Hirohiko Araki
Manga Artist
Creator of the long-running manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, who in a 2024 book on writing villains warned that AI would let con artists run rampant and recounted mistaking an AI forgery for his own hand — while saying in the same book that he wants digital tools to keep developing.
Why this score
How the formula works →- 55%nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
- 33%anti3 anti-AI statements (forceful)
- 12%pro1 pro-AI statement (mild)
Includes the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field. Evidence splits 12% pro, 33% anti, 55% direction-free → Nuanced
In his words
Speaking of “social evils”: as AI spreads through society, I think we will see more and more of a shady world where the con artists who exploit it run rampant. (translated from Japanese)
The other day I saw a picture and thought, “I drew this, didn’t I?” — then I found out it was actually made by AI, and I was shocked. … It copied me right down to “the feel of the eyelashes around here — that’s my drawing,” so you truly cannot tell it apart. (translated from Japanese)
Biography
Hirohiko Araki (born 1960) is one of Japan’s most influential manga artists, creator of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which he has drawn since 1987 across multiple generation-spanning “parts” that made his flamboyant, fashion-inflected style instantly recognizable. His work has been the subject of a Louvre exhibition, and his instructional books on manga craft are widely read.
Con artists, and a forgery of his own hand
In November 2024, in Hirohiko Araki’s New Manga Technique: How to Create a Villain (Shueisha), Araki reached for AI while cataloguing the “social evils” a story can draw its villains from — predicting a world in which the con artists who exploit the technology run rampant. He described a personal jolt: coming across an image he was sure he had drawn himself, only to learn it was AI-generated — the model had mimicked even the distinctive way he draws eyelashes. For an artist whose signature is his style, the counterfeit struck at something fundamental. The passage set off days of argument on Japanese social media over whether he was condemning generative AI itself or only the fraud it enables.
Art reflects its era, Araki wrote, so the arrival of this con-artist world in manga may be a sign that a con-artist society is coming — and that era’s “evil” will inevitably shape the manga that follows. CBR’s translation of the same chapter has him warning that, in a world of swindlers, laws favoring the swindlers could appear before anyone notices. In the book’s final chapter he is warmer about the tools themselves: digital technology is simply one of the tools for drawing manga, he writes, and as tools go he wants it to develop further and further — even as he means to keep drawing by hand himself, and expects, with some unease, that AI will keep shrinking the room left for his assistants. His comments joined a broader alarm among manga creators like Junji Ito over models trained on their art.
Quote sources
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/hirohiko-araki
