A lot of fantastical claims made in this article with little citation.
I definitely don’t think the author is wrong here. It is very likely AI animation tools will have a huge impact on the industry.
I have friends who work in animation and illustration professionally. Based off their predictions, the truth is likely far more mundane. These AI models will likely just become tools that automate or simplify existing animation workflows for larger projects. This would definitely result in less labor needed for any given project.
For smaller projects. You might see folks use AI for the entire thing
> “the AI art movement is already causing a sizeable reduction in artist commissions, and that effect will soon trickle down into B2B and wider world.”
This line specifically made me lose confidence in the author’s ability to predict the future. Cursory Google searches return nothing. This is also a very difficult thing to measure at a population level. In my friend group of illustrators (which is a very small sample of the population) all of them have used TikTok and seen their commissions drastically increase in the last few months. That doesn’t mean ALL artists are making more money though. Neither does a few mediocre artists losing commissions due to AI either.
>A lot of fantastical claims made in this article with little citation.
Not everything comes with a citation. Things first happen, then get studied, even if all the signs are there.
(Also, 'little citation' my ass. The post has links to video animation AI models, studios that already do this thing, papers and relevant technologies, etc. And it's just a post, not an exhausting monography on the subject)
>I have friends who work in animation and illustration professionally. Based off their predictions, the truth is likely far more mundane.
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" as the saying goes.
The change will not be driven by animators, but by people hiring animators that decide to cut costs by not hiring them.
Subpar results wont be a problem, if they're still good enough. There will be people helping and people touching up the end results, but half or less of what there are now...
I.e.: " These AI models will likely just become tools that automate or simplify existing animation workflows for larger projects. This would definitely result in less labor needed for any given project."
Yes, but much more dramatically so, to the point that there will big loss of jobs in the industry.
As software has become easier and faster to write, the demand for it has only increased, and salaries have gotten higher and higher.
I see no reason this couldn’t happen for animation. Studios demand more immersive, interactive experiences that require more and more detail. More animated content is generated. Every marketing team now needs 3D animators to make social media content, etc.
This seems like the logical progression and doesn’t necessarily result in a loss of jobs.
In a world where everyone is basically always consuming content I don’t really see this as a hard cap. Even if you’re not mindlessly scrolling through social media or watching Netflix, you still might be watching tutorials for work, or talking on slack, where we already use gifs and emojis. It’s definitely possible that animation eats the world, it would just have to move further down the spectrum from content to regular communication.
I see the animation industry as being very similar to the VFX industry, and the famous case of Rhythm & Hue winning an Oscar award for what they did on the movie "Life of Pi" in the same year they went bankrupt and out of business.
The industry will still be there. But how much money you can make, and how many people you can afford to have on the payroll, that will diminish.
I think Corridor Crew is showing this effect with virtually every post to their YouTube channel.
> The change will not be driven by animators, but by people hiring animators that decide to cut costs by not hiring them.
I have no doubt that management hopes that they will be able to cut costs through AI! My doubts come from the fact that the people most certain that this possible future will come to pass seem to be armchair experts outside the industry where people in the industry seem mostly excited about new tools and bemused with the IP issues around AI.
It's not like the last 20 years have been free of disruptions from software tools? I have no more of a crystal ball than anyone else, but this is only one of many confident predictions about AI killing human experts that has not yet come to pass. It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't invest based on it.
I think it would be a big mistake to discount Jevons paradox here. It's very possible that the lower cost of images and animation would greatly increase their demand, and customers would still want a person to be part of this process.
I think this is probably too limited a view. My guess is that animation becomes more like photo-editing. There are still experts who do it professionally and push the boundaries of the form, but it’s also a skill that’s expected for marketing jobs, graphic designers, web devs, etc.
> These AI models will likely just become tools that automate or simplify existing animation workflows for larger projects.
The problem for artists is that the vast majority of the skills they learned as artists are useless when it comes to forming prompts. Assuming these models raise their quality and responsiveness a bit, and are surrounded with tools to fix expected problems (anatomy, symmetry, light, etc), I wouldn't expect a professional artist even with an aptitude for the tools to have much better results than an obsessed 14-year-old without a social life who's been playing around with them for a few months.
They're weird in that they in a way turn the process of creation over to the fans. It's like a declarative language for entertainment. While vision and creativity make artists stand out, the real skill for a artist is knowing how to use artists' tools. The real skill for the future painter probably is knowing how to use the AI tools.
People who typeset with metal had very few skills that transferred to InDesign.
The difference between the artist and the 14 year old is the former has artistic vision and style. If a 14 year old can master prompt engineering, so can the artist.
