Homo Sapiens

Following the instructions on the webpage, he quickly logged onto the Dream Country Culture and Entertainment Company’s website and, sure enough, found that it was a subsidiary of the Homo Sapiens Company.

On Dream Country’s official website, there were various sections, including film and television, comics and animation, music, videos, literature, art, and publications.

In the comics and animation section, he found the Dream Country Comics sub-site.

After filling in his personal information and details, a moment later, a message appeared: [Congratulations, Mr. Luo Xuan. You have been granted a probationary contract with our company. Please use this link to download the exclusive employee app for Dream Country Comics.]

”I was approved this quickly?”

Luo Xuan then had a thought. ’The Homo Sapiens Company has hundreds of millions of employees. Their HR department must be massive.’

He clicked the link and downloaded the employee app provided by Dream Country Comics.

The app’s interface was very ordinary, and it was only about 0.3 GB in size. Luo Xuan followed the system’s guidance and quickly completed his identity registration.

He spent over twenty minutes tinkering with it.

He discovered that the app didn’t feel like work software at all. It was more like a chat application where Dream Country Comics employees could join group chats with each other, a bit like DingTalk.

The work interface, on the other hand, consisted of a settings page, a display frame, a materials library, and a draft library.

After finishing the new user tutorial, an incredulous expression appeared on Luo Xuan’s face. ”AI can already do this?”

He quickly typed ”an oil painting of myself sunbathing on a beach” into the settings page.

[Generating...]

Twenty seconds later, the information was sent to the Homo Sapiens Company’s supercomputing center located on the northern part of Luzon Island. This center was the dedicated AI art supercomputing center for Dream Country Comics.

The total computing power of the Dream Country Comics supercomputing center was 8,200 times that of the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, and it was connected to a massive database storing a vast amount of images, art materials, human models, and data on flora and fauna.

It was also paired with an incredibly powerful artificial intelligence management system.

Based on Luo Xuan’s settings, the supercomputing center’s AI system instantly produced 100 oil paintings of beaches.

[Generation complete. Please review...]

In the display frame on the left, 100 different beach oil paintings appeared one after another.

His lips felt dry as he carefully scrolled through them, one by one.

”Incredible...”

”The light and shadows... the proportion of the people to the scenery... the expressions are all so natural...”

”This technology is unbelievable...”

Still a bit unconvinced, Luo Xuan decided to try something more difficult. He wrote a short story in the settings interface.

The story was part of a comic he had conceptualized back in college. He had submitted it to several domestic comic companies, but not only was it rejected, his hand-drawn manuscript was also lost in the mail.

Relying on his excellent memory, Luo Xuan quickly recalled the comic’s content.

It was a story set in a future world. The protagonist, also named Luo Xuan, was a college student from a poor background who was cuckolded by his girlfriend, framed as a thief, and imprisoned for a long time.

After being released from prison, he returned to his hometown and was met with contempt from everyone. His mother had long since died of depression. Luo Xuan locked himself in his room, and then his brain mutated, granting him the superpower to enter the Mirror World.

What followed was a story of revenge, leveling up by fighting monsters, and ultimately becoming a great demon king.

He carefully wrote out the settings for the first three chapters before clicking ”Generate.”

Again, it took about forty seconds.

For chapter one, 100 storyboard panels, already laid out on pages, were turned directly into a compressed file and sent to Luo Xuan’s account inbox.

With trembling hands, he opened the compressed file.

An illustrated version of Luo Xuan appeared on the cover. He turned to the first page; it was a full-color comic in a style similar to Ito Junji’s.

Although there were some issues with the details, it wasn’t the AI’s fault. Rather, Luo Xuan’s own settings hadn’t been detailed enough, so the AI could only automatically fill in various background elements based on the scene.

Luo Xuan examined it very carefully.

Before he knew it, the sun had set.

But Luo Xuan seemed to have forgotten his hunger and exhaustion, his eyes filled with excitement.

Three chapters, 300 storyboard panels.

He spent more than five hours looking at them.

”Perfect, it’s absolutely perfect. With just a few secondary edits, it will be exactly the scene I imagined.” Luo Xuan picked up a bottle of ”otaku happy water” and took a big gulp.

”Ahh... HIC... The Homo Sapiens Company is truly a terrifying entity. This technology could wipe out the vast majority of traditional comic artists. No...”

Luo Xuan reconsidered. ’The AI can’t write its own plots. Comic artists still have a purpose; their job has just become more like writing a novel.’

’Wait a minute,’ Luo Xuan thought with another wry smile. ’Doesn’t that mean that the country’s novelists can also switch careers and become comic artists?’

No wonder the Homo Sapiens Company wasn’t afraid of them leaving after becoming famous. They had already dug a huge pit for them.

After all, the number of professional comic artists in Huaguo was definitely no match for the number of novelists.

Eventually, a large number of web novelists would surely charge into the comics industry, especially since some novels already had massive fan bases.

Web novelists were actually very conflicted about having their novels adapted into comics. On one hand, they were thrilled, but on the other, they worried that the artist’s illustrations wouldn’t match what they had imagined.

Now, with technology like the Dream Country Company’s, web novelists would definitely prefer to handle it themselves rather than letting someone else do it for them.

Of course, Luo Xuan still had a little confidence in himself.

This was because the app also had a professional materials library containing a lot of specialized art terminology, which would give formally trained art professionals a slight advantage in the early stages.

But it was only a slight one, because the materials library also contained all sorts of other material packs, with thousands of categories for things like clothing, internal organs, food, decorations, buildings, vehicles, and weapons.

These were all virtual images generated based on real-world objects.

For example, in the setting where Luo Xuan was on the beach, he could specifically define what shoes he was wearing. If he didn’t, the system would just assign him blue flip-flops based on the scene.

But if he specified that he was wearing a certain brand of Martin boots, the system would automatically match it.

The materials library was for beginners to look up assets, because the AI analyzed text. Therefore, the more precise the vocabulary used, the more accurate the generated image would be.

After all, the nouns for materials in the library were equivalent to the formal Latin names for plants and animals.

When it came to applying AI art, the New Humans were the most skilled. They could directly download the art materials library and precisely define every single detail. As long as a New Human had the patience, there was no scene the AI couldn’t draw.

Luo Xuan hurriedly boiled a box of frozen dumplings for dinner.

Then he threw himself back into the busy work of editing the comic.

While editing, he discovered more of the app’s functions, such as Synchronized Edit, Physics Background, Logic Parsing, and Built-in Materials.

Synchronized Edit meant that if he changed something on one page, the system would ask if he wanted to sync the change throughout the entire work, greatly improving editing efficiency.

Physics Background and Logic Parsing were mainly to avoid glaring logical inconsistencies.

For example, in a realistic setting, an ordinary person couldn’t run 100 meters in 9 seconds, nor could a car door block bullets from an AK.

The AI was basically saying, ”I refuse to let you cheat.”

Luo Xuan continued to explore the app while asking his team leader and a few colleagues questions.

「That night, at 10:20 p.m.」

The three chapters of the comic that Luo Xuan had finished editing were officially published on the Dream Country Comics platform under the title *Mirror Man*.

For this kind of AI comic, Luo Xuan held the copyright and adaptation rights, but all other rights belonged to the company. However, the company would give him a monthly bonus based on the comic’s sales.

If he could create a bestseller, the Homo Sapiens Company’s HR department would raise the employee level of these contract workers.

In fact, the probationary salary of 500 Jin per month was roughly equivalent to 7,500 Huaguo Yuan, based on the current value of the Jin.

Including other bonuses and subsidies, this income was enough to make a living.