Colin Kaepernick Launches AI Startup to Empower Manga Creators

Colin Kaepernick Launches AI Company Focused on Creators

Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) company that aims to use the technology to help creators produce, distribute and merchandise their work. The company, Lumi Story AI, will provide AI tools to help creators produce their work and will handle the logistics of distribution and merchandising via its platform, according to a Wednesday (July 24) press release. "The platform empowers creators to work freely and independently, deciding when and how they want to collaborate with others," Kaepernick, who is founder and CEO of the firm, said in the release. "This independence is crucial for fostering a vibrant and diverse creative ecosystem." The firm raised $4 million in a seed round led by venture capital (VC) firm Seven Seven Six, per the release. Cristina Apple Georgoulakis, partner at Seven Seven Six, said in the release that recent technological advancements have made it possible for Lumi to realize its vision. "Colin and the Lumi team have gathered valuable insights from creators about their concerns and needs, including the desire for control over their work and financial sustainability," Georgoulakis said. "We believe Lumi is the perfect solution to a problem that has existed for decades." Lumi was inspired by Kaepernick's experience in building media and publishing companies in recent years, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Wednesday. Since the end of his NFL career, he has built out Kaepernick Publishing, created a youth education initiative called Know Your Rights Camp, and started a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that went into liquidation. It was reported in 2021 that a deal to buy a company with the SPAC fizzled out. Lumi aims to use its platform to help authors generate images to illustrate their books; to help illustrators add words to their images; and to help creators create and sell merchandise, according to the report. The company will first launch a beta version focused on comic books and plans to later add other offerings, per the report. "It allows us to help fill in the skill gaps of creators," Kaepernick said in the report. "We are now building in that direction to try to up that up and democratize storytelling."

Colin Kaepernick is launching an AI startup to empower manga creators - Fast Company

A new AI platform led by activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick aims to make it easier for anyone to publish -- and monetize -- their original stories as comics and manga. Lumi Story AI, unveiled in beta form Wednesday, includes AI-powered tools designed to let anyone with so much as an idea develop full-fledged stories, says Kaepernick, the company's founder and CEO. From the start, Lumi is designed to support people looking to create comic books, graphic novels, and manga with AI tools that can help flesh out characters conceptually and visually, draft and edit dialogue and text, and build full images for their work. "Our focus is on democratizing storytelling," Kaepernick says. Once creators are satisfied with their projects, they'll be able to publish and sell them through the Lumi platform, including digital and physical copies. Kaepernick, a published author and lifetime comic fan who also founded his own publishing company, says he hopes the AI assistance and publishing tools will help overcome some of the typical barriers and long production cycles traditionally inherent in getting work published and sold, enabling stories to be told that might otherwise go unheard.

Why Colin Kaepernick Is Starting an AI Company

When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice in 2016, he soon found himself out of a job, eventually moving onto other ventures in media and entertainment. Today, he's entering the AI industry by launching a project he says he hopes will allow others to bypass "gatekeeping:" an artificial intelligence platform called Lumi AI. The new subscription-based platform aims to provide tools for storytellers to create, illustrate, publish and monetize their ideas. The company has raised $4 million in funding led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, and its product went live today, July 24. In an interview with TIME, Kaepernick says this project can be viewed as an extension of his activism. "The majority of the world's stories never come to life. Most people don't have access or inroads to publishers or platforms -- or they may have a gap in their skillset that's a barrier for them to be able to create," he says. "We're going to see a whole new world of stories and perspectives." Kaepernick says that the idea for Lumi AI came out of challenges he faced while building his media company, Ra Vision Media, and his publishing company, Kaepernick Publishing, which included "long production timelines, high costs, and creators not having ownership over the work they create," he says. When ChatGPT, Dall-E, and other AI models broke through to the mainstream a couple years ago, Kaepernick started playing with the tools, even trying to use them to create a children's book. (Kaepernick penned a graphic novel, Change the Game, based on his high school experiences, last year.) Lumi aims to help independent creators forge hybrid written-illustrated stories, like comics, graphic novels, and manga. The platform is built "on top of foundational models," Kaepernick says -- although he declined to say which ones. (Foundational models are large, multi-purpose machine learning models like Chat-GPT.) Users interact with a chatbot to create a character, flesh out their backstory and traits, and build a narrative. Then they use an image-generation tool to illustrate the character and their journey. "You can go back and forth with your AI companion and test ideas, 'I want to change the ending,' or 'I want it to be more comedic or dramatic,'" he says. The users can then publish and distribute their stories right on the Lumi platform, order physical copies, and use AI tools to create and sell merchandise based on their IP. Kaepernick hopes that the platform will appeal to aspiring creators with gaps in their skill sets -- whether that means athletes who have a story and an audience but lack illustrating chops, or content creators who are having trouble monetizing their work. "We talked to hundreds of creators and asked what their pain points were," he says. "Some were trying to fundraise money to get projects off the ground. Others don't know how to actually enter the space, or don't have a pathway or have been rejected. And other creators didn't want to handle the logistics of fundraising and manufacturing and project management and distribution. We hope that this creates a path for people to actually thrive off of the creativity that they're bringing to the world." Read More: Colin Kaepernick, TIME Person of the Year 2017, The Short List Lumi AI will give creators full ownership of the works they create on the platform, Kaepernick says. When asked about how the company might deal with works that are created on Lumi but are alleged to have infringed on pre-existing copyrights, Kaepernick responded: "We're going to build on the foundational models, and we're going to let the legislators and everybody figure out what the laws and parameters are going to be." Kaepernick is well aware that there is significant mistrust and criticisms within creative industries about the rise of AI and its potential to take away jobs. Spike Lee, for instance, who signed on to direct an upcoming documentary about Kaepernick, said in a February interview that "the danger that AI could do to cinemas is nothing compared to what it could do to the world." Concerns about AI were also at the center of the Hollywood strikes last year. "I understand the concerns," Kaepernick says. "The creators have to be in the driver's seat. This is another tool for them to be able to hopefully create in a better, more effective way, and that gives them freedom to create stories that they wanted to but couldn't before." Kaepernick compares these new AI tools to the iPhone's impact on allowing a much larger swath of people to experiment with photography. "We saw a whole new world of photography and photos," he adds. "But that didn't eliminate traditional photographers or their craft and expertise. We look at this in a similar way." Kaepernick's team includes engineers formerly at Apple (Stefan Dasbach) and Reflex AI (Sam Fazel). A representative for Lumi declined to disclose the monthly price of the platform. Creators can begin signing up for the beta version on July 24.