I simply don't think that's the difference. The difference is that the artist knows a bunch of craft. Between the people who know a bunch of craft, we're attracted to ones with particular artistic visions and styles, but don't know that average 14 year olds don't have the same range of artistic vision and style.
Doesn't this artistic vision and style boil down to taste, anyway? Claiming that the skill of the artist and the skill of the editor is identical is obviously wrong.
edit: in a way, making a work that targets a particular audience is an acknowledgement that the public has largely set the vision and style, and the artist is actually adept at working within it.
In my view the skill of the artist is to transfer an idea into the medium they work with, and if they work in a collaborative format that’s 50% of the job. It takes an enormous amount of skill to master the medium, and some mediums are easier than others. But the quality of the ideas they have matters a great deal. As does their ability to collaborate effectively.
I predict the end of commercial digital content. AI will eventually be generating what I want, not assisting create what Disney or Activision can sell me.
I am working on a tool to make that happen.
Religious traditions are not sacrosanct, and neither are contemporary civic life traditions. I don’t owe the past carrying on its modern patronage system of copyright maximalism and monopoly ownership of assets to extract rents from.
A growing segment of our society is tired of serving cushy office workers.
I would not be so sure there isn’t a massive amount of potential energy among the public to put video game companies out of work and increase the pool of “essential workers”.
IMO software engineers should optimize for themselves by walking away from industry rather than give it ownership of their intellectual output to be wielded against them after code writing AI is trained against their work.
Y’all thought you were so smart but hubris often comes with the later realization the effort was used against them. If society can generate content without paying someone it will.
Is that AI driven, or is it just "here are the control points on the key frames, make them go"?
It would be neat to be able to have fewer key frames and better in betweening so that more storytellers could have access without a team of CalArts grads. That doesn't seem unreasonable given what we've already seen, but I'm neither an animator nor an AI expert so I'm curious.
Both. It's currently mostly interpolation driven, but there are already added smarts and heuristics in the algorithms, and AI work is done to make it even better looking.
It's algorithmic replacement of human artistic skill in the animation field. Nobody said it was AI, it's an indication of how flexible the industry can be when it comes to cost cutting.
100% animation of each frame died a long time ago, because people don’t notice much about individual frames.
But as shown in the video you still need to hand tweak a great deal even if you don’t mess with individual frames. Suppose someone is jumping through a window, you need the sound of breaking glass to sync with the glass being broken.
It’s hard to explain why some things the article suggests are really easy and other stuff is difficult, but context is still a hard problem for AI. https://xkcd.com/1425/
Try to name 3 top anime that was completely hand drawn and released in the last 5 years. It’s extremely rare for even key frames to be completely hand drawn, let alone every frame.
Mind you there is CGI in these animes, but the frames themselves are still hand drawn. How else would you expect them to be done?
There's no magic here.
Cartoons can do it because they just use rotations, translations and skews, anime does not have that luxury. The pro is that, imo, when done right, anime is just beautiful to see, mesmerising even.
> Auto-tweening has basically displaced hand animation for most TV cartoons.
That's got nothing to do with AI, it's just economics, and it's been like that for years. Everybody doing animation on the cheap wants to avoid drawing every frame.
Prior to digital animation you used other techniques, like recycling frames or tracing over existing drawings (Disney used to do this all the time in their films).
What digital animation really allowed to happen was 2D puppeteering, where you could rig puppets and animate them in two dimensions without having to draw the key poses or the in-betweens. Now we're at the point where the standard way to do 2D animation is via puppets, rather than any sort of hand-drawn (be it key poses or full tweening)
I can't seem to substantiate this for anime. There was an app launched in 2018, and it's still priced at $399/seat/year, not acquired by neither Autodesk nor Adobe. I suppose the distinction between cartoons and anime is substantial?
I feel like pessimistic models like these often miss induced demand. That is with better tools that makes the job easier you open the way to produce more. Stuff that otherwise wouldn’t get animated actually does, by virtue of the craft becoming easier.
I find it odd (but predictable) that people miss this. We’ve seen proliferation of other specialized craft in the past as the tools get better, particularly in programing. And it is not like non-linear systems are that rare among people that are looking into AI and making predictions around it.
Animation is an amazing craft, our culture would for sure benefit from having more of it, and as more and more stuff gets animated, more people are probably gonna get jobs doing it, despite the fact—or even because of the fact—that every individual can produce more of it then before.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) alone by themselves will alter VFX fundamentally even without all the Stable Diffusion 2.0 (now with Depth!) etc generation.
NeRF lets you pick ANY smooth camera path in a 3D space built up with nothing more than a mobile phone. That's today.
