Webtoons is creating their own AI products

[Aleksei]

So, yeah.
What are your thoughts about this?
Its almost impossible to hide from AI this days, but when one of the only sites to show webcomics do this, its kind of disheartening.

Remember to always protect your work, people! Use Glaze, Nightshade, or try to avoid AI if that's what you want. Also, if you have the strenght for another social media site -and you had enough of Meta, X, and Adobe stealing your work- give Cara a shot!

https://www.cbr.com/webtoon-controversial-ai-product-develop/

[KevinReijnders]

It primarily reads as Webtoon trying to create a solution for a problem they themselves created. They claim to want to reduce the workload for their creators, yet is is their organization that caused the workload in the first place with their ridiculous contracts.

Also, can I ask, in what universe are we calling this "High Quality?" The 2D render is completely off model, it's borderline a different character.

give Cara a shot!

Eeeeh, Cara is buckling underneath the weight of their own success. They're struggling to pay for their expenses and will likely have to make some very unpopular choices going forward if they want to continue existing. it's also more a portfolio site, rather than a full fledged social media.

If you haven't joined yet, I'd personally recommend waiting until they get their shit in order and leave the Beta stage before joining and adding more weight to their already collapsing system.

[BoomerZ]

I truly don't understand the push for this. Comics used to be about the art, the creative stories, and the fun of doing it. The stories fell off the cliff long ago. Most comics I see now have a simple setting/plot that won't hold a comic for more than a couple episodes so it just gets drawn out. The art now has become just tracing 3D models. Hence why everyone looks the same with the small head, long necks, and long fingers, plus the thousand yard stare into nothing as you can't trace emotion off a blank model. Is this the direction everyone wants to go? Got forbid anyone draws a background that matches the style of their characters but just drop in an asset that sticks out like a sore thumb. Webcomics are turning into youtube videos, where everyone can do it but you end up with mountains of trash. You can never find the good stuff as it's buried, with no chance of finding it. If the online comics aren't careful, they are going to make themselves irrelevant. On a final note, this isn't about making the creators lives easier, it's about making them cheaper. Why pay an artist that knows how to draw, knows color theory, knows how to write a plot, when you can trace and drop assets in. The "art" will go away, and this will become product.

[aquashark]

this is the exact reason i prefer producig and reading novels now, most manhwa, manga and comics are eather coppies or have very dull stories, sure you see some like lookism viral hit and tower of god but most other works that you could call good or above average are based on novels. (e.g. tbate, solo leveling, omnicient readers viewpoint and even a few isekai like that time i was reincarnated as a slime or mushoku tensei). Point is most novel based mangas and manhwas get more success from my eyes

[SagaHolmgaard]

A tool that makes a 3D-model out of your character sketch...? If you want 3D-models of your characters, you should hire a 3D artist. Then you can make your entire comic be 3D renders if that's a style you're into. Or you can post your characters and draw over it if that's what saves you time.

[thepenmonster]

It primarily reads as Webtoon trying to create a solution for a problem they themselves created. They claim to want to reduce the workload for their creators, yet is is their organization that caused the workload in the first place with their ridiculous contracts.

Correct. And you can expect the workloads to slowly ramp up now that "It's easy to make comics!"

They're struggling to pay for their expenses

If Cara's flood of new artists aren't willing to pony up the donations to keep the place running they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

[VibrantFox]

seeing the umpteenth company jump on the ai bandwagon is stressing in itself but i cant help but feel crazy looking at this when csp already has a 3d tool thats similar and uses it's own coding format???

like yeah it's definitely a problem that they themselves made and if anything i can just see whatever higher up patting themselves on the back for the "good job" they think they've done and even if it's not ai in the sense of genai what use does it have if they're still offering predatory contracts to feed their ip farm. not solving the root of the issue will just lead to more problems bubbling up later and at best this screws up their reputation for a bit and at worst we just keep repeating the same mistakes

as for alternate social media it's fine to join these platforms but it really is going to be a money where the mouth is situation in terms of actually helping them to stay afloat and alive in general. we saw the rise, fall and resurrection of sheezy, inkblot's still hanging in there but they've been transparent about their struggles much like cara as they express the burden of so many joining at once (just like every other panic migration) so i feel like it's gonna boil down to are folks looking for someplace to run to without anteing up or will they drop it for the next "safe haven" when it shows up

[SagaHolmgaard]

The CSP thing is so true lol. I can't really imagine the AI 3d model being more useful than the tools in clip.

I wonder how many social media and art platforms we're gonna see in the upcoming years and where people are going to end up. I think that people are both really willing to jump on the next new thing while also struggling with still being dependent on the mainstream social media. So the new place is getting swarmed, and the old place isn't seeing any real consequences for their poor decisions. And when the hype for the new place dies down, people go back to using the old thing, and the circle begins anew...

Also from my limited understanding of Cara, I of don't see it replacing Webtoon. It's like a social media/portfolio hybrid, not a comic reading platform, so idk how easy it would be to publish comics there in such a way that it's easy for readers to catch updates and stuff.

[VibrantFox]

it's definitely more of a portfolio platform initially created sometime after artstation (of all sites) decided that it would permit genai on it's platform so Cara was the response. If anything the driver of my faith in it's creators is that they're pushing things on the legal side in terms of major lawsuits one of which she just won so it's not just giving a safe space but also actively fighting for artists. I have similar liking for Inkblot both because of it's stances against genai, nfts and other grifts the techbros keep pushing but also that it's one among what feels like few safe spaces for marginalized creators

I obviously can't quite see these places replacing a giant like webtoon less due to growth and more because that's just not what they were made for but i do think that cara's layouts wouldn't be too bad for comics posting (in a portfolio sense) since it's got a multi image scroll format similar to what artstation has

If anything I'd say it's up to sites like Tapas and ComicFury to make their stances clear and then see who's willing to put trust in them (particularly Tapas) which they've done well so far so beyond that it's just a wait n see situation

[MK_Wizard]

I will try to say this as gently and politely as I can... Webtoons already has a problem where 90% of the popular content looks like it was made by the same artist all the way down to the comics even having the same gimmicks, themes and similar storylines. This AI push will make things even more homogenized and problematic while making unseen artists permanently invisible because we'll now be buried alive in comic made using AI generated images which anyone can do.

In short, all that Webtoons is doing is showing us the shovel it will use to dig its own grave.

[sams_cartoon_shack]

Why have a platform replace Webtoon when we were previously well-off with webcomic-aggregation sites where every series had its own domain?

[thepenmonster]

The planet became addicted to smartphones and social media was the needle. Webtoon and Tapas are modeled after that.

[Lensing]

The only way out is to go offline but that´s not what you want

[Humbug]

Google's current algorithm makes it difficult for small independent sites to appear on searches organically.

I used to have my own domain, but server costs were so much it just became a money sink. That's also another reason why people use platforms.

[thepenmonster]

Google's current algorithm makes it difficult for small independent sites to appear on searches organically.

Yup. You don't pay Google, you don't make to the first dozen or so pages. But it's not just Google's greed. Corporate marketing teams ruined how search engines work with their SEO schemes.

And with three whole generations now thinking the entire internet is just social media, TikTok and YouTube it all amounts to personal websites being nothing but money holes.