In his words
It will become difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction, and there is no telling how far it will go. That kind of existence is frightening.
Biography
Junji Ito (born 1963) is Japan’s most celebrated living horror mangaka, the mind behind Uzumaki, Tomie, and Gyo — body-horror parables in which the mundane (a spiral, a beautiful girl, the smell of fish) curdles into cosmic dread. A multiple Eisner Award winner whose work has spawned anime and live-action adaptations worldwide, he spent decades inventing new fears. Then one found him.
The horror master’s horror
In an April 2023 interview with the Japanese site 4Gamer, widely reported by English-language outlets, Ito named AI replacing manga artists as one of his deepest fears — shuddering at the thought of future manga drawn by machines instead of people. His unease was characteristically precise: AI, he reasoned, cannot conceive anything truly original, and yet it might still someday produce artwork better than his. His stated hope was to keep reaching the unexpected — the thing you never knew was frightening — before the machine does.
He returned to the theme in a February 2025 interview with Asahi Shimbun’s Aera magazine, describing eerily plausible AI-generated videos — a polar bear playing with a baby, a woman stroking a shark — and worrying aloud that children will lose the ability to tell reality from fiction. It is a distinctly Ito-shaped fear: not a labor grievance but an ontological one, the world itself becoming an unreliable image.
Ito has filed no lawsuits and signed no manifestos; his opposition lives in interviews, delivered with the same quiet dread as his stories. He shares the apprehension of his countryman Hayao Miyazaki, though where Miyazaki thundered, Ito confesses — casting himself as a man in one of his own tales, watching the spiral tighten.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/junji-ito