Rootport’s Cyberpunk Peach John is widely known in the manga world, mainly because it was the “first manga drawn by AI”. But at least in the near future, it may be edged out of official histories because nobody wants to get their hands dirty writing about it.

An editor gets in touch to say that he loves the two-page piece I’ve written about Cyberpunk Peach John, but that the comics history he is publishing will not be printing it.

The pseudonymous Rootport helpfully bulked out his debut work with an afterword about the perils of working with 2020s machine learning, supplying context and gossip about what we now called “promptives”. So there’s lots to talk about there, even in sense of being outdated before something’s even hit the shelves – Rootport was using a version of Midjourney that has already been superseded twice since he made his manga.

Cyberpunk Peach John is a fascinating proof-of-concept – a comic drawn by a machine while an irate programmer threw prompts at it in attempts to get it to keep the leading lady’s face on the right way round, and not to forget what the leading man looked like. Rootport relearned a bunch of tricks already common in the anime world, for decorating his characters with big, bold quirks and statements (pink hair, cat ears) to help hide the number of times that his characters slipped off-model.

But they weren’t his characters, were they? And they weren’t his models. A publisher seeking the rights to run images from a manga as part of a visual work (as opposed to fair comment for criticism and review) has to find someone to hand the cash to. They could, of course, pay an image fee to Rootport and his publishers, but lawyers coughed politely from the sidelines. Midjourney had based its designs on an unknown mish-mash of other peoples’ art, and the chance remained, however distant, that one of those people might pop up and say they’d been ripped off.

This is a problem that will have to be resolved sooner or later. Already, I see contract clauses in which authors and artists must indemnify their employers that no AI has been used in the generation of a copyright work. Last month, the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) started polling its members about the possibility of a “Prompt” or “Learning” licence, which would pay a royalty to someone whose work was harvested for machine use. Until someone makes a ruling, however, at least one major publisher refuses to wade into AI image-use at all. And part of me thinks that’s a welcome stand to take.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #243, 2024.