AI Artist Carlo, First in Korea to Feature on a Magazine Cover

[Asia Economy Reporter Yuri Choi] For the first time in Korea, an artificial intelligence (AI) artist's work adorned a magazine cover.

Kakao Brain announced on the 31st that it collaborated with AI and big data specialized company Vibe Company to participate in the cover production of the February issue of the Korean edition of the global American economic magazine Fortune Korea.

Kakao Brain and Vibe Company planned this collaboration to make the AI artist a more familiar presence. They converted the face of the AI artist, as imagined by people through big data, into text, and the AI artist then drew it as an image.

For the cover production, Vibe Company collected keywords referring to ‘AI that draws pictures’ from internet spaces such as blogs, Twitter, and online communities, extracting a total of 56 related words. Kakao Brain concretized and refined these related words to create prompts, and the AI ‘Karlo’ generated images based on them. The February issue of Fortune Korea featuring Karlo’s work is currently available at both online and offline bookstores.

The AI artist ‘Karlo,’ which generates images based on text prompts, has been trained on a text-image dataset of 180 million images. Based on the understood context, Karlo creates unique images in various painting styles and techniques. Recently, Karlo debuted as an artist and held an exhibition composed of works capturing moments through Karlo’s perspective.

Kim Il-du, CEO of Kakao Brain, said, “The collaboration with Vibe Company and Fortune Korea was a great opportunity to demonstrate the limitless potential uses of AI,” adding, “We will continue to discover use cases for Karlo through various collaborations and contribute to increasing public understanding of AI.”