Ban AI-generated Comics [Self-Published Ones are Banned]

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Oh, the topic? Personal opinion is to ban with prejudice, opinion as mangadex staff member is that if we don't allow AI-generated scanlations then we probably shouldn't allow AI-generated comics either.
Just playing devil's advocate here because I agree that AI should not replace human creativity and effort, but what sort of lines would you draw? Would the entire work have to be AI generated (script and art)? Would either one be sufficient? What if the author admits to using AI as part of their creative process? What if just the backgrounds, or side characters, or even entire panels are generated with AI assistance but do not comprise the entire work? Should there be exceptions for "ethically-sourced" creations to encourage their adoption?

Food for thought, since drafting of any sort of AI-limiting guidelines is going to be a migraine-inducing undertaking. And since there's not a tool that will create an entire comic out of a prompt (I think...), the de minimis of human effort to letter an AI script onto human-selected AI images would be enough to undercut the logic of just expanding Rule 1.7 🤷

I imagine MD staff has already had some conversations about these questions, and I'm curious if they're at a point where you can share.
 
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Just playing devil's advocate here because I agree that AI should not replace human creativity and effort, but what sort of lines would you draw? Would the entire work have to be AI generated (script and art)? Would either one be sufficient? What if the author admits to using AI as part of their creative process? What if just the backgrounds, or side characters, or even entire panels are generated with AI assistance but do not comprise the entire work? Should there be exceptions for "ethically-sourced" creations to encourage their adoption?

Food for thought, since drafting of any sort of AI-limiting guidelines is going to be a migraine-inducing undertaking. And since there's not a tool that will create an entire comic out of a prompt (I think...), the de minimis of human effort to letter an AI script onto human-selected AI images would be enough to undercut the logic of just expanding Rule 1.7 🤷

I imagine MD staff has already had some conversations about these questions, and I'm curious if they're at a point where you can share.
That'd be similar to how it's allowed to use MTL to translate, but not allowed to use ichigoreader to make scanlations.
As long as it's not a completely automated AI process, it'll probably be allowed.
People greatly underestimate how many of the manga here are translated with MTL, the scanlators just never tell you. And if the creators used AI to help in their manga (for backgrounds, models, or similar), you probably wouldn't be able to know either.
It's pretty much impossible to distinguish a well edited and made MTL translation from a liberal translation.
 
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Just playing devil's advocate here because I agree that AI should not replace human creativity and effort, but what sort of lines would you draw?
Didn't really want to bother with this because if I had a hard line in mind I would've mentioned it to begin with.

The wording was "AI-generated scanlations" for a reason though, since we obviously don't police language model or other machine assisted scanlations, just ones that are "created by a tool that automatically edits and generates translated pages," even if said tool allows for manual editing. Enforcing this rule requires either a confession, or educated guessing which for the time being isn't very difficult but will probably become a bigger hurdle eventually.

Apply that to the AI-generated comics, I suppose. They're not really a huge fad at the moment and I kind of doubt (and hope) they will be anytime soon, so we're not being pressed for a rule clarification.

Ultimately though, even though we as a scanlation-based website don't really have influence in what kind of comics get created to begin with (compared to us wielding some amount of influence in how scanlations get created), the fact is that we have from the beginning completely arbitrarily limited the kinds of comics we allow on the site to "Japanese, Korean, Chinese or of similar Asian origin" purely as a consequence of our personal taste. I don't see a compelling reason as to why we shouldn't be allowed to make the same kind of subjective demarcation with comics of... sufficiently artificial origin, if you will.

:korone:
 
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I'm in favor for allowing ai generated slop. The question for me really is the quality of said slop. If it isn't worse than most manhua or whatever the people in uk produce, it's readable.
And if it's readable, it's going to be read. Just like this piece of grammatically incorrect garbage I'm spouting.
And if it's read, it has some value.

I tended to read manhua, which seemed very low quality, but their world building was quite inspiring.
 
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Staff voted on whether or not to ban AI-generated comics and here are the results:
  • Yes - 12
  • Indifferent - 5
  • No - 2
AI-generated comics that are self-published are banned now. The majority of staff doesn't wish to have or support them. However, it was decided in further discussion that comics that aren't self-published will be kept because if the industry we benefit from decides to create works using AI and scanlators want to work on them, who are we to say no.
@aflo_yuveera
 
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That seems fair. Let the market people who claim to know how to make money decide :thumbsup:
It's not the end of the world, people can go elsewhere if they want to find it.
I still think it'd be better if they did like on sadpanda, where you can easily avoid it because they're all mandatory tagged and placed under misc. But the mods want to take a stance I guess...
Considering how much better the AI works on sadpanda has become just the past year or something, it wouldn't surprise me if we soon start getting more content really.
I think culling creative works to protect the manga artists are kind of wrong and fighting advancing technology, and they're probably going to use AI themselves for backgrounds and similar in the future to save costs on assistants.
 

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