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Publishers weigh lawsuits and licences

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Master of menial tasks or threat to jobs?

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'No soul' in art by algorithm

By Joanna Gill

BRUSSELS, June 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Home to

animated heroes from Tintin to the Smurfs, Brussels is proud to

display its cartoon heritage in mammoth murals that tower over

the city's stately streets. But all is not well in the

self-declared capital of comics.

In an industry where animators routinely depict epic battles

between super-heroes and arch-villains, European cartoon artists

are now in a real-life fight of their own, fending off a new,

faceless adversary: artificial intelligence (AI).

AI-generated art currently operates in a legal grey area,

ensuring novel intellectual property disputes in what is a

fast-growing and ever-changing field.

Copyright laws in the European Union do not explicitly cover

AI-generated art, leaving some artists wondering if AI will help

or hinder creativity and throwing up the thorny question of

whether low-cost AI tools will eventually replace human artists.

LITIGATE OR LICENCE

While artists spend years honing their skills, generative AI

tools, such as MidJourney, use a machine-learning algorithm -

trained on artists' images - to generate pictures in minutes.

This has triggered a "complete rejection" of AI in the

European comic-book industry, according to Gauthier van

Meerbeeck, editorial director at Le Lombard.

His firm is publisher of the legendary adventures of Tintin,

an intrepid boy-reporter who is now almost a century old.

Created by Herge, Tintin became known for his blond quiff,

baggy plus fours and trusty sidekick, Snowy the dog, and is

considered an icon in what is now a global industry.

"This art is generated by stealing from artists. So morally

I could never get involved in that," said van Meerbeeck.

AI IN THE DOCK

Across the Atlantic, Disney ( DIS ) sparked controversy in June 2023

by using AI-generated images in Marvel's "Secret Invasion", and

the boom in generative AI has spawned a flurry of U.S. lawsuits.

Prominent tech companies from Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI to

Meta Platforms ( META ), have been hit with copyright cases by artists

who say AI profited from their work without permission or

compensation.

European comic book publishing houses are gearing up for

litigation when new EU rules under the AI act kick in mid-2025,

forcing tech firms to be transparent about training inputs and

opening them up to potential copyright lawsuits.

"It's huge for publishers," Quentin Deschandelliers, legal

advisor at the Federation of European Publishers, told the

Thomson Reuters Foundation, explaining that if you want to

litigate you need to "know what is under the hood".

He said the incoming law may push tech firms towards

licensing agreements to compensate artists if their work is used

to train a generative AI model.

Amid growing scrutiny over copyright, several big tech

companies that trained their AI using others' output have

already signed content-licensing deals with media outlets, such

as OpenAI with the Financial Times and Google with NewsCorp.

However, some publishers and authors are afraid of "giving

away the keys to the kingdom", explained Deschandelliers, over

fears of AI-generated works flooding the markets.

ART, SOUL AND BOTS

Courtroom battles aside, artists are also wondering

whether to harness or reject the new tools.

Belgian comic book artist's Marnix Verduyn, who goes by the

pseudonym NIX, describes himself as a computer engineer who

"accidentally became a comic book artist".

He chose to train a generative algorithm on his own comics,

joking that he had a fantasy of replacing himself to spend more

time at the beach.

But his fellow comic artists didn't find it so funny,

especially when the generative AI model Dall-E came out in 2021;

it was a watershed moment.

"It was a shock how powerful it was," he told the Thomson

Reuters Foundation. "That's when I thought there's a lot of

people who are not going to have jobs in the future."

In Europe, the cultural sector employed 7.7 million people

in 2022, while its net turnover was about 448 billion euros

($481.51 billion)in 2021, according to European Commission

business statistics.

NIX believes his use of AI - taking on low-skilled,

repetitive tasks - is "gently disruptive" and necessary to keep

up with competition from Japanese and U.S. comic-book giants.

But recent art graduates are worked up over entry-level jobs

they might once have filled now being filled by machines.

"It's cheap, fast, no humans needed, and it kills any

kind of artistic endeavour in the industry," Sarah Vanderhaegen

told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The 24-year-old Belgian described how a brush with AI during

an internship had left her crushed, forcing her to reconsider

options - and pivoting her to an archeology degree.

Now working on a comic book in her spare time, she sees AI

as a bogus short-cut powered by an algorithm that can never hope

to match an artist's ability to translate emotions onto a page.

A point where artists and publishers agree.

"AI-generated images, I can spot them straight away," noted

van Meerbeeck, who thinks comics are safe for now, as storyline,

text and images remain too complex for the current crop of

generative AI to create.

For NIX the human remains the boss, AI - a mere tool.

"It's just a cocktail of ideas stolen from somebody. I see

the mathematics (of AI), so there's no soul in the mathematics."

($1 = 0.9304 euros)

(Reporting by Joanna Gill; Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths. The

Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson

Reuters. Visit https://www.context.news/)