The Four Color Media Monitor

ZD Net has an article about programs for creating comics panels with, for people who wish they were artists, but lack the skills for illustration. Here, it's a special site where you can do some of this online:

Fire up your favorite browser and head to the AI Comic Factory page. First, type a description of the scene and story you want to create. Think of the characters you'd like to appear in your story, whether that be people, animals, creatures, superheroes, or aliens. Then, come up with a scenario to describe their actions, such as fighting, eating, or dancing. You can also describe the location of the scene and have it take place in a restaurant, on top of a building, or even in outer space.

Furthermore, your description will likely vary depending on how many pages your comic book will contain. If you're generating just one page, you'll want to include all the elements in your description. If you're planning a multipage comic, describe the opening scene for the first page and then build upon it with subsequent pages.

[...] By default, the AI may also add dialogue balloons in certain panels, though you have no control over this. The dialogue consists of just gibberish text, so it's more of a visual element to make the pages seem like they're from a real comic book.

There are programs to modify that, obviously. I tried running the program myself, and let me be clear about something: sometimes, there's very stupefyingly deformed imagery turning up and spoiling everything, like more than 2 arms, as though the program were confusing it all with a squid or a mantis, which makes clear AI isn't perfect or foolproof. So there's still a ways to go before AI can really offer up something workable, and even then, lest we forget, it shouldn't be a replacement for real life human illustration. Also, the images don't always load, probably due to heavy traffic on the server.

So try it yourself, but keep in mind it may all have to be taken with a grain of salt, due to the inevitable flaws AI can have.

Labels: science, technology