"MTB the way I like it" : Ilan Manouach puts an AI to work (…) – ActuaBD

Can a comic be created by an artificial intelligence? Ilan Manouach bet it was possible. The BD Cul collection allowed him to prove it. The one who is a great connoisseur of comics and is interested in how technological advances can influence artistic creation, found an ideal playing field there.

Mountain biking the way I like it © Ilan Manouach / Le Monte-en-l’air 2022

To get hold of the almost one hundred and fifty pornographic pages of the twenty-ninth volume of BD Cul, Ilan Manouach used an AI developed by Open AI, a company co-founded by magnate Elon Musk and which aims to “promote and develop artificial intelligence with a human face that will benefit all mankind” [1]. This artificial intelligence, named GPT-2, is capable of writing press articles [2] and write works of fiction. GPT-2 generates texts from a bank of words that is provided in advance, associating the terms in an apparently logical way.

Enough to store dozens of more or less realistic dialogues. Associated with images generated by 3D drawing software, these texts gave rise to short pornographic stories in which all the clichés of the genre are present. One or two pages at a time, in a few boxes, an ass scene is “unfolded” as coldly as possible.

Mountain biking the way I like it © Ilan Manouach / Le Monte-en-l’air 2022

The result leaves doubtful. Nothing out of the ordinary for an essentially disappointing exercise. Unless you have very specific desires, The Mountain Bike As I Like It will not arouse any sexual arousal. The dialogues, undoubtedly grammatically correct, are heavy and abstruse, often absurd, without eroticism or humor. As for the drawings, they are scary. Empty-eyed beings rub shoulders with monstrous, grimacing, barely human figures. The few shots that show sexual attributes – we hardly want to use a more poetic expression – are disgusting. The whole arouses, after about thirty pages, a dull anguish that becomes more acute as the reading progresses.

Mountain biking the way I like it © Ilan Manouach / Le Monte-en-l’air 2022

Is it a failure? We can doubt it. It’s a safe bet that Ilan Manouach wasn’t looking to create an erotic masterpiece or even an old-fashioned porn comic worthy of what was being sold at train stations and newsstands a few decades ago. The mountain bike as I like it will be the least horny BD Cul volume of the entire collection.

What interest then? If it was about showing that artificial intelligence is already capable of supplanting artists, we are halfway there. The AI ​​manages to put the words and strokes together to achieve a result close to what a human being would do. But it fails, at least not yet, to make sense, to arouse emotions or feelings. It’s probably just a matter of time. It is possible that the full potential of GPT-2 has not been exploited. And a new, even more powerful and efficient AI is currently being developed by Open AI.

Finally, Le VTT comme je l’aime acts above all as a revealer of what pornography is very often, and precisely what the Cul BD collection does not want to reproduce. The banality of faces to turn them into monstrosities, the artificiality of (in-)human relationships, the meaning reduced to its simplest expression: porn is above all an industry made to generate the maximum profit with the minimum of means, everything the more so in the age of the internet and the craze for “amateur” porn. Artificial intelligence reminds us, obviously without moralistic bias, that human intelligence is not always very bright.

Mountain biking the way I like it © Ilan Manouach / Le Monte-en-l’air 2022