100 TIMES AI HEROES
100 TIMES AI HEROES (v1.0)
Consept
このプロジェクトでは、私自身のマンガ制作におけるキャラクター創出の思考フローと作業プロセスを分解し、生成AIを用いて再現することで、キャラクター創出のスピードを加速させました。 生成AIの能力を活かして、キャラクター創出などのプロセスの生産性を向上し、より私自身の作家性にフォーカスした作品制作を可能にすることが期待できます。 しかし一方で、作品への私自身の作家性の反映すら、生成AIに代替できてしまうのではないか？という気づきもありました。キャラクターやストーリーを、生成AIが自律的に創作し続けることができたら、人間には鑑賞する役割しか残らないかもしれません。 さらに言えば、作品を鑑賞する役割すら、いつかAIに代替されうる機能なのかもしれません。 私たちは、生成AIによる創作の探求を通じて、人間による創作の意義、目的、その根源たる欲求を見つめ直さなければならないでしょう。
第3回AIアートグランプリ審査委員特別賞受賞
第3回AIアートグランプリ
https://www.aiartgrandprix.com/
https://www.aiartgrandprix.com/
第3回AIアートグランプリ最終審査会プレゼンテーション（日本語）
Using generative AI to increase character creation productivity by 100 times
In this project, I broke down the thought flow and work process of character creation in my own manga production and reproduced it using generative AI, accelerating the speed of character creation.
By utilizing the capabilities of generative AI, I hope to improve the productivity of processes such as character creation, enabling me to create works that are more focused on my own artistic creativity.
However, at the same time, I also realized that even the reflection of my own artistic creativity in my work might be replaced by generative AI. If generative AI can continue to create characters and stories autonomously, humans may only be left with the role of appreciating them.
Furthermore, even the role of appreciating works may one day be a function that can be replaced by AI.
Through the exploration of creation using generative AI, we will have to reexamine the meaning, purpose, and fundamental desire of human creation.
By utilizing the capabilities of generative AI, I hope to improve the productivity of processes such as character creation, enabling me to create works that are more focused on my own artistic creativity.
However, at the same time, I also realized that even the reflection of my own artistic creativity in my work might be replaced by generative AI. If generative AI can continue to create characters and stories autonomously, humans may only be left with the role of appreciating them.
Furthermore, even the role of appreciating works may one day be a function that can be replaced by AI.
Through the exploration of creation using generative AI, we will have to reexamine the meaning, purpose, and fundamental desire of human creation.
Winner of the Special Jury Award at the 3rd AI Art Grand Prix.
Compelling characters drive the story.
Whether or not there is a character who strongly drives the story forward is an important factor that can determine whether the story is interesting or not.
Characters are born from the bold combination of ideas.
I'm sure it's different for each writer, but in my case, I start by thinking about what desires, abilities, and role the character has, and then expand on that idea to create a character.
I think about and make a list of various desires, abilities, and roles, and then randomly pick out and combine them to create a unique and new character that I could never have imagined on my own.
The combination of a character's aspirations, abilities, and role creates that character's unique circumstances -- a narrative, so to speak.
Each character has their own unique circumstances, which allow them to passively react to events around them or actively act with will.
Because the characters act on their own, they are able to drive the story.
Conversely, a character who does not have a narrative in the form of aspirations, abilities, or role will not be able to drive the story, and will end up being a punchline.
Each author who creates a story will have their own unique circumstances.
And the more close the content is to the author or the stronger their tastes (moe or fetishes), the deeper the detail and the stronger the impression.
By bringing in narratives based on their own experiences, desires, habits, and so on, authors give their characters external factors and create an even more overwhelming situation.
It is, so to speak, a narrative that can counter the character's narrative, and is another important element of a story that can drive the character into an overwhelming situation.
A story can be thought of as a character facing an unavoidable situation.
In the real world, we humans can find ourselves in a variety of unavoidable situations, but it is possible to avoid them or run away from them.
However, characters in stories cannot escape from unavoidable situations.
For example, "Man-eating giants are attacking one after another from behind the huge walls protecting the royal capital," or "My beloved sister has been eaten by a dragon, so I must go and resurrect her."
If you think about it rationally, these are completely absurd stories, but for the characters in stories, they are unavoidable situations, and they take them very seriously.
The more realistic the emotional movements and principles of action that follow each character's narrative, the more people will be drawn into the story, and their interest in what will happen to this character will be aroused, leading them to continue reading the story.
