Posted in: Comics | Tagged: ai, bytedance

Pinecone Moment A.I. Can "Create" 6 Page Comic Stories As Market Booms

The new A.I. app Pinecone Moment can "create" six page comic stories as the A.I. comics market continues to expand

Liang Chenqi, former executive of TikTok developer ByteDance, has raised an eight figure investment for a new AI Comics app called Pinecone Moment, to be developed by his new startup company Dongnian Yongxian. The app is intended to allow people to generate complete comic stories, typically four to six pages long, by combining images with text prompts. Currently, creating comic book stories has been extremely limited by a lack of consistency between panels, let alone pages, something that also saw people accusing Mike Deodato for using A.I. over.

Where the information is gathered to create these stories is not mentioned, but you can probably guess. They state that Pinecone Moment is to be an AI-powered user-generated content platform "focused on storytelling, emotional expression, and long-term user companionship" and that Pinecone Moment's core thesis "centres on recording and companionship, distinguishing it from utility-driven AI comics generators."

Those involved include CEO Liang, who previously led the 0-to-1 development of ByteDance's Flow "Catbox product. The CTO is a graduate of Zhejiang University's elite Chu Kochen Honors College, a former early ByteDance recommendation system lead, and a serial entrepreneur. And the company currently employs over 60 staff, recruited from ByteDance, Tencent, and other major tech firms.

This comes as reports are that the AI-generated comic book market is expanding, with North America leading and Asia-Pacific rapidly growing. Expected 2025 reports are that the market expanded from $1.15 billion in 2024 to $1.52 billion, and that further predictions indicate that the market will reach $4.6 billion by 2029.

The growth is attributed to the rising consumer interest in personalised storytelling, inclusive comic narratives, and the emergence of immersive reading formats. Basically giving the reader what they say they want rather than what they need, and putting you in the story, literally and figuratively. And this is being advanced by the development of text-to-image models, real-time rendering tools, multimodal storytelling techniques, interactive comic formats and an utter deadening of the soul. As if social media hadn't done enough in that regard, it is being cited as playing a critical role in this expansion, offering a platform for AI-generated comics to thrive and engage audiences with spoonfed slop.

Pocket Entertainment's launch of Pocket Toons in February 2025 kicked this off for last year, as did Dashtoon's partnership with the Korea Webtoon Industry Association. and don't blame the Koreans, North America held the largest market share in 2024, and significant players in this market include Adobe Inc., Canva Pty. Ltd., Superside AS, and Stability AI Ltd., among others. And of course it's the tariffs affecting media production costs and in response, media companies are turning to domestic suppliers emphasizing AI-driven content to maintain competitiveness. Comics, it seems, will be next. Our only hope is that this report was created by AI…

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