(Seong Sang-min’s Cultural Reversal) Controversy between technology and creative labor, who should really take responsibility

Do you remember the time in 2016 when Go player Sedol Lee played several matches against AI (artificial intelligence) AlphaGo? After Lee Se-dol won one of the great countries, but AlphaGo won the other four rounds, countless words began pouring out in Korea that the development of AI and other technologies would threaten humans. Books such as ‘The Singularity Is Coming’, a future study book that predicted that humans would be put at a new inflection point due to the highly developed AI and other technologies, were popular. Of course, similar concerns did not exist before. It is relatively unknown in Korea, but in 1996, when the AI ​​’Deep Blue’ developed by IBM beat Garry Kasparov, then world chess champion from Russia, when the results of technology sometimes look as good or better than humans, such Concern predictions emerged.

In particular, the current situation in 2023 is unfolding in a more dramatic way. Shortly after AI specialized in image production and synthesis such as ‘Stable Diffusion’ appeared, even natural language synthesis AI services represented by ChatGPT appeared. there is. Even if it shows plausible results on the surface, if you look at the details, no matter how elaborately you enter the command, somewhere awkward or nonsensical results will easily appear.

However, I will focus on the fact that a ‘reasonable result’ has appeared, even though it is lacking in detail for some people. Anyway, not all drawings and writings end with a draft, and the final result comes out after several rounds of revisions. However, without going through the hands of the creator directly, through the large amount of big data and experience value already secured by AI, it is possible to create a draft that can be seen even if there are many corners to be touched. Not only that, but also various labor costs and remuneration paid to creators can be reduced. In particular, if it is not a creation by an individual unit, but a creation by a company unit such as an agency or studio, it is bound to be more appealing.

Controversy between the development of gradually emerging technology and creations

And the creation of AI for this ‘efficiency’ in a corner of creative labor is slowly coming to the fore. The first area that became a hot topic was the game area. Illustrations released by Rayark, a mid-sized Taiwanese game company that is world-renowned for rhythm games such as ‘Deemo’, ‘Cytus’, and ‘VOEZ’, are drawn by artists who belong to the company or have contracts with it. However, suspicions were raised that it was not done through AI. Like many paintings produced through AI, it looks pretty good on the outside, but when you look closely, it shows a little awkward results in terms of details such as drawing lines or painting colors.

In line with this, various opinions and arguments to support this began to pour in. While former Rayark employees have expressed their opinions about the possibility of using AI-generated illustrations, it has even been revealed that many former Rayark art team members have quit the company. In addition, coincidentally, at the end of 2022, when AI for creating pictures appeared in earnest, Rayark even included related technical positions as open recruitment targets. In his spare time, on May 10th, Rayark’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer) attended the ‘Google I/O’, a conference event for developers held by Google, and made a remark about the importance of AI and the need to introduce it in game development. What he did is getting attention again and getting more criticism from some.

Of course, Rayark has yet to officially acknowledge this. It is only a level of matching various circumstantial evidence to the problem of poor detail in the illustration released by Rayark. However, the case to be discussed right away is a case that deserves more attention in that the company acknowledged the use of AI services in the process of creating creations when the controversy arose, albeit in part.

The controversial work is the webtoon ‘King Knight Returns with the Gods’, based on the web novel of the same name, which began serialization on Naver Webtoon on May 22nd. The original work was serialized on the web novel platform ‘Munpia’, which was acquired by Naver Webtoon in 2021, and was a work that won the Excellence Award in a contest hosted by Munpia. The original work was quite popular, and although it is not produced directly at the Naver Webtoon level, but is produced through an external studio, it is a work that aroused expectations from some readers even before the main story came out in that the comic version is serialized on the parent company’s platform, Naver Webtoon. was also

However, expectations for the work immediately turned into suspicion and criticism, because the quality of the drawing was difficult to say even empty words, even for those who do not know AI. In particular, the figures and objects whose shape changes with each cut, the human body drawn without being properly shaped, and the extremely unnatural arrangement of the roof and windows further raised suspicions that this work was created through AI. Some have raised suspicions that the cartoon was taught to an AI to create illustrations for the work at the production studio level because it resembles the character design that appears in the Japanese TV animation ‘Jobless Transformation’ to some extent.

As the problem spread quickly, ‘Blue Line Studio’, which produced the work, hurriedly posted an explanation at the end of the first episode. Blueline Studios has at least partly acknowledged the use of AI in its production. However, as raised in the Internet community, etc., the line was drawn that AI was not used in all areas of webtoon production, but AI was used only in the editing process. At the same time, AI correction is deleted from the currently posted works and re-uploaded, and it is declared that AI work will not be used in works to be published in the future. The first episode of the work, which caused so much controversy, has been modified to a more plausible result, but the controversy is still not going away easily, such as image files that capture the problematic parts that have been spread all over the place.

