Lee drew inspiration for his renegade baseball avengers from the Sammi Superstars, one in all South Korea’s first skilled baseball groups, whose journey of perseverance captivated a rustic stifled by army dictatorship. The sequence gained a cult following amongst readers searching for a artistic escape from political repression, mesmerized by his daring brushstrokes and cinematic compositions that defied the conventions of cartoons.
Kkachi, the rebellious protagonist in A Daunting Crew, is an alter ego of Lee himself. A scrappy outcast with untamed, spiky hair, he’s a fan favourite who challenges the world with unrelenting ardour and a courageous conscience. He has reappeared all through Lee’s signature works, painted with a brand new layer of pathos every time—a supernatural warrior who saves Earth from an alien assault in Armageddon and a rogue police officer battling a robust legal syndicate in Karon’s Daybreak. Over many years, Kkachi has turn out to be a cultural icon in South Korea.
However Lee worries about Kkachi’s future. “In South Korea, when an writer dies, his characters additionally get buried in his grave,” he says, drawing contrasts with enduring American comedian characters like Superman and Spider-Man. Lee craves creative immortality. He needs his characters to remain alive not simply within the reminiscences of readers, but in addition on their internet comedian platforms. “Even after I die, I need my worldviews and characters to speak and resonate with the folks of a brand new period,” he says. “That’s the type of immortality I need.”
Lee believes that AI can assist him notice his imaginative and prescient. In partnership with Jaedam Media, an internet comics manufacturing firm based mostly in Seoul, he developed the “Lee Hyun-se AI mannequin” by fine-tuning the open-source AI artwork generator Steady Diffusion, created by the UK-based startup Stability AI. Utilizing a knowledge set of 5,000 volumes of comics that he has printed over 46 years, the ensuing mannequin generates comics in his signature fashion.
This yr, Lee is getting ready to publish his first AI-assisted internet comedian, a remake of his 1994 manhwa Karon’s Daybreak. Writers at Jaedam Media are adapting the story right into a modernized crime drama starring Kkachi as a police officer in present-day Seoul and his love curiosity Umji as a daring prosecutor. College students at Sejong College, the place Lee teaches comics, are creating the art work utilizing his AI mannequin.
The artistic course of unfolds in a number of levels. First, Lee’s AI mannequin generates illustrations based mostly on textual content prompts and reference pictures, like 3D anatomy fashions and hand-drawn sketches that present cues for various actions and gestures. Lee’s college students then curate and edit the illustrations, adjusting the characters’ poses, tailoring their facial expressions, and integrating them into cartoonish compositions that AI can’t engineer. After many rounds of refinement and regeneration, Lee steps in to orchestrate the ultimate product, including his distinct creative edge.
AI firms envision that artists might automate the grunt work of drawing and channel their artistic vitality into storytelling and artwork route.
“Beneath my route, a personality may glare with unhappy eyes even after they’re indignant or ferocious eyes after they’re glad,” he says. “It’s a subversive expression, a nuance that AI struggles to seize. These delicate particulars I have to direct myself.”
Finally, Lee needs to construct an AI system that embodies his meticulous method to human expressions. The grand imaginative and prescient of his experimental AI venture is to create a “Lee Hyun-se simulation agent”—a complicated era of his AI mannequin that replicates his artistic thoughts. The mannequin can be educated on digital archives of Lee’s essays, interviews, and texts from his comics—the topic of an exhibit on the Nationwide Library of Korea final yr—to encode his philosophy, persona, and values. “It’s going to take a very long time for AI to be taught my myriad worldviews as a result of I’ve printed a lot work,” he says.