AI is the scourge of the art world. And while it’s bad for independent artists and owners of copyrighted works in the United States, it’s a whole ‘nother thing in Japan. Japan is known for a lot of things but one thing that it exports at massive rates is the anime genre. For decades Japanese anime has dominated the world and brings in millions and millions of dollars back into the country every year.
Various anime shows and movies have become culturally ingrained into Japanese zeitgeist with many being considered national treasures. Anime is a lucrative business with merchandise sales hitting astronomical numbers both in and outside of Japan. With this being the case the country takes copyright very seriously and lacks any ‘fair use’ statute for any copyrighted work.
There is also another side of the anime world in Japan that also makes a lot of money, although one that might be considered obscene but most standards. Anime porn and lewd content is huge in Japan, with entire series, shows, games, and more being dedicated to the adult animated space. Even something as well known and loved as Ghost in the Shell was created by as porn by a porn artist who is still creating to this day.
I bring this up because in the middle there has always been this known yet often overlooked aspect of those two worlds. You see, there is a lot of money to be made selling adult art, books, and more based on popular anime characters. This has been something done, shared, and sold in the backrooms of manga shops, on the convention circuit, and through online sharing of works.
But, as you might imagine, anime creators and studios aren’t all that keen on this stuff being out there for a number of obvious reasons. But thanks to the rise of AI it’s getting insanely easy to create pornographic art of anime characters quickly and without any work involved. And so the proliferation of anime porn is bigger than ever and costing studios money and reputation in some cases.
Enter the legendarily insane Evanagelion anime series. This mecha series is pure insanity and well loved for its style, story, and especially characters. And it’s those characters, all young teens, that NTV states has led to the arrest of two men for violating Japanese copyright by creating AI art of the main characters in, let’s just say, compromising positions.
This dynamic duo would use AI prompts to generate the young girls from the series and other popular anime doing things you’d never tell your mother about. Now, it’s one thing to create bad anime porn for fun, even going as far as sharing it online with other deviants, but it’s quite another thing to sell that art for profit.
And that’s the case here as the two men were selling this AI generated art online on various auction sites. Authorities believe that the men made somewhere around 15 million yen (nearly $100,000 American greenbacks) over the course of a single year.
And as someone who has recently been to an anime convention, I can safely say that tons of AI generated content is being sold at these shows, even when there are strict rules against it. Artists have enough time trying to create and sell their work at these shows. Now they also have to be the copyright police also in order to keep the bad actors out.
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