These two phenomena will start to merge and the impact will be as transformative to the software side of media creation as the switch to digital from celluloid was for hardware. There was a time some still remember when not everyone had a camera in their pocket.
NeRF only works with static scenes, requires perfect camera pose, clean scene with clear edges and low exposure. For outdoors any tree with leaves is going to add a lot of noise and blur. For a natural scene indoors the camera exposure is going to be too high. While it is certainly a breakthrough, even “just” static scene reconstruction is still not solved, given the limitations above.
Note also, NeRF is not an “AI” model, it is more of fancy compact storage for objects, images or scenes.
Three years ago, our SOTA image generation models had very strong limitations (when compared to today's models), it can be difficult to see when and where the next breakthroughs will come - NeRFs are not there yet, but we may not be far away
I’m a little skeptical - at least of the view that we’re a few years away from all animation jobs being dead and ML models producing entire movies or TV episodes e2e from text prompts.
What’s likelier is that ML-based tooling becomes a key part of the animation workflow. Used to generate assets, animations, backdrops, characters, etc, which are then combined by an animator/editor. The examples he cites in the article all fit this mold - the anime character generator he cites in the article uses separate models to generate the character then rig it from facial data.
After working in the self-driving car industry, I’m really skeptical of any claim that rapid advances in one modality or task mean we’re “just 3 years away” from all related tasks being done via ML models. Alexnet et al completely revolutionized perception in self driving cars - between 2014-2017 it was really common to hear predictions that we’d have end to end models driving our cars perfectly in “less than 5 years”. That reality never arrived because ML just wasn’t capable of handling more complex tasks the way it could with object detection. Lots of articles similar to this one talking about what we were going to do with all of the out of work truckers and Uber drivers.
And yeah obviously generative art is a different beast than autonomous driving. And I’ve seen examples from WIP text2video models. But I just want to caution that tons of progress in image and text doesn’t necessarily mean we’re just a year or two away from all related tasks being conquered.
I think there will be rapid advances and some of them are already happening in unrelated space, but it will be quite far from completely replacing the human in the loop.
especially challenging will be (as it is for self driving) context permanence.
that said, with 3d modelling, rendering etc eating up so much of modern animation costs as it is, it is quite likely that tech as ai art tailored upscalers will merge with technique as dlss to enhance permanence and will help make the cost crash back down to earth, and that will have a big impact as currently only "safer" films get greenlighted due the difficulties from recovering costs.
My point wasn’t that these systems will never work in some capacity - my point is that they’re taking a lot longer to roll out than people predicted, and that the internals of these systems aren’t end-to-end ML models - it’s ML-based perception feeding in to a lot of traditional robotics code, with ML models handling certain prediction tasks in certain spots.
You clearly know more than me but it definitely looks like it all fit neatly into a 5-10 year timeline which imo is insane for something of this magnitude.
The common refrain in 2015 was that we were < 5 years away from having self-driving cars operating at scale without the need for a safety driver in most major cities in the US.
At this point we have a public robotaxi service in one suburban area and two robotaxi services operating under restricted domains in SF that are open to the public behind a waitlist. The cars have problems with rain, fog, or snow, and expanding to a new city still takes a ton of time. Having joined the industry after the hype of 5 years ago, the reality now is nowhere near the vision companies we’re selling back then.
I love these “AI *will* replace [x] job in [y] years” genre of posts because it’s a fun thought experiment. Taken to its extreme in writing, visual art, coding, conversation bots etc.
It’s like the future will be everybody living in NvidiaBlackrockDominoes housing, eating TysonIntelJ&J gruel, and the only employer left will be TSMCOnlyFans — which will be a staffing agency for test subjects in GarnierRevlon’s automated anti-aging research facilities.
I don’t think it’s a completely unfair scenario to imagine. If wealth continues to concentrate in to a smaller and smaller group of people, and having wealth makes it easier to change the laws stopping the concentration of wealth, what exogenous factors would stop this process?
“Technocratic” serfdom is already kind of a thing depending on how you look at it, that’s the joke.
As for what has historically led to “utopia for the ultra rich” being less-than-infinite in duration… *gestures to wars, petty infighting, boredom, gross incompetence, bad luck*
The current generation of the ultra rich might see that and argue “Aha! But we will have basically used a neural network to generate a society based off of ‘what if Kafka wrote Robocop Star Trek prequel fanfic’! Problem solved!” to which I’d say “cool”
This process is completely orthogonal to automation though. You could just as well have done this in 1822. If demand is minimal because the population is poor automation isnt necessary to kill off jobs.
