Colin Kaepernick, former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, has raised $4 million in investments for Lumi, a new AI-based platform for publishing comics and graphic novels. Seven Seven Six led the seed round alongside Kapor Capital and Impellent Ventures, angel investors Mariam Naficy (founder of Minted), David Sze, Chamillionaire, and tech execs from Meta, Anthropic, ContextualAI, Sleeper, Pave, and more.
Lumi is intended to "empower" comic book creators by "providing them with the tools needed to independently create, publish, and merchandise their stories both digitally and physically." And that "The company plans to focus energy on comic book and graphic-novel creators first, a market with the need for multiple creative skill sets." And that "Lumi is on a mission to democratize storytelling by providing creators with the tools to independently create, publish, and merchandise their stories" and that "Lumi leverages advanced AI technology to enhance the creative process and ensure diverse and authentic stories shape our future."
Oh, joy. This must be a definition of "authentic" that I was previously unaware of.
A follow-up post summarised the reactions from comic book creators (summary: it isn't good), including at least one who was asked their advice early on in the process:
Khary Randolph: To be clear, I was one of a number of artists that had meetings with Colin a few months ago. He told me broadly what his AI platform was about. He mentioned that it was about removing "gatekeepers" and how he wanted to benefit people from underserved walks of life. I told him that while I was a fan of his, I couldn't support this because those "gatekeepers" were people like me who had put our blood, sweat and tears into our craft. Hard work, a pencil, and paper is all you need to make comics. I let him that his product was going to hurt us longterm. So if anyone is asking whether Colin Kaepernick is aware of the misgivings artists have with AI, please believe that he has been made aware. And I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who did so.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. If it hasn't been trained on works that were scraped off the Internet but on paid-for works, that's good.
I don't like the quote about gatekeeping though. It sounds a lot like the same people who are against student loan and medical debt forgiveness.
Yes, you worked hard to get where you are, so everyone must put themselves through the same thing?
Would it be better if we leave ved in a world where people could spend their pursuing what they love to do? Yes. We're not in that world.
Plus, there seems to be a lack of detail on how the whole thing is going to work.
Issue is, you need to train it on a large number of artset to get the basics working, far beyond what public domain could guarantee, plus AI is usually sold as the replacement of artists, usually paired with the line "it should have been only a hobby a person does on the weekends".