The webcomic is now drawn by open source.
Hello. I’m luke Yang, CEO of BELIVVR, an AI webcomics platform and webcomics production company. BELIVVR was a webcomic technology startup that launched a VR webcomic, called Comixv in 2017. However, the VR webcomic platform, which approached the concept of ‘drawing’ comics in VR without 3D or separate tools, did not do as well as expected.
There were many reasons, but the 360-degree image format used in VR was difficult to draw compared to vertical webcomics, and the narrow market was the biggest reason for the failure. As an alternative, we registered a patent for learning the artist’s drawing style using AI technology and converting it to VR webtoon format, and made various technology development efforts, such as collaborating with Ajou University to research artificial intelligence coloring, but due to ComixV’s urgency to survive, technology investment was slow.
Fortunately, WebXR technology, which shows an immersive environment on the web, which was used in VR comics, could be utilized once again as a online immersive technology during the corona pendamic, so we were able to pivot and grow into a company called BELIVVR
Meet the Stable Diffuse That Will Conquer the World Pictorially
Then, in August 2022, I heard about the development of Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion is an artificial intelligence model distributed by Stability AI under an open-source license and released on August 22, 2022. I have a background as a NAVER Webtoon PD, but before that, I was an AI developer at NAVER, so I ran Stable Diffusion for the first time and was shocked by the performance of the advanced AI. At the time of the Bucheon International Manga Festival in 2022, we were experimenting with Vtuber, and I was in the corner of the booth, installing Stable Diffusion on my laptop to print out images of vvri, the character of BELIVVR, and then trying out the technology to create YouTube with the characters created in Stable Diffusion.
When, I hadn’t thought about making a webcomic with Stable Diffusion because it was difficult to get the composition I wanted.
After that, I watched with interest as sexualized images by A.I. caught fire online, and based on my experience that the big changes on the internet in the past were driven by adult content, I realized that something profound was happening.
Then, in February 2023, when Stable Diffusion started to explode and the term “HabitatMountain” was coined in Korea, I became convinced that AI was moving beyond people’s rejection and into their favor.
Most of all, I have a certain confident by Controlnet extention which is fixed character pose. One more, I founded unlimited potential the github-based plugin extension of Stable Diffusion
The power of open source to drive stable diffusion
While much has happened in the intervening years, including the Novel AI hacking happening, a powerful force has been at the center of this change: open source. Open source has been a fundamental force in the evolution of computers, and there’s not a feature on most computers that hasn’t been influenced by open source, from the cell phones and internet services we use every day to our own computers.
This open-source ethos of releasing the source of SW for free and letting people fix and improve it together started with a concept called CopyLeft, which initially emerged as the opposite of copyright. CopyLeft is “a movement started by Richard Stallman in the United States in 1984 that opposes the monopolization of information and programs by capital, arguing that all programs and information should be freely shared and allowed to improve upon each other.” A major outcome of the movement is open source.
In that sense, I think open source started out as the opposite of copyright, which guarantees monopoly. Copyright is a concept that protects authors, but it also works as a right that guarantees the economic rights of inventors, inventing companies, and authors by guaranteeing the monopoly of intellectual property rights. Especially in the case of software industry, inventions often require large amounts of capital and effort, so it’s a natural movement, and the concept of open development is a tool to promote technological advancement because it can benefit more people.
Because software is so cheap to replicate and so cheap to deliver over the internet, its velocity of propagation is frightening. Once these stable diffusions were open-sourced and released to the public, many developers began to improve upon them, and once the technology was open to everyone, lexica.art popped up to share related prompts, civitai.com to share various models, and communities like arca.live to create and share AI images utilizing these open technologies began to pour in. And all of this has happened in less than a year.
In AI terminology, there is a term called the AI singularity. The AI singularity is a term that refers to a specific point in time when AI exceeds human capabilities. In past anime and media, when A.I. develops, it is depicted as living alongside humans, like the AstroBoy animation, and they are shown growing at a “human pace.” However, scholars say that the rate of development of A.I. will not be at a “human pace,” and the moment may be like a flash in the pan. Perhaps we are passing the “singularity” in some areas, image drawing, we are passing it to some extent.
The reason for this high speed is that the software exhibits cumulatively increasing performance metrics and is very cheap to deliver. Currently, we have about 15,000 die-hard fans of the Stable Diffusion WebUI and 77,000 friends who are interested in it, and I believe one of those friends is me.
With so many developers interested and teaching AI, you can imagine the power of collective intelligence. When one of our developers develops or announces a cool feature, it quickly spreads around the world, upgrading every StableDiffusion on every computer. Even as you read this, some developer is probably working on StableDiffusion right now.
It’s no exaggeration to say that StableDiffusion AI has already become an integral part of the AI ecosystem in the design industry, and I don’t think any global company will be able to surpass it in the near future, because it’s not only about the power of software algorithms, but also the power of human networks. There’s Midjourney, there’s other generative image software, but one thing is for sure: StableDiffusion has established itself in the market as the definitive solution in the global design ecosystem.
This is perhaps no more evident than with ChatGPT, which is a hot topic these days, and the same concerns are shared by the Google developers behind ChatGPT.
And this open-source driven development of AI means that AI is actually human intellectual child. We don’t know how idiot or how great doing, but it’s hard to turn back now that it’s here, and we have to live with this new era. That’s why we took the bold step of releasing our AI webcomic platform and webcomic made by stable diffusion AI.
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