In fact, the 37-year-old has never drawn a comic by hand.

The publishing house behind the work, Shinchosha, believes that “Cyberpunk: Peach John” is the world’s first complete AI manga work. On sale in Japan from Thursday, it was illustrated using Midjourney, an online image generator that can produce detailed pictures based on users’ prompts.

To create the panels, Tokyo-based Rootport entered a string of text descriptions, which he then refined using trial and error, to create images that matched his storyline.

All the futuristic contraptions and creatures in “Cyberpunk: Peach John” were intricately rendered by Midjourney, a viral AI tool that has sent the art world into a spin, along with others such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2.

As Japan’s first fully AI-drawn manga, the work has raised questions over the threat technology could pose to jobs and copyright in the nation’s multibillion-dollar comic book industry.

It took the author, who goes by the pen name Rootport, just six weeks to finish the over-100-page manga, which would have taken a skilled artist a year to complete.

Midjourney was developed in the United States and soared to popularity worldwide after its launch last year.

Like other AI text-to-image generators, its fantastical, absurd and sometimes creepy inventions can be strikingly sophisticated, provoking soul-searching among artists.

The tools have also run into legal difficulties, with the London-based start-up behind Stable Diffusion facing lawsuits alleging the software scraped large amounts of copyrighted material from the web without permission.

Some Japanese lawmakers have raised concerns over artists’ rights, although experts say copyright infringements are unlikely if AI art is made using simple text prompts, with little human creativity.

According to cnn/ japantimes