How it work
100 TIMES AI HEROES accelerates the productivity of character creation by 100 times.
It automatically generates character-specific narratives and external features to present character ideas as vivid figures.
Few-Shot Prompting expands the ideas for character aspirations, abilities, and roles by 100 times and stores them in a spreadsheet.
It's fine to start with 10 or 5 of each. You can easily increase the number by coming up with a few of your own and sending a prompt such as "Suggest 10 abilities other than the ones listed below" to ChatGPT or similar.
Each one doesn't have to be eye-opening, exciting, or novel.
The fun is in the unexpected combinations of aspirations, abilities, and roles, and each idea can be mundane or well-known.
You could also write down the aspirations, abilities, and roles of each character from your favorite manga.
Going forward, I wanted to automate the combination of elements and repetitive processes, so I wrote a simple program in Google Colab.
When it didn't work properly, I asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. about the error and fixed it.
Gemini was the most knowledgeable about using Google Colab and spreadsheets.
Aspirations, abilities, and roles are randomly selected from the spreadsheet and stored in the corresponding variables.
Age, gender, and race are combined into a single variable.
We'll incorporate variables into the prompt to generate a character concept and store it in a variable called CharacterConcept.
When summarizing, some elements may be left out, but we'll accept that this is part of the fun of randomness.
Create a prompt for image generation.
Since we want to ensure consistent quality of the generated images, we enter the necessary elements directly in English and store them in variables.
This is combined with the CharacterConcept variable to create a prompt for image generation.
Since the prompt is quite long, we were concerned that information might be lost and the generated results might vary, but we were able to get quite stable output with Midjourney and niji・journey.
By repeating the above process using a for statement, we are able to generate 100 different character concepts and visual prompts in 15 minutes.
The visual prompts are then thrown into an image generation AI (in this case, Midjourney and niji・journey) to generate images.
Due to the effects of common parts of the prompts, the poses, camera angles, and art styles of the generated character images are fairly consistent.
In a for loop, the program generates character concepts and visual prompts, while the AI generates ideas for new aspirations, abilities, and roles to store in a spreadsheet.
When 100 characters are generated, 100 rows will be added to each of the desire, ability, and role sheets.
This allows us to create an almost limitless number of characters, each with their own unique narrative and visuals.
This is 100 TIMES AI HEROES.
As mentioned earlier, humans can add narratives based on their own experiences, desires, habits, and so on to stories to create situations that characters find themselves in difficult positions, and express emotional movements and principles of action from within the character's narrative, evoking strong empathy in the viewer.
Could this also be possible with the LLM, which aggregates and abstracts the narrative of humanity?
And at an overwhelming speed.
If a generative AI could create character concepts, character visuals, and stories, and continue to generate all of these autonomously and inexhaustibly, would humans be able to continue reading them?
In this work, the generative AI is responsible for creating characters, and I, the human, am responsible for evaluating and selecting them, but if I could verbalize my evaluation criteria and hiring standards, I could imagine that I could leave those roles to an AI as well.
If characters can do this, I imagine it would also be possible to verbalize evaluation criteria for elements such as the character's behavior, emotional movements, and principles of action in a story, and to evaluate the story, which is a continuum between that result and the next event.
If AI can evaluate characters and stories, surely it can also read stories and enjoy them, or find them boring?
If AI can create narratives, produce stories, and continue to enjoy them for itself, what role will be left for humans?
Main tools used
Main tools used
Documentation: Notion
Idea expansion: Claude3.5Sonnet
Coding assistance: Claude3.5Sonnet
Character concept generation: OpenAI API
Database creation: Google SpreadSheet
Code execution: Google Colab
Character image generation: Midjorney, niji・journey
Image editing: Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Photoshop 2024
BGM generation: SunoAI
Documentation: Notion
Idea expansion: Claude3.5Sonnet
Coding assistance: Claude3.5Sonnet
Character concept generation: OpenAI API
Database creation: Google SpreadSheet
Code execution: Google Colab
Character image generation: Midjorney, niji・journey
Image editing: Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Photoshop 2024
BGM generation: SunoAI
Gallery v1.2
Gallery v1.1
Gallery v1.0
100 TIMES AI HEROES PROJECT - copyright 2024 Masafumi Nakanishi
Photo gallery of the AI Art Festival 2024 venue on November 9, 2024
