College of Fine Arts
23 Exploring AI Image Generation as a Collaboration Tool for Comic Artists
Sarah Benedict and Lien Fan Shen
Faculty Mentor: Lien Fan Shen (Art & Art History, University of Utah)
Introduction
Art and humanity are synonymous; everything artists create is the result of their unique sets of experiences. Even when art making is used as a form of escape, life finds a way to bleed into every brushstroke. A lavish, rich, fictional world necessary for a comic series cannot be simply generated. The outputs from AI image generators ambushing the internet are messy and unorganized. Lines that are implying a mountain-scape spill into the sky. Strokes start and end unpredictably. People grow extra fingers, if not entire limbs. There is an obvious dissonance between the highly detailed, shaded style, and the confusing and out-of-place components that infect each output from these tools. Despite this, the role AI might eventually play is still uncertain. Professional artists must be able to continue to compete with the speed of AI image generators, or even integrate them into their practices. Despite the current, inconsistent quality of their outputs, AI art is undeniably prevalent and will continue to exist in the art world.
Methods
The objective of this project is to understand what role AI could have in the comic-making process from an artist’s perspective. Through the production of a limited comic series, Sand Sage, which uses different forms of AI generation tools at every stage, we explore how AI might eventually empower and collaborate with artists. AI was primarily utilized in the pre-production stages, including story development, character design, concept art, and layout design. In the finalized pages, several backgrounds are AI-generated while character drawings, page composition, and text placements are done using conventional methods.
Sand Sage follows two girls, Lily and Eliza, who live in a society that is trapped beneath a dome. The world outside is polluted to the point that humans must wear a mask to breathe, something which Eliza presents in the opening pages. The dome’s air is filtered using sand sage, which is a plant that can only be found outside. Both characters struggle in their environments, with Lily being unable to fulfill the expectations of her parents and Eliza being haunted by the past and the declining physical state of those who live within the dome. In using ChatGPT, we were given the chance to focus our efforts on areas of the plot we were interested in writing, while still implementing a complex world and cast. It provoked central plot points for Sand Sage and could generate a plethora of ideas that we could simply choose from. As we approached the last chapters of the series, we ran into a roadblock in finding a suitable ending. We used ChatGPT here as well, helping us understand what options we had left using prompts such as, “Help me find an end to this story”. This was a point when we reminded ourselv