Japan wants to lash out at AIs

"Love Hina" creator and now Japanese politician Ken Akamatsu has revealed that Japan's government is debating whether artificial intelligence (AI) image generators automatically violate manga artists' copyrights. Artificial intelligence art is one of the biggest issues faced by modern manga artists, who are often at risk of having their work stolen and repurposed by AI programs. Since the introduction of artificial intelligence, many governments around the world have begun to reconsider how they should deal with programs that rely on the existence of copyrighted material to produce images.

Recently, on Twitter, Ken Akamatsu, who serves in Japan's House of Councillors, addressed questions about an artificial intelligence program called LoRA. Supposedly, this program was used to generate images that closely resembled works produced by Kishin Higuchi, a popular manga artist in Japan.

"We have received a lot of questions about LoRA from Professor Kishin Higuchi. What's unique about this is that the distribution area at Civitai says, 'All the images used for the learning were created by ourselves, and no copyrighted work by any artist was used.' However, even if the artist's own copyrighted work is not used for AI learning at all, if the act of creating and using the product satisfies the "similarity and dependence" in relation to existing copyrighted works, then it would be a violation of these rights," Akamatsu wrote.

If implemented, it would have far-reaching consequences, not only for those who generate illustrations with AI, but also for those who produce the technologies that are used to create them.

"In addition to the users," Akamatsu continued, "there is the possibility that the developer (i.e., the person who created LoRA) could become the infringer... The government is also considering violating non-copyright rights, such as publicity rights, with respect to generated artificial intelligence."

Within the anime community, artificial intelligence has frequently been criticized for plagiarizing the style of popular artists. Last year, Japanese publisher Shinchosha came under fire for publishing "Cyberpunk: Peach John," an AI-generated manga that closely resembles the iconic style of "Tokyo Ghoul" creator Sui Ishida. Viewers also lashed out at Studio OLM for using AI-generated art in an official music video for the "Beyblade X" series. Much of this collective outrage stems from the belief that entertainment companies are simply replacing human performers with artificial intelligence to save time and money during production.

Source: Twitter Official Account