The Speed of AI Comics

I just stumbled across this post I made back in 2021. It refers to a research paper in which scientists were able to create AI comics by feeding it some video footage, and then the computer would identify "key" frames to use as panels, and apply word balloons as appropriate based on the spoken dialogue. The resulting comics weren't great, of course, but made for some serviceable materials that could be an alternative to the actual video. I likened the idea to "video novels" of the 1970s that basically created the same thing, but had to be done manually and, thus, were financially impractical from a production perspective once commercial home video became commonplace in the 1980s.

Today, of course, we have tools available in which you can type in a sentence or two prompt and have an entire story generated. It's already been fed scripts and photos and video footage of all sorts of media, so you don't necessarily have to provide a specific video that you want to make into a comic. And it's not limited to specifically what's in any one video either, able to combine elements from other sources it's been previously given. The resulting comics still aren't great, but are usually cohesive enough that you can get an idea across.

I'm not going to get into the ethics of all those other materials being essentially stolen to create modern AI materials. I'm not going to get into the huge resource drain creating AI material this way is. I'm not going to get into the psychological impact of relying on AI instead of your own brain to work through ideas. You've heard all those arguements already, and I'm not going to be able to add anything new to those discussions.

No, the point I want to bring up is the date of that older post I mentioned: March 8, 2021. Five years ago. Five years ago, "AI-created comics" was highly technical research conducted by a small handful of scientists at a couple academic institutions. The stuff of research papers. Two years later, comics were able to be made commercially by AI, but still required a lot of trial and error. (Though the comic was written/published in 2023, I reviewed The Last Survivors in 2024.) Today, you can get more more cohesive, consistent results with less direct intervention or manual manipulation.

Five years ago, creators were absolutely not thinking about their hand-crafted work being used without their permission to create slop because it was simply not on anyone's radar. Five years ago, "AI comics" was the subject of an obscure research paper. If you're wondering why it feels like AI is being shoved down everyone's throat faster than any product ever, that's because it is.

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