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Forum - View topicNEWS: Manga Plus Service Publishes Daisuke Miyata's Rugby Rumble Manga Using AI Company as Letterer
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3461 Location: Finland |
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The Beat has more images to compare.
A few more iterations of learning, and I think it should easily become passable out-of-the-box. The main problem right now what I can see, the text is too big and overflow of text bubbles, and to a lesser degree placement. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1570 |
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There used to be a time when the goal of new tech was to make things easier or more convenient for the consumer, and if it didn't do that, you kept in development until it did.
Now the goal of new tech is to save money for a select, tiny group of people while screwing over everyone else. In this case, manga professionals get screwed out of work, the public has to look at ugly, poorly formatted lettering, but we're all told we should just suck it up because one company saved money. Along with the vague promise that "it'll get better later." Well if that's true, then release the tech later when it's actually good! Why shove it in all our faces while it still sucks? |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2338 |
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What is 'lettering', as distinct from translation/localization, exactly? The process of determining the placement, fonts and general style of already pre-chosen words on the page?
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1402 |
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Broadly, yes. "Lettering" has been a part of graphic novels since their inception, as it's the act of actually putting the words into word bubbles. Typically for manga that means choosing the right font, kerning, and formatting for the translated text, and in cases like Viz's volume releases, it means actively redrawing and replacing any on-page text that originally appeared in Japanese. It's one of those areas that is extremely critical to the actual reading experience, but is severely undervalued because it's invisible when done properly. |
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skafreak51
 Posts: 212 |
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So this is literally my job. I’m a letterer.
Not really in fear for my line of work just now, but I want to say, it doesn’t pay much. I’m fortunate enough to come from a background where I’m pretty comfortable in life even with said pay, and I genuinely love my job and wouldn’t trade it, but the point I’m trying to make is, this isn’t going to be saving companies millions of dollars. It’s just another in a long line of moves to stuff the pockets of the guys at the top as much as possible with having to pay the least amount of people the least amount of money. It’s sad how ai is incredibly jaw dropping and dystopian at the same time. Firsts it’s lettering, then it’s translation. Then there will be no mangaka, and a year after that no one will be reading the same comics as each other. Everyone will be in their own little world being fed content strictly for them. Then sites like ANN will have no reason to exist, because there will be no hot topic manga and anime to report on, no voice actors, no industry news, no fandom and no culture. Old man yelling at clouds? Maybe. But I’m also pretty young. |
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DevilBrew
Posts: 131 |
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This ai nonsense really needs to end. It's obvious these companies are using any excuse possible not to pay their already underpaid employees in the name of "saving money". I don't know if letterer jobs can be unionized but people in the creative industry need protection now more than ever.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2338 |
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I wonder if there's any chance of them splitting pricing tiers, where they use AI for this kind of thing for titles that they wouldn't otherwise be willing to spend human labor on? And, treating those titles as priced at a lower tier. But, still shelling out for human letterers/translators/localizers/etc for premium titles, and up-pricing those appropriately
Probably a bit utopian, and there'd be a substitution effect in a macroeconomic sense so they probably could never be thought of as entirely separate even if the companies in question unexpectedly had the best of intentions, but that feels like it would be a decent world to shoot for, in which we'd get both wider access to titles and mostly protect existing jobs/quality of work done in titles that would have been judged as worth exporting with pre-AI labor costs anyway |
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Rodem
Posts: 27 |
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Imagine being a creator in this situation and finding out the publishers didn’t consider your hard work “worth spending human labor on.” Also it would just lead to a self fulfilling prophecy where readers would assume such “lower titles” were not worth reading anyway so they would be doomed to fail. And what would even qualify “lower” vs “premium” titles??? |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2338 |
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I mean -- currently, there are tons of titles that don't get translated or localized at all (or lettered, in English, of course, etc). I'm not sure I see why it would feel better not to get a contract at all, as a creator. |
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ch3ru
Posts: 4 |
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Would you REALLY rather have your work be deemed 'not worth the effort' and tossed on a scrap heap for others to then criticize the low-effort production you had no control over...vs completely ignored? |
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Blanchimont
Posts: 3461 Location: Finland |
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Well, that's up to the creator or/and the publisher. As a consumer, between a 'good enough' and none, I take the former... |
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lys
 Posts: 1010 Location: mitten-state |
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As a consumer, there is SO MUCH available to me, I'm not wasting my time or money on something that looks like junk. I also don't want companies to get the impression they CAN put in minimal effort and still profit off the results, so I think it's important to uphold standards of quality. As a creator, I would find it pretty off-putting to be told (or have it implied) that my work was only worth feeding into a machine for a sub-par result that would make the publisher a few extra nickels. Yes, I would rather have it left alone or await a better opportunity down the road in that case. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2338 |
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If I have a chance at profiting off of it, then, yes, probably? I suspect this is very similar to the 'self-publishing' trend in ebooks; the quality is generally significantly lower (for lack of proper editorial involvement, I assume), but not so bad that it is literally unreadable or entirely unenjoyable, and an author trying to break into the industry may still see this as a good opportunity (or, well, their only opportunity) to get more attention and hope they land a hit. And, similarly, I expect the ocean of those works will largely be ignored and earn nothing (I've never looked for statistics on self-published ebooks, but I'd be shocked if much more than even 1% of them earns anything material; much like indie games, I expect a lot of failure). Ideally, a small percentage of people published(/translated, lettered, localized, etc) in this way would earn enough fame that they'd be able to leverage their initial success to transition into getting more direct attention from the companies involved. In any case, yeah, I still I have trouble viewing it as a worse thing than having no opportunity to share your work at all, if it can help pay the bills.
This seems like a more material danger to me. Generally, I wouldn't really trust companies not to just treat this as an opportunity to substitute much lower quality even when they would not traditionally have done so. This kind of concern is why I think of this possible future as fairly utopian, and not likely to be sustainable. EDIT: But, I'm also doubtful that just complaining about the adoption of new tech is much of a consumer-side strategy. Even if one company avoids it, there will be plenty of others that pop up and use it to try to compete while undercutting costs. Organized consumer groups lobbying for responsible uses of AI instead've decentralized consumers just declaring every use of it unacceptable seems like it would be most likely to yield a decent outcome, to me. |
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Blanchimont
Posts: 3461 Location: Finland |
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There is a third option if you so prefer. Scanlations. Your ' SO MUCH' is relative, there is literally a ton of series I currently read that aren't on the platforms. There is a lot on the platforms that I DON'T read. As you said there is a lot, but it doesn't account for taste. |
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