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A note from the mod on AI-generated comics (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by lawrence@lemmy.world to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world

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Hi friends, mod here.

I want to take a moment to address the issue of low-quality AI-generated content that occasionally gets posted in this community.

While /c/comicstrips hasn't had a specific rule about this until now, it's become clear that some AI-generated comics being shared fall well below the standard of quality we aim to maintain. These low-effort posts not only disrupt the overall experience for readers, but they also devalue the hard work of the illustrators and artists who contribute original content here.

Starting today, a new rule is in place:

AI-generated comics are no longer allowed in this community.

Thanks for understanding and helping keep /c/comicstrips a high-quality space for everyone who loves comics.

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[-] TommySoda@lemmy.world 35 points 8 months ago

Just make a comic with stick figures. Cyanide and Happiness literally became famous for doing it and turned into a semi-refined art style. You don't need AI if you got a good joke on your hands.

[-] RedStrider@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

or sprites from a video game

[-] RelativeArea1@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

please dont remind me of loss comic

edit: ok...i think i need to drop some context with what im saying

[-] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Speaking of loss

You just lost The Game

[+] Lembot_0004@discuss.online -26 points 8 months ago

So if you're ok with low quality, why then you object about AI comics quality which is mostly significantly higher than "stick figures"?

[-] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 20 points 8 months ago

There’s a difference between “low quality” and “simple”. Cyanide and Happiness, to use their example was simple, not low quality.

[-] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 8 months ago

XKCD also a great example

[-] TommySoda@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

Because I believe stick figures are of a higher quality than AI. An AI generated comic shows me that you cared so little about it that you couldn't even draw stick figures. And this has nothing to do with effort, but artistic intent. It shows that whoever did it had no desire to inject themselves into the comic and would rather have it look generic and bland. Fidelity does not equal quality.

[-] psx_crab@lemmy.zip 4 points 8 months ago

Because AI "art" being posted around isn't even consistent throughout the panel, and is often devoid of effort and context so even when it's not that interesting, it's not even pleasant to look at.

Comic artist like C&H and Oatmeal, while having terrible art, at least are funny and with context. There's human in it, and they can call the style their "own", even if it's stick figure it's stick figure with distinction. AI art just make you think "is this made from AI?"

You want people to appreciate AI comic? Sure, do the touch up first and make everything consistent.

[-] Mike_Hunt@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

because AI is lazy

[-] bobbyguy@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago

ai isn't lazy, it opens up the art industry to people who cant draw, and people who are worried about their art careers need to remember that ai cant make physical art, and there's already enough hate for ai that will definitely still be demand for human made art, so just draw or paint on a physical canvas, or find the people who have a demand for human made art

[-] Mike_Hunt@lemmy.ml 0 points 8 months ago

Disagree on that first bit a lot, drawing is a skill you have to learn, Jumping to AI right away because you don't want to take on the hours of learning is just lazy.

[-] bobbyguy@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

i don't understand why people don't like ai, its just a very new and advanced tool, it makes peoples lives more convenient and can intelligently solve problems, we used to have manual long range communication like mail services, it would take days or weeks for people to send short one paragraph messages to each other (in this analogy this is equivalent to the pre ai art industry where you could either learn to create art yourself or commission an artwork.) then we developed telegraphs and radio and telephones and eventually smart phones which among other things can allow to people on opposite sides of the world to communicate with almost zero delay (in the post ai art industry almost anyone can create almost anything in a matter of minutes or seconds, something that used to take hours days or weeks to achieve has been streamlined, made cheaper, and more available to the general public)

in both industries automated systems replaced most of the workforce. lots of people were put out of jobs because it was economically more efficient to automate the process for the most part. just like how there are still people in the mail industry delivering packages and of course physical letters, there will still be human artists in the future. the industry will just be smaller and people wont create art for the sake of looking the best, or for the sake of making money, people will personally create art because they want to appreciate it and share it with other people.

so i really don't see why ai is a bad thing, all its doing is streamlining the industries it can be applied to.

[-] TootSweet@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

You don't even have to draw the stick figures yourself.

[-] Lembot_0004@discuss.online 1 points 8 months ago

And how does it is differ from AI?

