Research Publications
(Thesis Paper). The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the webtoon content creation industry introduces a complex landscape that holds both significant opportunities and notable challenges. This research, comprising two distinct studies, explores the psycho-social and thematic dimensions of attitudes towards AI in the context of webtoon content creation. Study 1 adopts a quantitative approach, grounded in self-determination theory (SDT), to examine the attitudes of South Korean young adults aged 18-34 years. The results indicate that a sense of relatedness plays a crucial role in shaping positive attitudes toward AI. Specifically, individuals who feel a stronger connection to emerging technologies tend to have more favorable views of AI. The study also finds that AI is perceived more positively in certain industries, such as gaming, education, e-learning, and healthcare, compared to its application in webtoon content creation. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of cross-national and cross-cultural research, given the variability of attitudes across different cultural contexts. Study 2 presents a qualitative thematic analysis that contrasts the perspectives of webtoon artists with those of non-webtoon artists. Webtoon creators generally exhibit optimism regarding AI’s potential to enhance productivity and efficiency. However, they express concerns over issues such as copyright, the current limitations of AI technologies, and the necessity for clear regulatory frameworks. Both studies collectively underscore the need for continued research and policy development to address the evolving dynamics of AI integration in the entertainment industry. Ultimately, the research stresses the importance of understanding and addressing the diverse attitudes and variables influencing AI adoption, to ensure its responsible and effective application in webtoon content creation.
Individuals looking to utilize AI image generation technologies to aid in creative content generation, such as anime or webtoon artists, may struggle to use new state-of-the-art text-to-image generators due to the lack of familiarity of prompt engineering. This paper explores the possibility of using models that have inherent image-to-text capacities like CLIP (ViT-L), CLIP (ViT-H), DeepDanbooru, GPT-4, and Gemini 1.5 pro, to automatically generate prompts that produce high-quality single-character images, which will help to streamline the creative content process for character image production during the character ideation phase. We employed image evaluation metrics like CLIP image-to-image (CLIPI-I), CLIP text-to-image (CLIPT-I), Contrastive Character Image Pretraining (CCIP), Bilingual Evaluation Understudy Score (BLEU), and ImageReward to compute quantitative measures to compare images representing CivitAI models to images produced by prompts that were automatically generated by different image-to-text generators. We found that the image-to-text generators’ CLIPI-I scores were not statistically significant from one another, which means that the images were visually similar to each other. However, from the Bleu scores we found that the textual prompts were dissimilar between image-to-text generators. This means that visually similar images can be generated by different, but semantically similar tokens. We also found that most of the existing image evaluation metrics are not satisfactory to reflect the perceived preference of humans in their subjective ratings for images.
Mental health problems are prevalent issues in modern society. While psychological counseling has been a traditional solution, it faces such barriers as negative societal perceptions and limited accessibility. To overcome these, researchers have explored remote counseling via video/voice calls. Despite its advantages of accessibility, convenience, and anonymity, the lack of personal interaction continues to be a drawback. This study investigates the feasibility of using an augmented reality (AR) mask in remote counseling and whether it could increase the level of self-disclosure-which is often used to measure the effectiveness of counseling-while maintaining anonymity. We conducted a controlled experiment and a qualitative user study to assess the effects of AR masks on counselees’ level of self-disclosure during remote counseling. The results suggest that AR masks can increase this level more effectively for people with a low disposition for self-disclosure.
Healthy aging in a broader perspective entails the multidimensional processes of lifelong learning and personal development aimed at accomplishing autonomy and independence for elderly people. Thus, it requires the balance of the interactions between the various dimensions in the lives of older adults from physical health, to independence and autonomy in activities of daily living, and to social involvement. The present study identifies and discusses various important factors including physical, psychological, and societal that can promote healthy aging. Based on the premises of such factors, potential changes in public policy aimed at enhancing the mobility of older adults as well as encouraging positive behavioral changes in the lifestyles of older individuals were proposed to advance the agenda of healthy aging.