Rootport

Rootport is the pen name of a Japanese science-fiction and manga writer who has never publicly revealed his face or legal name — by his own account, he has “zero” drawing talent. In March 2023 the major publisher Shinchosha released his Cyberpunk: Peach John, a full-color, 108-page retelling of the Momotaro folk tale in a neon future, billed as the world’s first fully AI-illustrated commercial manga.

Nine thousand images in six weeks

Working with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, Rootport generated roughly 9,000 candidate images to fill the book’s frames, patching hands and other artifacts with supplementary tools — finishing in about six weeks a volume he estimated would take a conventional mangaka more than a year. The stunt made global news, from CNN to the Guardian, and that September TIME named him to its inaugural TIME100 AI list as an “Innovator.”

The book drew fire from illustrators and readers who saw a threat to one of Japan’s proudest crafts, and even sympathetic critics noted the art’s inconsistent character faces. Rootport has been notably measured in reply: he argues AI still cannot interpret a story the way a human artist can, that hands, food, and animals still defeat it, and that for most manga artists the story they want to express should come first — technology being merely the means to express it.