At a time when artificial intelligence or AI has made its way into different fields, French and Indian authors Laurent Daudet and Appupen have come up with a graphic novel, Dream Machine – AI and the Real World, based on this very technology. Partly created using generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, the novel is set in AI land and features the character Super Hugo who dreams of immortality and has the power to fly, much to the delight of superhero fanatics.
The story revolves around Hugo, founder of an AI start-up, being approached by a giant digital conglomerate, his dilemmas, and urge to be ethically responsible.
So, does the novel project AI as infallible? Or does it answer the anxieties over AI – people losing jobs, manipulative usage? No. Rather, the text-rich graphic novel with a dystopian theme is an attempt by Daudet and Appupen to educate the masses about the path-breaking technology itself. And it all started when the duo met in Angouleme, Paris during a comics festival and engaged in a discussion on the innovation.
The novel is set in AI land and features the character Super Hugo who dreams of immortality and has the power to fly, much to the delight of superhero fanatics. (Source: Appupen)
In the novel, one can find a lot of real-life instances and events that unfolded during the launch of AI technology. Be it the initial euphoria, ChatGPT clocking one billion users in a day, fears over AI’s usage in war or the threat to democracy, the novel is replete with real incidents. In fact, the characters in the novel are based on the authors themselves – Hugo being Daudet and Appupen a graphic designer.
For a reader completely unversed in AI, the novel gives clarity about artificial intelligence-based tools, along with technical details – interspersed with plenty of ‘Super Hugo’ moments. “When you first use ChatGPT, you may think that there is magic in it. So, we wanted to bust quite a few myths. We wanted to let people know it is not magic, but just pure statistical and mathematical computations,” Daudet told indianexpress.com in an online interview.
“We wanted to make it relatable to people. We are telling a story which has to be taken seriously. People don’t really absorb the technical elements and they remember how things unfolded. When we bring in real-life situations and even incidents that already occurred, people will find it relatable. They might think that in future it may happen to them as well,” Appupen said.
In the novel, one can find a lot of real-life instances and events that unfolded during the launch of AI technology. (Source: Appupen)
Asked about AI’s creativity and its influence on arts, Appupen said, “The source of content with which AI gets trained poses challenges to the field of arts. One needs to know if the content is taken from the internet and if there are any copyright issues. I see AI as a tool which churns things out faster and cheaper.”
‘Have not given any creative freedom to AI’
“As a creative person, I am driven by the joy of writing or drawing. But this is something which is trying to get into my area of joy. We have not given any creative freedom to AI. It should also be noted that AI is good for research and people are using it for political commentary as well. So, why not leverage the technology to disseminate information to a wider public? We stumble upon a lot of memes on social media and those are also recreated. We just have to be careful how to use it,” Appupen said.
Even though the novel, which runs into 155 pages, was partly created using AI models, its development was a cumbersome, time-consuming process for the authors. Bengaluru-based Appupen, who is also known for his comics laced with political commentary, drew the images for a large portion of the work. The images were later used to train the AI models.
A physics professor at Paris Cité University, Laurent Daudet was fascinated by the technology and co-founded LightOn, a Paris-based start-up that develops large language models, the new generation of AI, in 2016. (Source: Laurent Daudet)
“Laurent did most of the work. He had to feed my drawings to the AI, cut out the characters like Hugo, Han, and the (background) settings, and inform the tool. We wanted it to be original and not generated. Otherwise, it could also pose copyright issues during publishing. One cannot publish AI-generated art in the US,” Appupen said, referring to works that are purely AI creations.
Laurent Daudet and Appupen at Midland Book Shop in New Delhi (Source: midlandbooksofficial/Instagram)
Appupen also brought political commentary into the novel as the character Hugo talks to a graphic artist about journalists, politicians being attacked in India and dissenters being silenced. Appupen said that since he lives in India, he knows the scenario better and it is always best to write about what you really know. “Otherwise, in every part of the world, one can see consolidation of power in fewer hands. A similar trend can also be seen in the field of AI.”
Appupen, the creator of the mythical world of Halahala, published his first comic book Moonward in 2009. He was the artist-in-residence at the comics festival in Angouleme in 2021.
A physics professor at Paris Cité University, Daudet was fascinated by the technology and co-founded LightOn, a Paris-based start-up that develops large language models, the new generation of AI, in 2016. Elaborating about it, he said, “One cannot really predict the future of this fast-changing technology. In certain sectors like customer support, AI has already impacted jobs. Meanwhile, in the field of science, AI has a positive impact, such as in the discovery of materials.”
“We should educate people about the technology, its limitations and how it is made. It does not have any notion of truth or fairness and there should be regulations,” Daudet said. While efforts are underway to print the novel in French, the two also plan to bring out a Bengali version.