The oligarchs who try to concentrate wealth will still try to scapegoat AI via mass media though, along with Mexicans, boomers, etc. or (historically), Jews.
Television will kill movies because people don’t have to leave their homes. The entertainment industry is doomed because people now have social media. Recruiters won’t have jobs any more because we have LinkedIn. Restaurants are obsolete because anyone can learn to cook with YouTube.
I work in an animation adjacent field and this is hogwash. What happens when the person responsible for the creative content says “I don’t like the way this part of the sky looks in the background”? Or “The way this character falls down the stairs is too violent and not funny enough”? Who’s going to sit there with the AI and make it do the thing that someone has asked for? It’s not going to be the director or producer because they have too many other things to do. They will delegate that task to someone. Is that person an animator? Does it matter that they’re working with an AI instead of moving keyframes around?
> Do you think "AI prompters" will earn the same amount as animators?
The typical animator doesn't make much. I knew one who worked for a well known movie animation studio. They hire as needed and then let them go easily after the movie is made. He made enough to pay bills, but not much more.
> prompting an AI requires much less skill than animating it yourself
s/much less skill/different stills/
> Do you think "AI prompters" will earn the same amount as animators?
I do, because animation is not inherently valuable. The value they are paid for is solving a problem, the same problem AI prompters will solve. It is totally valid to argue that AI will reduce the total amount of animators, I think that will happen.
> It is totally valid to argue that AI will reduce the total amount of animators, I think that will happen.
I don’t think that will happen because I believe induced demand is a thing. I think animators will produce more and more efficiently, I also think that amateurs will be animating stuff that they’re currently not animating because it is too hard. I think we will see a huge proliferation in animation as the craft becomes easier, and with the proliferation professionals will not only keep their jobs, but they will actually see their profession expand.
As a comparison, the textile industry still employs millions of experts despite the craft having been automated with the automatic loom as early as the 1780s.
I think there is a fundamental difference between creative work like apparel, programming or animation and basic necessities or basic materials like mining, farming, dying, etc.
To continue with the fabric industry. The automatic removed jobs in weaving fabric, but it made fabric cheaper and created many times those jobs in sewing this fabric.
Much less skill and different skills. Declaring that it will take the same level of skill (measured in mean amount of training and practice to do the job) in order to make a finished product is an appeal to the law of averages. It does not take the same amount of skill to typeset a book well in InDesign as it did to typeset a book in e.g. the 1930s.
True, but there are way more typesetters employed today than in the 1930s, and what they are able to do with their skills has changed a lot. I guess I’m just arguing that animation will follow the same path.
Depends - at what level does the result become "good enough"? I suspect that with animation we are still far away from this, so the expert "AI prompters" and those who can fix the results will be in high demand. It takes a lot of know-how to be able to tell what is wrong with some animation.
Television has killed movies for me. Wouldn’t be surprised if box office receipts go on a downward trend, at least domestically. Maybe globalization allowing the global poor to pay for movies will save it though.
Exactly this. Having WordPress and themes available didn't eliminate income of those who build websites, they just focus on building better sites (or on building plugins for WP).
As it has been with every technology. Sure, the dynamics and specifics change dramatically, and maybe there are less people doing the work, but the idea that those workers are somehow not needed doesn’t make sense.
I find this kind of writing so unbelievably annoying, it's unreadable.
People who write as though not only can they predict the future, but they're so arrogantly certain of it that they write long, scary sounding articles about it.
Guess what? This random guy has no idea what will happen in less than 5 years, no one has any idea. I'd bet AI won't, in fact, dominate the animation industry. Am I certain of it? No, because at least I have some humility.
Anyone who thinks they can predict the future is full of shit.
Unfortunately, this style of writing makes the article perform better on Twitter and Reddit (where it benefits to wrangle the scared or passionate) or aggregates like HackerNews, where people get to tear it apart.
Your choice is this, or SEO farm bot posts (perhaps ironically).
>People who write as though not only can they predict the future
Well, many people can and have, with reasonable arguments that panned out 20, 30 and even 100 years later. It's not metaphysical prediction, like an oracle, it's just reading trends.
>Anyone who thinks they can predict the future is full of shit.
In any case, we didn't learn anything about what will or will not happen in this comment, or about the feasibility of predicting the future even. But we did learn that you strongly dislike the idea that it's possible.
Also, as if "5 years" is some big leap in predicting an industry change, or technology trend. E.g. I could tell you already in 2007 than in 5 years touch-based smartphones like iPhone will dominate. I could you in 1995 that this "world wide web" thing will go huge.
That kind of prediction is basically what any businessman does when they make an investment in infrastructure or direction that will pay for itself in 5 years or more...
