Screentones, digital, CGI backgrounds/assets, now AI. Tools aren't worth banning, but AI has unparalleled potential to be misused as a substitute for creativity and artistry. Just ask amazon why they limit self-publishing authors to no more than three books per day. Comics made without drawings are still comics, there are interesting ones made with collage, photos, cgi, even AI, but are they the same as regular comics? obviously not.
No one wants AI slop spam on MD in the same way that chat gpt generated books now flood amazon, but I think we should at least entertain stuff like the Eikan remake since it's from a major publisher and based on a real comic. Also, artists could be using AI to generate parts of background images without anyone ever noticing, and we obviously shouldn't be banning that. Mangadex can't "ban" AI anymore than the government can ban trees, they're gonna grow outside the fence regardless. Whether you like it or not, use of AI as a tool is already happening and will probably only become more prevalent.
I use Adobe firefly all the time in my scanlations, but I use it in a way that it's not noticeable, and I still have to draw the important stuff to match the rest of the comic, i have no reason to suspect it's much different for actual comic artists that use AI as a tool rather than as a crutch. I dont see much issue with AI for use in background imagery for example, but when it's used for most of the character art then it becomes an issue where the expression (in every meaning of the word) is not authentically human, which as i've said uniquely defeats the whole purpose of a comic in ways that even comics made with real-life pictures or collage do not.
I think mangadex shouldn't allow any fully AI self-published comics, esp non Korean, Japanese or Chinese language originals. Additionally, manga where the character drawings are AI generated should get some sort of AI generation tag. There would be no need to tag manga where AI is used to support rather than supplement a human artist (e.g. in making details for backgrounds) because it's use might not even be detectable.
AI is an exciting technology, and it will probably continue to make marginal quality improvements as it matures, who knows maybe it'll actually be able to make consistent characters someday, but the main issues: a lack of human expression, and the spam potential, will never change. If tomorrow there was a sudden explosion of fully-CGI comics generated with a CSP plugin, I suspect they would be rightly removed as spam for the sake of quality control, I dont see why AI needs to be treated much different.
There are a few truly awful self-published comics on this site where the art is 2nd-grader-practicing-holding-a-pencil tier, but even with those terrible comics, at least someone had to actually sit down and put an ounce of effort into making them, which isn't true for the worst of what AI has to offer. I suspect the only reason AI hasnt flooded mangadex yet is because there's no profit incentive, and it's comparatively harder to generate a comic with AI than a novel with no pictures.