[-] ji59@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 8 months ago

Nice library. But does using this solve anything? From the post and other comments, one of the main issues with AI generated comics is that the author do not present himself in the images, and by using this tool, the images are also automatically generated by users description. There is more control over the final layout and there is needed more creativity to create it. But in the end I see the same issues about "being lazy" and having no author personality in the images. PS: I'm not saying this tool should be banned, just want to point out some similarities of this tool to AI tools.

[-] TootSweet@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

But does using this solve anything?

If you hate the mouse like I do, yes. Think of codecomic as comparable to OpenSCAD only where OpenSCAD is for making 3d models, codecomic is for making webcomics. (And of course 3d models could be made in FreeCAD, but OpenSCAD makes for a different paradigm.)

Full disclosure, I'm the author of codecomic. (I'm the AntiMS who owns that repository on Gitlab.) Just to explain why I wrote it in the first place, I was GMing a D&D game at the time. And I have my own system for organizing my GM notes (which is a whole other code project that I haven't Open Sourced yet) that involves writing Markdown and running a build process that generates a static HTML "website" locally which I can look at and navigate at the table.

A picture (in this case, a webcomic or storyboard) is worth 1000 words and my brain can process it quicker while I'm at the table and thinking on my feet. (I don't want to be at the table and be like "hold on everybody while I read these three paragraphs of notes about the next 30 seconds of what is likely to go down in-game.") Interpreting a webcomic is just something my brain does faster.

But if I have to slog and toil at the Gimp user interface to crank out tons of webcomics... I'll probably just rage-quit GMing rather than endure that.

Plus organizing all the images so they appear correctly in my notes would be a pain. And making tweaks and revisions to comics I'd made previously would be a nightmare.

So I wrote codecomic to speed things up. And the coolest part. I wrote an extension for my markdown-based notes system to let me embed codecomic source code blocks directly in my markdown source files. Running the build for my notes system would produce HTML like usual, but with the generated comics directly in the HTML documents.

(And then scheduling conflicts happened and the campaign fizzled out. Sigh. Such is the life of the forever GM. Lol.)

I definitely didn't want to have to fight with something like Stable Diffusion for this use case. If I wanted to tweak an existing comic and move one stick figure 20 pixels to the right or modify the text in a "speech bubble", I didn't want to have to regenerate the image with roughly the same keywords and pray to my graphics card that it would output exactly what I have in mind. I just want to modify my codecomic source code to change the X coordinate of that stick figure by 30 pixels.

one of the main issues with AI generated comics is that the author do not present himself in the images, and by using this tool, the images are also automatically generated by users description. There is more control over the final layout and there is needed more creativity to create it. But in the end I see the same issues about "being lazy" and having no author personality in the images. PS: I'm not saying this tool should be banned, just want to point out some similarities of this tool to AI tools.

Codecomic is quite limited and opinionated in its current functionality. I've definitely got things in mind regarding how I might extend it in the future to give users more creative freedom. (Mind you, I probably wouldn't get back to working on it any time soon unless folks start expressing interest in it. Keep in mind the codecomic repository has exactly one (one!) commit in it.) It doesn't support backgrounds currently. I'd be interested (if others expressed interest in it) in potentially adding support for other, more sophisticated ways to represent characters than just stick figures. More ways to draw stuff. Other ways of drawing lines that have more "character". Etc etc etc.

You definitely have a point when it comes to the current state of codecomic. But whereas something like Stable Diffusion can't be extended to give users more creative freedom, I don't think the same could be said about the approach codecomic takes. Codecomic could definitely be evolved more to allow the user to put more of themselves into the comics while still reducing some of the overhead and "fiddliness" of using something line Gimp for making web comics.

One more point I'll make. I think the approach that codecomic takes would allow for "incrementally" adding more of "yourself" into comics in a way that Stable Diffusion couldn't. Spending more time designing your Stable Diffusion prompts/keywords/inputs/whatever could give you "better" (and I put "better" here in very large double quotes) results. But only to a point. After not too long, further tuning your input is going to give you increasingly diminishing returns. With codecomic's approach (or at least the vision for codecomic), there's not really a limit to how much creativity one could pour into a given webcomic.

Also, thanks for your input! I'll definitely at least make some notes and let that influence the direction I take codecomic in the future. (If I do continue working on it, that is. No promises.)

Edit: Some screenshots from my GM notes to show how I'm using codecomic:

Warning: Spoilers for the published module Forgotten Relics from the book Eberron: Rising From The Last War.