Or fusion and flying cars are 20 years away. Some predictions come true. Plenty of others don't. The web was going to replace brick and mortar stores in the late 90s, and books and magazines were going no longer going to be printed in the 2010s, which still hasn't come true, even though a lot of shopping is done online and digital material is read now. Which is probably a better kind of prediction for how things will play out. More stuff gets automated by AI, but people still have jobs using those AI tools, since automation leads to doing more things.
> I could tell you already in 2007 than in 5 years touch-based smartphones like iPhone will dominate. I could you in 1995 that this "world wide web" thing will go huge.
Did you?
And more pointedly, any more specific than “huge” and “dominate”?
Yes, I did. Even going into the business, getting my own company and so on.
>any more specific than “huge” and “dominate”
Like? What the list price for AMZ and APPLE stock would be in 2022? Or what color socks would Zuckerberg wear?
Not to mention, that if you dismiss a prediction as "dominate" as vague enough to be easy to come true, then you've already made my point: that's exactly what the TFA predicts.
There seems to be a (small) subgroup of txt2img/img2img enthusiastic people who have had gripes trying to relate to or reason with existing artists and their identities(gender, ethnicity, language, etc.) and to me this sits in line with those.
It’s also annoying because it distracts from the very real consequences of consolidation. People treat AI replacing jobs as if it’s a binary thing “AI can fully replace an animator or it can’t”, which is basically never how it works.
This is undoubtedly spot-on. I saw this happen with print design. Many job categories like typesetting, pasteup, layout, archiving, plate production, and other prepress and press work simply WENT AWAY as pages were designed on-screen and spit out of printers.
At first, there was great resistance and many cries of "It's not as good!," which were, of course, true. But it didn't matter. Desktop publishing as it was called (now something your child does in elementary school) was good enough and opened the door to many uses of "the press" which were simply unaffordable before.
> This is undoubtedly spot-on. I saw this happen with print design. Many job categories like typesetting, pasteup, layout, archiving, plate production, and other prepress and press work simply WENT AWAY as pages were designed on-screen and spit out of printers.
I think people who have seen this process in print and are aware of it have a sharply different view of the potential of this then people who haven't. Seeing the amount of skill, knowledge and practice accumulated over decades by pressmen and prepress/typesetters; all of that is almost worthless now. And by that, I mean it pays nothing, and you're competing with everybody who is "pretty good at Illustrator and InDesign."
The big question is what happens when the human training set for art stops being generated? Will AI art stagnate, or will there still be enough humans making art without financial reward to continue to supply models with better data?
Hopefully humanity has created enough art styles because we might never create new art styles again since there will be no way to fund our best young artists.
There would still be a selection pressure towards better models even if the datasets were completely overtaken by AI-generated images, as there would still be humans in the loop, choosing which AI-generated images (or videos/text/etc) to use for their content, picking the better ones, discarding the not-so-good ones. Thus, the input dataset to the next generation of models would not be the raw output set of the previous generation(s), but rather some manually selected subset of the best outputs of the previous generation(s). However, this seems like it could only provide a pressure for the models to move towards a local maximum, so perhaps there might be interesting opportunities outside of this local maximum.
Humans are still involved its just that they are generating art faster. If more people can create art the human creativity will only increase not decrease.
It’s like programming, easier it is too program the more creative programs become.
Also in my opinion creativity is just combination on two ideas together. These AI tools allow you to combine different concepts together and see how does it looks.
The AI models don’t have access to reality, so insofar as art needs to be motivated from physical reality, it breaks down until they do. For example, if humans were to start modifying their bodies in a novel and counterintuitive way, AI models would never capture that accurately if it’s never really been depicted in the training set.
I think what we need to do is feed the AI generated art into AI and build new models and see what happens!
The issue with articles like the original post is that typically they are written, not by animators or artists, but by data scientists.
This becomes obvious when they approach animation with a lens of realism. In fact, the photograph has not replaced all visual media because artistic expression goes well beyond a facsimile of what we see and experience. The difference between a Degas and a photograph of a ballerina is multifaceted.
Animation is no different, and naturally AI will be a useful tool, but without understanding art in it’s entirety, and without being able to create art oneself, without the aid of a machine will separate the plebs from true artisans.
If AI gets to the point where it can have limitless creativity—then I hate to say it but we’re all fu*ed.
This falls into the same category as the other efforts to replace human crafts with AI: Too much uncanny valley.
Generated text looks like the person crafting it is having a constant stream of micro-strokes while writing in their third language.
Deep Fakes have a proportion problem. Not to mention little things like skin tone and lighting.
Images look like one of those “one person draws one part, and hands it off blind to someone else” activities.
