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If Osamu Tezuka were alive now, what kind of future would he depict?
- TEZUKA2020 VOL.1 -
February 26, 2020
The God of manga, Osamu Tezuka, taught us the joy of depicting dreams through technology. At the same time, he insisted that science should not leave humanity behind.
We now live in a world that Osamu Tezuka imagined.
If he was alive now, what would the future look like through his eyes?
KIOXIA, a company that uses technology to create excitement, boldly took on the unprecedented task of producing a “new work” of Tezuka that had never even been imagined before.
The first new work of Osamu Tezuka in 31 years was made possible by this project that called upon the wisdom of creators and engineers. It is titled PHAEDO.
Your heart will beat like never before.
What’s TEZUKA2020?
KIOXIA has established “Uplifting the world with ‘memory’” as its mission. The #FutureMemories campaign embodies KIOXIA’s commitment to changing the world by pursuing the possibilities of memory and creating new values and experiences. As the first project, TEZUKA2020, a collaboration between humans and AI, tried to reproduce Osamu Tezuka’s perspective to create a new manga work that would remain in people’s memories.
PHAEDO created from 3 challenges
Story
From 130 of Tezuka’s standalone manga stories, AI learned Tezuka’s style (= characteristics and artistry) to automatically generate draft plots and characters as the basic elements that make up a story. By using these “seeds of manga” as a source of inspiration, the creators were able to expand their ideas and developed a “new work” that had previously only been a dream.
Character
The co-creation between humans and AI also extended to the creation of characters. AI learned facial images of the characters extracted from manga works with meta data added to generate original facial images. From these face images, the creators designed the characters, including their clothes, in line with the story.
Drawing
The latest robot arm technology was used not only to create the draft of the new work, but also to ink pencil sketches to breathe life into manga characters with vivid personality. This is a project that pursues to the limit the possibilities of manga production through collaboration between humans and technology.
Future
The TEZUKA2020 project challenged the possibility of collaboration and fusion between the different industries of AI and creative. The new work PHAEDO, which came to fruition through the above 3 challenges of Story, Characters and Drawings that creators, researchers, and engineers took on, was a touchstone that opened up a new door for AI-based manga production.
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A collaboration between AI technology and manga artists, the Tezuka 2020 project led to the creation of a new manga in the style of legendary manga artist Osamu Tezuka. Kioxia’s Ryohei Orihara and NVIDIA’s Takeshi Izaki discuss their roles on the technical side of this exciting project.
In Tokyo in the year 2030, a man turns his back on the society where people are controlled by the advanced technology. His name is PHAEDO. He is a homeless who lost his memory, and determines to solve mysterious cases with a bird robot, Apollo.
AI has the ability to make a great leap of imagination in a positive sense. In creating the story of PHAEDO, AI's inspiration became the “seeds of the plot” and bore fruit as an overwhelming imagination like seen in Tezuka’s work.