Japanese to harness AI to fight trillion-dollar manga and anime piracy problem

A Japanese cultural protection agency wants to use artificial intelligence to help tackle its manga and anime piracy problem.

The number of illegal manga and anime sites is on the rise. About 1,000 websites offer the popular genres for free, making it all the more difficult to identify them and take them down.

These websites offer free downloadable content, mainly graphic novels, a group of Japanese publishers said.

Japan’s Cultural Affairs Agency, an organization responsible for conserving the country’s cultural heritage, wants to create a program that detects pirated manga and anime using artificial intelligence (AI).

Those who watch and distribute Japan’s anime and manga without the creator's consent cost the industry billions of dollars every year. So, creating a program that would leverage AI to detect stolen materials may aid the country’s economy.

However, this pursuit doesn’t come without a cost, as the agency has asked for roughly 300 million yen ($2 million) to tackle the issue using AI.

The system will scrape sites and use image and text detection software to determine whether they’re hosting pirated manga novels and anime content.

The Japan Times, which reviewed a written statement from the agency, said that human moderators can “barely keep up” with the amount of illegal content circulating online. Therefore, automated systems must be put in place to help tackle the piracy epidemic.