And animation looks like the characters on screen are also having micro-strokes.
“It will get better,” but will it? Or will we just continue to live in the valley with a ceiling of “it’s good enough”? Getting better will be a huge cost, after all.
“DALL-E 2 and other AI art models can now produce a near-infinite variety of illustrations using a simple text prompt. By 2025, they'll outperform human artists on every metric”
jesus this is so stupid on its face its laughable. this is like an artist saying by 2025 that artists will have replaced coders. you have no idea what you’re talking about and how stupid you sound
I guess what freaks me out is that if this is true, how can't it be true for people that write code? And how much longer do I have, than my artist sibling?
To write functional code you (usually) have to understand a lot of things (the problem you're solving, the overall architecture, the implications of your code).
I don't think any of the current AI tech demonstrates any kind of "understanding." The image-generators are closest, but if AI-generated images were code, almost all of them would be unusable.
I think coding jobs are safe until AGI.
That being said, I think copilot and similar can fill in a lot of blanks, because we often solve the same problems repeatedly. (I haven't used them FWIW). They're like a library of solutions, not a brain that invents a new solution.
I can see this being true, but it won't be because it's good, it will just be because companies lower their production standards in the interest of saving money. There were (maybe still) lots of really crappy CG animated shows that came out as soon as the tech allowed (20 years ago). The bits I saw were much worse than anything drawn, but they were for kids shows that nobody really cared about the quality of.
Hanna-Barbera's style was specifically built to separate heads and bodies for animation re-use. In addition to the infinite scrolling backgrounds. This let them crack the nut on TV animation before Disney.
Kricfalusi (of Ren and Stumpy fame) famously bad-mouthed Tartskovsky's style as lazy and cheap looking. But while it took an army ages to make one season of Ren & Stumpy, Cartoon Network got dozens of episodes of three shows.
... And ultimately, the story, characters, and writing can matter more than the art.
John K is such a jackass in general though about anything that didn’t come from him.
I was mentored by several people who worked under him for Ren and Stimpy, and I’ve never met anyone who’s said a nice thing about working with him.
His blog is also one of the more toxic fixtures of the animation industry, leading to tons of people who look up to his style of critique in much the same way many engineers looked up to Linus’s early aggressive rants (but worse). He’s the proginator of the derogatory “Calarts bean mouth” description that so many wannabe artists throw around without thought, and led to so many death threats and harassing of brilliant artists.
That’s not even mentioning his rampant sexual abuse allegations and dating underage girls.
John K made some great content but man is he a blight on the industry as a whole, since Ren and Stimpy finished.
Meanwhile since you mentioned Genndy, who I’ve had the pleasure to work with directly, he’s an artistic genius and just great to work with. Genndy and Craig McCracken pushed an art style that defined multiple generations of cartoons, and Genndy pushed forms more than most people I know of.
A lot of the more fun stylization in CGI is thanks to Genndy pushing Sony hard. The first hotel Transylvania is mind blowing if you analyze the animation, and a huge part of that is Genndy drawing over frames to show the extreme silhouettes that he wants. Technology was then developed to allow artists to fit those forms repeatedly and reliably. That’s had knock on effects to other CG films, even ones from Disney and Pixar who analyzed how much he pushed forms. Not to mention he created three of the best shows: Dexters Lab, Samurai Jack and Primal. primal is a master class in story telling and cinematography.
Anyway long rant to say, man I dislike John K but Genndy is awesome.
> ... And ultimately, the story, characters, and writing can matter more than the art.
That is a highly subjective conclusion, and worth consideration.
I still remember watching Ren And Stimpy as a kid when it aired, and later Invader Zim and have a way of recalling the skits/gags in a way that I can only due to those shows hook was the art: mainly because how remarkable it looked for it's time. Ren and Stimpy was something like a cross-between Dali and Goya surrealism (specifically the grotesque works when they did close-ups) that to this day stand up; I recall they sold the rights and it was on some other channel when I was in university on cable tv and it looked like a badly made knock-off as a cash grab so after the short lived nostalgia you realized how bad it was because they didn't take the time to do it like in the 90s.
The same can be said about the Nick era plot/art of Vasquez's work with Invader Zim, the art was so unique and it looked like the harshness in his comics and the plots were always weaving between dark and light in such a way that one questions who this show was really written for; the later Netflix stuff (while more advanced in it's appearance) suffered so much, and I felt the sane way about the comics and kind of dissapointed by his claim to only ever agree to do more Invader Zim work if it could explore the darker side more as he did when Nick canceled syndication. The Moofy was such a whimsical take on the dark foreshadowing of the way media and short lived celebrity would define the coming decades with social media.
