Kuaikan Accelerates AIGC Layout: Building an AI-Integrated Full-Process Digital Workspace for Assisted Creation
-
On July 16, the 'Comics Reborn' 2023 Kuaikan Chinese Comics Conference was held at the second Kuaikan Comics Park KKWORLD 2023 in Guangzhou. In response to the current economic climate, Kuaikan unveiled a strategy focused on high-quality, professional, and global content hits, aiming to continuously promote the emergence of premium comic works. The company also released a summer lineup featuring 126 IPs.
At the conference, Chen Anne, founder and CEO of Kuaikan, delivered a keynote speech titled 'Comics Reborn,' sharing her insights on the current state and future of China's comic industry. Chen Anne stated, 'What we are experiencing now is likely the most challenging period since the birth of webcomics. However, hope often emerges from the trough, and I believe China's animation industry is still in its infancy with abundant opportunities. Kuaikan hopes to work with creators to patiently refine content, expand the market, and achieve mutual prosperity.'
For this reason, Kuaikan proposed implementing new content, new business models, and new technologies to enable high-quality comic content to emerge more efficiently in the market. This will accelerate the birth of Chinese comic IPs with global influence and further unleash the commercial value of comics as a cultural medium, thereby propelling the Chinese comic industry into a new phase of development.
Beyond refining works and exploring new markets, Kuaikan also expressed its commitment to empowering the industry with new technologies, showcasing its vision and confidence at the conference. This marks the first time Kuaikan has shared its AIGC (AI-generated content) strategy since announcing the establishment of its AIGC division in April this year.
Since its founding in 2014, Kuaikan has consistently driven innovation in the comic industry, pioneering the mainstream adoption of webtoons, leading the industry into the mobile internet era, and accelerating the video adaptation of comics through large-scale releases of 'comic dramas.'
As early as 2019, Kuaikan first announced its 'Magic Brush' project, forming strategic partnerships with Harbin Institute of Technology and Southern University of Science and Technology to explore ways to integrate AI with the comic industry. This includes developing AI-assisted tools for creators, such as automatic coloring, style transfer, and line art optimization. Kuaikan has also applied AI capabilities extensively in scenarios like intelligent conversion of page comics to webtoons, automated comic reading, and smart bullet comments within its app to enhance user experience.
With the rapid development of text-to-image and large language models over the past year, AIGC technology has experienced an explosion. As an industry innovator, Kuaikan hopes comic creators can also benefit from this trend.
'After continuous refinement and deep consideration, we believe AIGC can provide industry value in two dimensions: enhancing user experience and expanding content production capacity,' said Li Chao, Kuaikan's AI Technology Sharing Officer, at the conference. Specifically, user experience encompasses reading, auditory, and visual experiences, while expanding production capacity involves assisting creators in improving content creation efficiency. Both can be achieved by introducing new technologies, ultimately creating new commercial value for the industry.
Leveraging years of experience in comic incubation, creation, operation, and development, as well as its accumulated AI research, Kuaikan has now officially entered a new phase of building an AIGC capability platform based on multimodal generative models and has begun exploring specific implementation paths.
For example, Kuaikan's AI-integrated full-process digital workspace for assisted creation will help creators find inspiration, assist with scripting, and enable features like automatic coloring, character outfit changes, personalized voice creation for characters, facial animations to 'bring characters to life,' head/body rotation, and breathing details. Starting from text, image, audio, and video models, the platform aims to free creators from mundane tasks, boost productivity, and enhance the efficiency of comic promotion and operations through richer experiences.
Kuaikan believes that with the implementation of AIGC, comics will significantly improve their competitiveness amid the increasingly diverse forms of entertainment available today. This is the new landscape Kuaikan hopes to bring to the industry through new technologies.