Z-Machine Matter

Like a lot of people who keep reading about AI, color me skeptical. It seems like AI is always ten years away and I’ve been reading that since the 1980s. But in 2022, it feels like we’re on the verge of a breakthrough in text and image generation. ChatGPT is scary good. And the images generated by DALL-E and other systems are impressive. With that in mind, I decided to try out a few of the image generation programs to see whether they could produce content suitable for a graphic novel adaptation of my novel The Man from Mittelwerk.

I tried several different programs, but the only one that seemed to fit with the graphic novel illustration style was Midjourney. And even then, sometimes the images come out quite strange. But with some trial and error I was able to produce the first ten pages of a graphic novel adaptation. As far as I can tell, this could be the first AI-generated graphic novel. I just have to finish the next 118 pages.

Here are a few samples. What do you think?

• The Man from Mittelwerk: Official Site, Amazon, Audible