The Rent a Girlfriend author Reiji Miyajima posted an AI illustration of Chizuru Ichinose on X, and the amount of unnecessary negative comments against him and his work has been insane. Please don’t get me wrong, I myself am against AI art being confused with real human effort and understand the negative sides that have been brought up ever since the AI boom started. However, I believe that what Reiji Miyajima posted did not warrant the reactions it got and is still getting. Here’s the illustration in question.
The message he wrote in the post reads: I recently started to become interested in AI, so I tried creating an illustration of Mizuhara by only training it on my drawings! Cute!
That’s it, that’s the tweet post. But the comments have been ranging from calling Rent a Girlfriend trash to calling Reiji Miyajima himself all sorts of things for using AI. To be fair, people have been criticizing his writing for years, mainly due to the protagonist Kazuma’s lack of character development. And that’s fine, but I don’t think insulting the man on a personal level is the right way to go about it.
The Rent a Girlfriend manga has released 35 volumes as of February 2024, and it has over 11 million copies in circulation. Clearly there is a demand for his work, and he is doing something right. If you don’t like it, it’s naturally fine to criticize it, but I think that feedback can still be delivered in a polite and respectful way. As of his AI illustration post, there have been comments that say this is expected from the Rent a Girlfriend author, that he must have been using AI for the manga for a while, that he might be planning to use AI now to draw faster, that he is a fraudulent artist, etc.
Those make no sense. First, he was transparent in his use of AI in this (and according to our knowledge, only) illustration. There is no reason to believe he won’t do that any time in the future when he uses AI. Second, he doesn’t even mention the manga in any way. It just seems like he tried out this ‘cool new’ AI thing for fun and thought the illustration was cute. Hell, if you’ve been following his work, you know Reiji Miyajima already has a great artstyle and must admit that even as the biggest hater of his writing. Here are some illustrations he posted on his X profile, all of which look a lot better than the AI one.
Third, he only trained the AI on his own illustrations. There is no escaping AI moving forward, but that point is definitely going to be one of the more important ones in the discussion. If it is ever to get widely accepted, I think that this will be the first step. He didn’t take someone else’s work, and I don’t think anyone has the right to complain about a person using their own drawings to play around with AI.
In regards to the comments claiming he’d start using AI for his manga. I seriously doubt any artist of a popular series can just start doing that on their own in the first place. If he actually does come to some agreement with Kodansha (or any other artist with another publisher) to start using AI to draw manga, I will (while still advocating polite and respectful negative feedback) at least be able to understand the criticism more.
In the end, I think people are using this AI illustration as an excuse to bash Reiji Miyajima because they dislike Rent a Girlfriend and that it’s unnecessary hate. I am not a fan of it either and personally believe it should have ended a while ago. However, I can understand that he learned what sells and can also appreciate the fact he capitalized on it without thinking he’s actually a bad person for it.
I’m not trying to preach something cliché love over hate here either. You can hate the story, you can hate Kazuya’s development, you can hate Mami, you can hate anything, but don’t hate Reiji Miyajima for things he didn’t even say. Again, I actually encourage expressing your dislike of AI in art, but please do it in a polite and respectful way wherever possible.
Source: Reiji Miyajima on X and the QRTS
©Reiji Miyajima, Kodansha
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