New Black Jack Chapter Will Be Written by AI

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Black Jack, Tezuka Productions will use ChatGPT-4 to create a new chapter. It will appear in Weekly Shonen Champion in Fall 2023. It will be a “collaborative effort” between humans and AI. [Thanks, Famitsu and Manga Mogura RE!]

This is not the first time that AI has been used for Osamu Tezuka’s work. In 2020, Tezuka Productions penned a “new Osamu Tezuka manga,” Paidon, using AI that learned from Tezuka’s works. The way it worked was that the AI program came up with the plot and character designs, and then humans drew the illustrations. This method will be how Tezuka Productions will write the new Black Jack chapter.

According to an interview between Famitsu and Tezuka Productions, Makoto Tezuka (partial owner of Tezuka Productions and son of Osamu Tezuka) said the AI program was still new with manga in 2020. Since AI technology has advanced so much in three years, Tezuka says it can now handle the more arduous task of creating a new Black Jack chapter. The difficulty comes from the sheer number of genres and chapters that Black Jack encompasses. But he believes that a new Black Jack chapter is what “a post-COVID world wants the most.”

Black Jack came out in the 1970s, focusing on the titular Black Jack. He is a very kind doctor who works for free. It was an episodic series with recurring characters but no particular plot. It spawned several adaptations, such as a live-action series and anime series, over the years.

The new AI Black Jack chapter will appear in Weekly Shonen Champion in Fall 2023. In other AI news in Japan, the Agency of Cultural Affairs ruled that AI art would be subject to copyright infringement laws due to how the learning process might use copyrighted works.