Creating Playful Comics Together with AI

This project presents new forms of visual narratives, diversifying ideas and artistic possibilities by collaborating with an AI (tools for image and language generation) in the field of comic creation. The project is based on the artist's approach to analogue comic creation in which events/situations from her daily life get recorded in the form of visual diary through quick, spontaneous drawings later serving as starting points for larger narratives creation (loosely based on the approach by Lynda Barry). The AI extends this approach by allowing the artist to depart from her own analogue comics and take the narrative further through a dialogue with the machine, switching between analogue and digital by varying the prompts, letting the AI caption the hand-drawn images, allowing it to participate in the drawing process (in the artist's style) and taking on its textual suggestions for the continuation of the story. The project showcases several comics/visual narratives/artworks already created in this manner by the artist, all of them humorous, surreal and playful. This project celebrates diversity of ideas and art forms both through using comics as an art form as well as through the numerous possibilities that can emerge as a result of artist-machine collaboration in this field. Such collaboration also diversifies the artistic palette by adding AI as another material much in the same way as inks and pens. Humor further adds to the celebration of difference and diversity. Members of the public will be invited to participate and create their own comics based on the same approach using the same tools in a Google Colab interface. By doing so, the public will be able to sample the diversity of ideas that comes about through creating with an AI, while involving the public in using AI tools will in itself add to the theme of diversity.