of those things is possible with any AI I've tried.

The Legendary Shark

[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




Daveycandlish

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 24 January, 2024, 03:03:07 PMImagine if Pat Mills fed everything he'd ever written into his LLM, then all he'd have to do is put in an outline and sit back while the program filled in the blanks.

Pretty sure Mills has been regurgitating the same old shite for years anyway.
An old-school, no-bullshit, boys-own action/adventure comic reminiscent of the 2000ads and Eagles and Warlords and Battles and other glorious black-and-white comics that were so, so cool in the 70's and 80's - Buy the hardback Christmas Annual!

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 24 January, 2024, 04:02:33 PMFor a comic, I'd say there's currently some scope regarding script editing (but not creation), marginal use for art (even stills can be deeply weird, and output is much harder to drastically edit than text), and possibly zero use for lettering (given how dreadful generative AIs are at dealing with anything text-based).

I'll be honest... I think AI is going to come for the colourists first. I hate saying that, because I very much appreciate what a good colourist brings to a project... but I think it's going to be possible very soon to give an AI a colour palette and it'll make a passable stab at colouring a page. This isn't helped by just how bad many colouring jobs in the low-to-middle end of the US market are, which will make 'good enough' a pretty low bar for editors/publishers who already demonstrably don't give much of a shit about quality anyway.

I suspect we'll see publishers steer away from getting the actual script and art done by AI for now, simply because it's going to be difficult to defend your IP when the US courts (at least) have ruled that AI-generated content can't be copyrighted, although it'll take some precedent-setting court case to settle that on existing IP where the publisher owns the rights and would have taken on a writer and/or artist on a WFH contract.

Oddly, I think lettering is going to be a way down the list of comic jobs that AI will be able to reasonably imitate, simply because there are a bunch of aesthetic 'rules' that are both arbitrary and subjective, plus stuff like reading order and placement, all of which can render a book unreadable if you get them 'wrong'.

Of course, this, too, will spread up from the low end where 'good enough' is a much lower bar. I'm sure some of the smaller publishers will soon find some kind of AI solution where they can run a lettering AI across a bunch of books and one production guy can do quick pass to fix the most horrific errors before the books get shoved off to press.

Fun times.

Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

Funt Solo

Quote from: Daveycandlish on 24 January, 2024, 07:05:56 PM
Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 24 January, 2024, 03:03:07 PMImagine if Pat Mills fed everything he'd ever written into his LLM, then all he'd have to do is put in an outline and sit back while the program filled in the blanks.

Pretty sure Mills has been regurgitating the same old shite for years anyway.

Again, not Tuesday. Did I miss a meeting?
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

pauljholden

Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 24 January, 2024, 07:15:28 PM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 24 January, 2024, 04:02:33 PMFor a comic, I'd say there's currently some scope regarding script editing (but not creation), marginal use for art (even stills can be deeply weird, and output is much harder to drastically edit than text), and possibly zero use for lettering (given how dreadful generative AIs are at dealing with anything text-based).

I'll be honest... I think AI is going to come for the colourists first. I hate saying that, because I very much appreciate what a good colourist brings to a project... but I think it's going to be possible very soon to give an AI a colour palette and it'll make a passable stab at colouring a page. This isn't helped by just how bad many colouring jobs in the low-to-middle end of the US market are, which will make 'good enough' a pretty low bar for editors/publishers who already demonstrably don't give much of a shit about quality anyway.

I suspect we'll see publishers steer away from getting the actual script and art done by AI for now, simply because it's going to be difficult to defend your IP when the US courts (at least) have ruled that AI-generated content can't be copyrighted, although it'll take some precedent-setting court case to settle that on existing IP where the publisher owns the rights and would have taken on a writer and/or artist on a WFH contract.

Oddly, I think lettering is going to be a way down the list of comic jobs that AI will be able to reasonably imitate, simply because there are a bunch of aesthetic 'rules' that are both arbitrary and subjective, plus stuff like reading order and placement, all of which can render a book unreadable if you get them 'wrong'.

Of course, this, too, will spread up from the low end where 'good enough' is a much lower bar. I'm sure some of the smaller publishers will soon find some kind of AI solution where they can run a lettering AI across a bunch of books and one production guy can do quick pass to fix the most horrific errors before the books get shoved off to press.

Fun times.



The focus for a lot of ai stuff seems to be look at the finished product we can make! It's nearly good enough!


But all creative work requires empathy and any form of ai will always lack empathy.


That said. If someone could hurry up and make an AI tool for flatting I'd very much appreciate it.

Jimmy Baker's Assistant

Quote from: Hawkmumbler on 24 January, 2024, 09:56:41 AMConsidering AI script programs can only function as they do by stealing incomprehensible swaths of copyrighted material (more often than not, from small writers who go without recognition, credit or payment for their labours even before they're ground up and fed into the dread maw of the content mill) I really don't see how anyone can accept AI as a 'tool' without inherently admitting they're fine with content theft and plagiarism.

Yeah, I agree with you. I personally won't use AI for anything, I think it's both immoral and useless.

AlexF

For what it's worth, the Publisher I work for has taken the decision to ban all use of AI-generation for any writing/design/illustration on our books (for now).
Potentially we will be allowed to use GPT and the like to generate marketing copy, but that's about it.