Is the problem ‘technology’ or ‘subject to use technology’?

These two suspicions raised in the cultural arts industry are examples of AI, which is deeply related to creation, infiltrating at an industrial level at a very rapid pace. However, this case needs to be looked at more carefully. This is because the ‘consumer’ side is strongly exposed in the way suspicions are raised. This is especially true of the raising of problems and criticism of the webtoon ‘The King of Knights Who Returned with the Gods’. Many of the criticisms against the work were mainly because it was easily made by humans without drawing by hand and without any effort, and the quality of the result is not good. Because it is being raised, a new term ‘click’ appeared because the work would have been completed with just a few clicks required to activate the so-called AI program.

This kind of criticism does not go beyond the aspect of ‘product quality’. In both cases, would it have been so controversial if the company had very elaborately input instructions to AI or created an AI-generated image that was not easily noticed through post-correction work? It is quite possible that it passed without much controversy. In a sense, the point in this direction would have flowed in such a way as to find a clue called AI while looking for grounds to match the idea that ‘the appearance is not cool’, rather than being in the fact that the work was created through AI.

Rather, what should be noted is the ‘context’ in which AI was used in the work. Coincidentally, the two industries, game and webtoon, where suspicions have been raised this time, are cultural and artistic industries that have certain commonalities. All of them have a relatively short history of formation, and the work intensity is by no means small. The issue of treatment for creative workers or employees belonging to creative companies is also not low.

In the case of games, ‘crunch mode’, where you work all night to match the game release date or online update schedule, has become commonplace. In particular, even if the game itself is not updated significantly, the importance of communicating with active users through various promotional materials such as cartoons and illustrations through social media has increased. Now, planners are not programmers, but public relations/marketing or art team workers are also a constant burden of work. has become a situation in which Even before webtoons appeared, there were concerns about work intensity and the health of creative workers even when black and white comic strips were the mainstream, but in Korea, color coloring and weekly serialization became the norm, and work intensity exploded. Unlike publishing/page-view comics, which could set the upper limit of work on a page-by-page basis, webtoons are still in a situation where the physical upper limit and the upper limit of the work delivered through agreement are not clear.

Therefore, in both games and webtoons, there have been countless moves to reduce the work intensity and load somehow technically and instrumentally. In particular, in the case of Korean webtoons, the introduction of various work tools to somehow reduce the high work intensity was an area that received wide attention. Originally an architectural design program, ‘SketchUp’, which at some point became a highly used tool for webtoon background production, is a representative example. The font containing various sound effect fonts used in cartoons produced and distributed by the Korea Cartoon Image Promotion Agency is also in line with this context. Both tools certainly produce plausible results, but there is an aspect that leads to controversy over creations using AI in that they give an awkward feeling somewhere or give a feeling of imitation if they are not used wisely.

The introduction of these technologies has certainly been of some help in lowering the amount of work at the level of individual creators. However, in a situation where the workload itself does not change to a level where people can live like human beings, nor does there exist negotiations at the company level or industry level to set reasonable standards for workload, the introduction of technology itself is a tool that can fundamentally solve the problem. couldn’t be And in the current situation where it is possible to extract plausible primary results through AI, capital is being used as a means to create creations at a lower price and with less time. Paradoxically, without a solution to the structure in which creative workers or workers constantly suffer from various occupational safety and health problems, including overwork, the introduction of technology that creative workers themselves introduced for themselves becomes a tool for more efficient profit creation of capital. ended up

At that level, it is not the technology itself such as AI, or individual companies that use the technology in a ‘obvious way’, but the board itself that maintains the work environment and structure that promotes its use. maybe In that respect, what is needed now is not just criticism and elimination of creations using AI, but raising questions and changes to the board itself that drives it.

The context is a little different, but the reason why the ‘Writers Guild of America’ (or ‘Writers Guild of America’, WGA, Writers Guild of America West), a labor union of American videographers’ workers, has been on strike for about a month since May 2nd. It is also like this. There are many issues such as the minimum work fee or AI introduction in the screenplay, but the biggest issue is OTT. In the video industry, OTT has rapidly spread and become a new main media, but creative workers, including writers, are not receiving proper compensation in an environment where OTT has become popular, so they are strongly demanding the introduction of a new compensation system. What Korea needs right now is more than just talking about AI itself, isn’t it a strong action to change the industrial area that does not operate a proper labor and compensation system?