Okay, if I was a graphic novelist, this would be a little terrifying. Dude here, Will Douglas Heaven, has found an AI that can turn your book or short story or poem into, well, graphic novel.
Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story about a man who eats luxury cat food. This morning, I sat and watched as a generative AI platform called Lore Machine brought my words to life.
I fed my story into a text box and got this message: “We are identifying scenes, locations, and characters as well as vibes. This process can take up to 2 minutes.” Lore Machine analyzed the text, extracted descriptions of the characters and locations mentioned, and then handed those bits of information off to an image-generation model. An illustrated storyboard popped up on the screen. As I clicked through vivid comic-book renderings of my half-forgotten characters, my heart was pounding.
After the usual stretch in development Hell, it’s now publicly available, for a subscription fee starting at US$10 a month. You can feed it up to 100,000 words and generate 80 images in a bunch of pre-baked styles.
I find myself thinking it’d be great fun to mess around with, just before I find myself wondering how all of my illustrator buddies are going to avoid starvation.