[-] ji59@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for your replay, it was very insightful. I have to say that I do not have anything against your tool. I think it's wonderful that you created it and allowed anyone to use it. Also, I do not create comics, I just came across this post, so I don't really care about the rules in this community. I just hate that so many people are refusing any AI tool because it is AI. I also don't like how everyone is pushing AI into their products, but in my opinion there are places, where these tools are really useful. That said, I understand, that people want to ban AI generated comics. It only seemed interesting to me that as an alternative, you suggested using another tool for generating comics by computer (although there are some similarities, I know that AI tools are very different from codecomic). So lwt me repeat, codecomic sound awesome and I only wrote my comment to start a discussion.

I have one question, would it be okay to create codecomic source code with LLM?

And one final note on AI tools. Some of them are really complex. I don't use them much, but some of them allow user to edit only parts of the image with a prompt, or create an image based on user sketch, etc.

[-] rowdy@lemmy.zip 30 points 8 months ago

Incredible. Thank you.

[-] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 5 points 8 months ago

Which ones were identified as AI generated?

[-] classic@fedia.io 2 points 8 months ago

I wouldn't mind seeing a few examples as well

[-] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 9 points 8 months ago

Almost everyone, anyway

[-] Mac@mander.xyz 5 points 8 months ago

Was ready to unfollow and block.
Glad we decided to preserve the integrity of the art.

Let the ai-bro tears flow.

[-] GrantUsEyes@lemmy.zip 4 points 8 months ago

Thank you!!!!! (づ￣ ³￣)づ

[-] ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 2 points 8 months ago

I'm not against the posting of AI generated content, but it should be confined to communities that were specifically set up for AI content.

[-] Bad@jlai.lu 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I started by making comics with horribly drawn stickmen in Paint, black and white, no colors, yet they got a positive reaction due to the writing (example of my work 2 years ago).

Unless you suffer from a severe physical disability, there's no excuse, you can draw your own comics.

The best part is while drawing your shitty stickmen, you'll get better at drawing, learn to represent emotions and actions, develop a style, start to have a visual identity, maybe even get good at it who knows.

I learned to draw from scratch in my late 30s, two years later I'm doing illustrations for my own games - there's still a lot of room for improvement, but it proves practice pays off even without tryharding and you don't need AI to draw your comics for you. You just need to get over your fears of judgement, try your best with the skills you've got, and keep doing it on a regular schedule. Slowly, over time, you'll get better. I promise. It'll be fruitless and frustrating sometimes, but you'll get big visible leaps in your skills every now and then.

That's why I'm always upvoting and complimenting those who are just getting started and can't draw much yet, but have good ideas and a vision. I'd encourage everyone else to do the same. A lot of people tend to stop if they don't get positive feedback.

If you're considering making AI comics, try drawing them instead. Who cares if it's ugly, give it your best and share it with the world. You might not get many upvotes, but if your ideas are good enough you'll get a few comments and the motivation to keep trying, and that's a lot already. Don't fret over having no "talent", I don't have any either, still can't draw anything decent with a pen and paper :-)

[-] rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You don't even need the stick figures if you're especially clever about it.

ASCII art exists. MAD Magazine even had a feature in a few issues from the 1960s-1980s which were comic strips in which the art was made of characters typed on a typewriter, in a very early precursor to ASCII art.
Fumetti (photo comics) use photographs instead of illustrations.

There are lots of ways out there to be creative without generating slop.

[-] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 2 points 8 months ago

And nothing of value was lost.

[-] psx_crab@lemmy.zip 1 points 8 months ago

Based.

On what? Idk, just based.

[-] Sergio@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

How the mod ruled:

Great choice!

[-] rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Awesome! Thanks for this decision.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 0 points 8 months ago

I congratulate you on your decision

However, I do think that people like us are on the losing side. US tech companies are flooding the internet with AI slop and most people in the world are tied up in them and see barely anything else anymore.

Soon enough we'll be a tiny minority, but what can you do....?

[-] tetris11@feddit.uk 2 points 8 months ago

Many people cook entire meals using the microwave, and many people cook using an oven and stove.

Yes there's a lot of quickly processed food out there to feed the masses, but even the masses can tell the difference between a home cooked meal and a microwaved plate.

We might be the minority with our cooking, but our clientelle don't want it any other way and thats okay

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world -2 points 8 months ago

how do you feel about posting a comic that occasionally uses ai tools in it

this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025

110 points (98.2% liked)

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