AI Comics – The first graphic novel generated by Artificial Intelligence in the world, produced and published in Helsinki

Application summary

Deep neural networks have very recently played a transformative role in advancing artificial intelligence across various application domains, and sometimes in different artistic experiments. Within the “computational creativity” literature, various papers and academic researches have proposed different algorithms and model architectures in the exploration of the artistic potential of a machine. The project AI Comics has the aspiration to produce and publish in Helsinki, the first graphic novel entirely generated by Artificial Intelligence. The project represents a considerable technical and artistic challenge as it explores a set of unconventional operations that don’t account for the production of comic books: web-scraping, image classification, computer vision, indexation, coding, database building and cloud computation. The resources from Machine Learning will be steered toward the synthetic production of everything related to ‘original’ comics art: the artwork, the character designs, the dialogues, the narrative evolution, and the page layout will be entirely generated using the most up-to-date algorithmic architectures in Deep Neural Networks (GANs, RNNs and LSTM). AI Comics is a knowledge-rich, experimental transdisciplinary project, produced and published in Finland, that embraces the dazzliness, druginess and eeriness of a machinic, non-human understanding of the comics medium.