And then there were the early Rick and Morty eps which contradict this where both the art is mediocre and generic, and even the characters are clear back to the future rip-offs but the plot and story and execution is so well done that it doesn't need a huge art budget (the Unity episode specifically).
I remember that Bugs Bunny became vanilla and humorless in the 60s as they began to do tired jokes and explained them in dialog, and no character was much different from any other. Somebody decided to make it palatable to 4-year-olds? I don't know. But never mind the perfect art; it was unflavored gelatin cartoon pablum.
> Just look at the recent V-tuber craze as an example. AI generated animation allows people to multiply the utility of a single drawn frame, increasing accessibility and lowering the barrier to entry for animators considerably.
It's not accurate to call it "AI generated animation". Face tracking is an input into the software that animates it. Those inputs feed into a bunch of manually configured math to move the thing around.
It's also not a new idea. The idea of having a human puppeteer a computer animation goes way back. What's new is streaming.
My 70 year old mother’s new favorite past time is making ai art. She’s using nightcafe and has no knowledge of the internal model workings. I strongly suspect ai startups are about to get their moment.
A few years ago when ML could only dream creepy dog faces, I would not believe that it could generate coherent images with decent framing and composition, correct proportions, realistic light and shadows, depth of field, excellent taste for palettes, and even good faces without uncanny valley — and hands and text being the hard parts.
So this time I'm willing to believe that the small morphing clips and blurry NeRFs are going to grow into whole realistic 3d scenes.
That's what they said github copilot was going to do for coding, but I haven't heard of anyone using it to replace developers.
Prediction: It's going to run into all sorts of copyright issues, wouldn't be perfect and make mistakes that a human would never do and end up being just another tool for Animators to use to create rough drafts that they can refine further.
I wish every time someone writes a "AI will kill X in 5 years" they'd take me up on a 500$ bet that it won't. If they did I would have been able to retire by now. Anyone remember the "I wouldn't train radiologists any more" arguments from like, ten years ago?
computer tools already dominate the animation industry and have for a long time. Lots of that already is AI if we hadn't started to redefine what the word means. It's not going to cause unemployment, it's going to give animators more tools, and it will make animation more accessible.
I do wonder if all these AI generating content software will be the end to artists, animators, media creators etc. I guess for a lot of things it will, but I wonder if people will want an AI or organic created content. Akin to how hand-made crafts are still desirable as opposed to mass produced textiles etc. eventhough the mass produced stuff is cheaper.
I guess there is room for both. But likely much less organic v AI created. Maybe we will see labels placed on content with " natural made " or something a long those lines as a selling point in the future.
When someone is this confident, and they get anything about their prediction substantively wrong, you should question anything else they say with confidence in the future. So, on the off chance this gentleman's prediction is wrong, we should question his fundamental methodology and distrust by default any predictions he makes after this. It should be easy to test, because he provided a year, and outlined how the process would unfold. We could check back in late 2027, though I reckon we'd have a pretty good idea long before then.
The failure mode for AI when it comes to cartoons would be barely irritating, whereas for medical diagnostics, it's really important. Aside from that, there's no need to be consistently better. If it's not good, run it again. AI can take 10,000 tries at something in the time it takes human experts to do one. Not super valuable when it comes to questions where your final answer has to be right, like lung cancer. Extremely valuable when only one of your answers has to be right and you just throw the rest away, like a few seconds of a cartoon.
Sounds plausible. However, usually, software doesn't replace all jobs, but makes the top 20% of works productive enough that the bottom 80% aren't needed.
At the same time, large businesses are very slow, so many companies will likely continue with traditional methods for decades while newer startups use the latest technology. It'll take decades before all business use AI pipelines. Animators should start their own studios to take advantage of the technology wave.
The key to the success of AI models in animation production is going to be how "directable" they are. Even with traditional procedural techniques, this is an issue.
It's relatively straightforward to generate a procedural forest. Less so when the director wants "this branch" to curve more in a given direction.
Where I can see this having the greatest initial impact is in concept art and matte painting. And not in a good way for the artists.
"Dominate" seems a little off. Feels to me like said AI tools are merely an augmentation, and will have a push on the spectrum from hand-animator to curator. In the end I think it will probably come down to taste, which comes down to whatever floats the boat.
I always compare these claims to self checkout. We’ve had technology to replace cashiers for 30 years now and they still just augment checkout cashiers a bit.
People are creatures of habit and really don’t want to change our routines. Plus large businesses are extremely risk averse.
