New chapter of Black Jack comic with AI element launched

The main content is about a genius surgeon, while the plot and images are completed with the support of artificial intelligence (AI).

The series revolves around the medical issue, in which the main character is Black Jack - a talented but unlicensed doctor. The new chapter is produced under the framework of a collaborative project between an AI program and content creators of the animation studio Tezuka Productions.

Speaking in Tokyo at a joint press conference with project team members, Mr. Makoto Tezuka - son of the late artist and currently Director of Tezuka Productions - said the new part of the series has the theme of the sanctity of life, while also raising issues of the medical industry in the development trend of modern technology.

The announcement of the new chapter in the Black Jack series commemorates the 50th anniversary of the first Black Jack collection's release in 1973.

The new 32-page chapter of Black Jack will be published on November 22 in the Japanese manga magazine Shukan Shonen Champion. The chapter follows a female patient who received an artificial heart transplant that was deemed “perfect” because of the AI ​​that created the artificial heart.

Last May, the production team officially launched a project to use generative AI models to produce a new chapter of the Black Jack series. The AI ​​models used include the new generation of ChatGPT chatbot GPT-4 and image-generating AI software Stable Diffusion.

These AI models were able to learn from the content and images of about 200 chapters of Black Jack, 200 short-form manga works by the late Osamu Tezuka, and 20,000 pages of image data depicting the faces of characters in Tezuka's manga series. The project team then fed content and plot ideas into these AI models and asked them to generate a full story for a new chapter of Black Jack.

According to the project team, interacting with the AI ​​model stimulated creativity and the AI ​​generated texts that were tailored to better reflect the sense of the plot in a way that readers could better understand the content.

However, Mr. Makoto Tezuk said that AI is still not able to express human emotions and feelings in stories. These limitations cannot be overcome by simply analyzing the data collected by AI models.

According to Professor Satoshi Kurihara, who works at Keio University's Faculty of Science and Technology and is a member of the project team, the use of AI has opened up the potential for large-scale comic production with quality that is not inferior to that of comics created by manga artists.

In 2020, the AI-powered Paidon manga project was also published and appeared in the manga magazine Morning. In this series, AI recreated the character images in the style of Osamu Tezuka.