Generative AI tools like Midjourney use machine learning algorithms trained on the artist’s images to generate images in minutes.
Street art depicting characters from Asterix in Brussels, Belgium. Photo: Getty Images
According to Gautier van Meerbeeck, editor-in-chief of Le Lombard, this has led to a “total rejection” of AI in the European comics industry.
His company publishes The Adventures of Tintin, a book about the intrepid boy reporter who is now almost 100 years old.
Created by Hergé, Tintin is known for his blonde bangs, baggy plus-four and trusty dog sidekick Snowy and is now considered a global industry icon.
“[AI-generated] “Art is created by stealing from artists,” van Meerbeck says, “so morally I can never get involved in that.”
Belgian cartoonist Georges-Prosper Remi (known as Hergé) works in his home in Brussels in 1975. Photo: Getty Images
Across the Atlantic, Disney caused controversy in June 2023 when it used AI-generated imagery in Marvel’s Secret Invasion, and the boom in generative AI has led to a flurry of lawsuits in the United States.
Prominent tech companies, from Microsoft-backed OpenAI to Meta Platforms, have been hit with copyright lawsuits from artists who claim AIs have profited from their work without permission or compensation.
European comics publishers are bracing for lawsuits as new EU rules on AI law come into force in mid-2025. The rules will force tech companies to be transparent about their training inputs, raising the possibility of copyright lawsuits.
“This is a huge thing for publishers,” said Quentin Deschanderières, legal adviser to the European Publishers Federation, explaining that those wanting to sue “need to know what’s behind the scenes.”
He said the new law could encourage tech companies to enter into licensing agreements to pay artists when their work is used to train generative AI models.
Amid growing scrutiny over copyright, several major tech companies that have trained their own AI with other companies’ work have already signed content licensing deals with media companies, including OpenAI with the Financial Times and Google with News Corp.
A still from the AI-generated opening of the Disney+ Marvel show “Secret Invasion.” Photo: Marvel
But some publishers and authors are afraid to “give up the keys to the kingdom” for fear of the market being flooded with AI-generated works, Deschandeliers explains.
Legal battles aside, artists are also wondering whether to embrace or reject these new tools.
Belgian cartoonist Marnix Verduin, known by his pen name NIX, describes himself as a computer engineer who “became a cartoonist by accident.” He jokes that he dreams of replacing himself and spending more time at the beach, so he decided to train a generative algorithm with his own cartoons.
But his fellow cartoonists didn’t find it all that funny, especially when OpenAI’s generative AI model Dall-E came out in 2021. It was a groundbreaking moment.
“I was shocked by how big an impact it had,” Verduin said. “I thought at the time that a lot of people would be unable to get a job in the future.”
Mural in Brussels, Belgium. Photo: Shutterstock
According to European Commission business statistics, the cultural sector will employ 7.7 million people in Europe in 2022, with net sales of around 448 billion euros ($480 billion) in 2021.
Nix believes that using AI to take on low-skill, repetitive tasks is a “gradual disruptive change” that is necessary to keep up with competition from major manga companies in Japan and the United States.
But recent art school graduates are outraged that machines are now taking the entry-level jobs they once might have had.
“AI is cheap, it’s fast, it doesn’t need humans, and it will ruin every artistic endeavor in the industry,” says Sarah Vanderhagen, a 24-year-old Belgian woman who describes how an encounter with AI during an internship left her so devastated that she was forced to rethink her options and switch to a degree in archaeology.
Street art in Brussels. Photo: Shutterstock
Now working on comic books in her spare time, she believes AI is a false shortcut driven by algorithms that will never match an artist’s ability to translate emotion onto paper – a point both artists and publishers agree on.
“AI-generated imagery is immediately recognizable,” says van Meerbeck, who believes comics are safe for now, as their storylines, text and images are too complex for current generative AI to create.
For NIX, humans are still the bosses and AI is just a tool.
“It’s just a collection of ideas stolen from somebody. Mathematics is [of AI, and] Mathematics has no soul.”