It all depends on the store and time of day. Predictions that make 100% claims are usually wrong. What happens instead is usually a hybrid approach. Automation replacing all our jobs has never happened, while automation has replaced some jobs while creating others even as the automation increases over time.
I think there's a bit more inertia with animation here than the author realizes. Only the one-shot techniques currently allow you to animate a custom character and only within the confines of human faces and other things for which we have a lot of data.
For the vast majority of animation that isn't just humanoids talking, or bodies moving, rigged cg animation is going to be better.
In fact, try comparing the control you get from rigged CG animation versus blindly groping through latent space for "just the right character with just the right animation"
I think in 5 years AI will dominate the meme generation "industry", but animation will still be dominated by good ol fashion rigged CGI.
The rigging and animation tools are what will be an order of magnitude better + faster, particularly facial and humanoid body stuff.
The idea animations will get easier to make means more human time can be spent on the creative composition side and less on the production side. It's still ultimately a big win for art and consumers.
Aside: if you scroll to past issues, the author has all sorts of other articles like how to get into p0rn. Wonder if the author picked up AI recently, in which case, that's impressive.
Ah yes, in less than 5 years AI will completely dominate the fields of animation, art, programming, moviemaking, car driving, healthcare, etc, the sensationalist treadmill never stops.
Typical neo-liberal ideology: "you can't do anything about capitalism".
Yes, you can. Humans controls AI, not the other way around (at least for now). Join your local communist party, organize to combat capitalism, discuss regulations to AI and corporations, worker ownership over the means of production, etc.
Another capitalist mouthpiece that thinks that AI, capitalism or human misery are natural events, like the rain or wind. There is nothing "inevitable" about this at all, capitalism doesn't grow in trees.
I’ve said this before, but this article is the view from someone who has no experience in the field who sees technology as the answer to everything.
I am someone who has both worked in the animation industry (both as an artist and a developer), and currently work on what I would consider the bleeding edge of graphics engineering with ML (with large teams of course), I feel very confident in saying that people who make articles like this are just spewing technocratic bullshit.
There’s no understanding of the craft that goes into making content. There’s no understanding of the iterations and creative control that goes into it. There’s also no understanding of the business of animation.
Saying “you’ll lose your jobs” is downright stupid. Yes, AI tools will help streamline jobs. But that’s what they are: tools. Some jobs may be displaced if people don’t learn the new tools (see 2D animation being displaced by 3D) or if you were already just a worker doing menial work. However there’s so much artistry involved in every phase of production that you’re not going to see job reductions for a few decades.
I believe the opposite, there’s such a desire for a glut of content, that you’ll see more jobs. AI may help accelerate those tasks, but there’s already so much work that studios are constantly at capacity.
The other fact is that it ignores human nature. We still value stop motion animation or 2D even if CGI is better for mass production. There’s a human element that is not purely rational that we crave.
Lastly, the reason I think articles like this are bunk is because the people who write them assume studios do little research and development internally. We do so much. Attend any SIGGRAPH session and you’ll see so much mind blowing content.
We spend years trying to make it so artists don’t have to do work. I’ve literally automated my job and the job of other artists on other projects.
Does that mean my department or those artists get fired? No! It means they spend time working on making the content better instead of spending time on the stuff that was just automated. When they were spending time working on menial things like crowds, they can now spend that time finessing great performances.
We often stay on top of the cutting edge of research outside of our industry and make good use of it. It’s not like the industry, made up of countless brilliant engineers and artists, are blind to what’s going on.
Anyway, my advice to people: don’t listen to charlatans who sell technology as the answer to problem spaces they’ve never worked in. Yes, every now and then you get an outsider who shakes up the world, but it’s rare without some deeper understanding of the problem space.
The people saying Diffusion art generators and nerfs are coming for the animation jobs are quite clueless in my opinion, and are easily hyped by “shiny”.
I definitely don’t think the author is wrong here. It is very likely AI animation tools will have a huge impact on the industry.
I have friends who work in animation and illustration professionally. Based off their predictions, the truth is likely far more mundane. These AI models will likely just become tools that automate or simplify existing animation workflows for larger projects. This would definitely result in less labor needed for any given project.
For smaller projects. You might see folks use AI for the entire thing
> “the AI art movement is already causing a sizeable reduction in artist commissions, and that effect will soon trickle down into B2B and wider world.”
This line specifically made me lose confidence in the author’s ability to predict the future. Cursory Google searches return nothing. This is also a very difficult thing to measure at a population level. In my friend group of illustrators (which is a very small sample of the population) all of them have used TikTok and seen their commissions drastically increase in the last few months. That doesn’t mean ALL artists are making more money though. Neither does a few mediocre artists losing commissions due to AI either.