What Webtoon’s New AI Partnership Could Mean for Translators

When the webcomic platform Webtoon announced in April that it had partnered with the AI company Genies to create “character-driven fan experiences with digital avatars,” industry eyebrows were raised. As the company said at the time, the deal was part of a concerted effort by Webtoon to “invest in AI-powered tools and experiences that support creators and enhance how fans discover and engage with their favorite stories.”

Just what that would mean in practice became a little clearer last month, when Webtoon heralded two new initiatives built on AI: an AI-based auto-translation service for self-published webcomic creators, and an “interactive story-chat service” being piloted in South Korea called “byUS,” which allows users to generate and take part in new stories drawn from existing webcomics. PW spoke with Webtoon creators, translators, and company spokespeople to better understand what it all means, both for Webtoon and for the future of online comics.

Expanding universe or contracting market?

Even by online startup standards, the rise of Webtoon has been dizzying. Founded in South Korea in 2004, at a moment when no unified platform existed for the rapidly multiplying number of web-based independent comics, the company now comprises the largest share of the global webcomics market, with some 155 million monthly users.

Webtoon’s offerings are broadly divided into two categories. The vast majority are comics by independent creators who publish through the platform’s Canvas service, and earn revenue based on page views. A much smaller and more curated group are Webtoon Originals, published directly by Webtoon—many of them having graduated from self-published titles on Canvas.

Still, Webtoon’s most recent financial report showed some cause for concern. In August, Webtoon reported a net loss of $15.25 million in the second quarter of 2026 and a slowing growth rate, much of it due to a wider downturn in the Japanese digital comics market. That led some to speculate that the company’s new focus on AI was an effort to find new ways to monetize an uncertain market.

But the new initiatives are a result of more long-term thinking

“This is the quarter where we started to really evolve our platform and talk about all those interesting things we’re doing [with AI],” he told PW. “We’re using this advanced AI to move beyond simple reading on our app towards a different type of interactive fandom experience.”

Hume can’t attribute a single moment or rationale to Webtoon’s new initiatives, but instead paints both as the result of a much longer evolutionary process. “This is really something we’ve been thinking of for a long time,” Hume says. “We’ve been really open about this: we want to find new and interesting ways for people to build fandoms and grow them on our platform. And part of that means new types of formats and experiences based on these incredible stories that we can offer.”

Hume describes each of Webtoon’s new AI rollouts over the past two years—which include a Netflix-style recommendation system, an internal database system for the company, and now chatbots, translations, and AI avatars—as a natural expansion of creators’ properties rather than the exploitation of them. But for Webtoon creators themselves, it seems, this rosy future might also have a few shades of gray.

Suci Anggunisa Pertiwi has a personal stake when it comes to Webtoon’s AI-based auto-translations. Born in Indonesia, with a university degree in Korean language and culture, Pertiwi has worked as a translator since 2018, and currently freelances at Webtoon as a translator for Korean-Indonesian translations. On the subject of whether AI could ever take her place, Pertiwi takes a surprisingly nuanced view.

“I think AI will continue to change the translation industry, and translators will need to learn how to work with it,” she told PW.” But I don’t think this means that human translators will disappear.”

That same view is echoed by Zack Davisson, an American-born translator of manga who has won several Eisner and Bram Stoker awards for his translation work. Davisson told PW that AI still struggles to capture the nuances and context clues necessary for localizing East Asian comics into disparate languages and cultures.

“When I translate a work, I don’t translate the words—I translate the emotions of the piece,” Davisson says. He cited, as an example, Alexander Smith’s translation of the video game Final Fantasy X. At one point, a character says “thank you” in Japanese. “But knowing what the character was actually meaning,” Davisson noted, “Smith translated that into English as, ‘I love you.’ Because you don’t really say ‘I love you’ in Japanese. It’s just not a thing you do.”

As a result, both Davisson and Pertiwi believe human translators are still vital, if nothing as, a form of editorial revision and quality control. Indeed, that’s a reality Kiel Hume says Webtoon is aware of. The platform launched its AI auto-translate service shortly shutting down its older Fan Translation service, which allowed readers themselves to provide translations (on a fully volunteer basis) accessible by others—essentially crowdsourcing translation to the world at large. Both options necessitate safeguards and human monitoring, though Hume is open to the possibility that this may not be the case forever as algorithms improve.

“Right now we have a mechanism for creators to submit notes and feedback if they’re seeing things that they don’t think is translated as they intended it,” Hume says. “That’s something that we’ll likely iterate on these [AI] models for some time as they evolve.”

In the meantime, auto-translation remains limited (for now) to independent Canvas comics; translations of Webtoon Originals still receive the human touch.

Likewise, Hume emphasizes that both of Webtoon’s interactive AI features—Genies avatars (digital, interactive versions of webcomic characters drawn with AI in the style of the original comic) and byUs story-chats (chatbots that invite readers to participate in their own adventures in webcomics—involve close supervision by their respective comic creators

“These are things that are limited in their interactions to the story,” Hume says. “You can’t just have it do anything and talk about anything…. They must stay focused on a kind of story universe, which makes sure that characters and stories are going to progress in a way that creators can feel confident about.”

In the end, the argument is still mostly theoretical. Webtoon isn’t yet releasing data on the usage or adoption rate of their new AI initiatives, but Hume says that one webcomic, Woo Si-mok and Lee Ha-an’s Control+Alt+Resign, saw a 67% jump in readership a week after launching a byUs chatbot.

Currently, auto-translation is still in beta phase, with a tentative rollout planned for this fall. And byUs story-chats are now being piloted in the Korean market, with Japan to follow later this year. No date has yet been set for a public Genies launch.

None of this has stopped Webtoon’s competitors from using AI, or the absence of it, in their own marketing. The webcomic platform and retailer GlobalComix, for instance, has overtly positioned itself as a more “thoughtful” alternative to gung-ho AI adoption—even as they announced plans for their own use of AI localization and translation software in March of this year. Tapas, another prominent webcomic platform, has no formal AI policy in place, but drew PW’s attention to its current content guidelines, which prohibit AI-generated content (though the statement does not refer specifically to AI-assisted translations or chatbots, however).

But for all the Sturm und Drang, not every Webtoon creator is taking a passionate interest in AI debates. Ashiya Kisa is a Russian artist who publishes the series Yellow on Webtoon’s CANVAS platform. Asked by PWabout her opinion of Webtoon’s new AI programs, Kisa was bemused.

“I don’t really understand what this feature is about,” Kisa says. “I don’t think I care. I only want to draw the stories I want to tell and that’s enough for me.”