Looking at recent online discussion, this is an easy conclusion to come to, but it's really just a huge bubble.
People won't stop creating just because there's a cheaper alternative.
The analogy with manual labor automation simply doesn't hold, first because people actually like creating stuff, but perhaps most importantly because there is no supply problem to solve.
Taking the analogy with automation in the car industry, automation drastically lowered prices, making each individual copy of a product accessible to anyone.
It costs virtually 0$ to copy a movie, a picture, a song and display it on every device on the planet.
The cost of creating a audiovisual product is amortized across all users, dividing the costs by the number of users instead of multiplying it.
Sure, one day we may have models capable of generating full 3d animated movies from just a prompt, paying for just the electricity used to run the GPUs, but how much cheaper can you get compared to 9$/month to compete with a traditional streaming subscription with human-made content?
Assuming the world even comes to the point where AI streaming services contain virtually infinite amounts of meaningless autogenerated content, and assuming people actually like that content (which may be the case for the chunk of people already watching statistics-driven garbage on Netflix), nothing will stop creatives fired from previously-human studios from creating their own studios, producing hand-crafted, human works at the same price as always (9$/month).
An analogy can be made with handcrafted cars like Lamborghinis may cost millions, with the difference that with audiovisual content, a work can be shared by (and the price amortized by) billions.
We are already seeing something similar in the western animation industry vs the anime industry.
Given the alternative of cheaper, semiautomated 2d animation, anime studios prefer handcrafting every single frame, instead, because some people really like drawing, and a large amount of people also likes watching handcrafted, high-quality animation with wonderful stories and visuals.
Hate to break it to you … but the “industry” that is the “anime industry” has been quietly adopting the latest technology for years. There are notable exceptions like Ghibli but for the most part, Japanese animation studios have been pioneering the state of the art in cell shading, lighting and post processing, adjustable “cartoon physics” style automated physics tweening and basically everything else in 3d computer graphics that will allow them to make the most of their artistic efforts. They’ve still got a vibrant story boarding process helped by the obvious intersection of anime with the vibrant drawing culture that produces the manga so many are based on… but beyond the storyboards they have been relentlessly trying to eliminate the need to tediously draw anything unnecessarily. There are entire 2D (not 3d!) animation tools that serve the professional 2D “cartoon” market that have widespread adoption. The 3d market is no different, the first cell shaded graphics code I read was all written with Japanese comments… “anime studios” (except Ghibli) don’t “prefer handcrafting every single frame” they use whatever tools are available and usable by them, that are capable of executing the artistic vision of the art director of that project/show/movie.
They care about the outcome not the process. They care that it looks how they want it to look, that it conveys what they want it to convey. This is artistic pragmatism at its finest. They will composite hand drawn graphics/animation, 2D computer graphics/animation, and 3D computer graphics/animation… it’s the final results that matter. I absolutely expect that once the tooling gets better at frame-to-frame consistency, once it is good enough AI/ML based animation tools will be widely adopted by the “anime industry” and it will be praised because it will do things like let small manga creators produce short OVA or movies or YouTube style content directly whenever they want without having to spend ages working with an animation studio and the fans will love it because they love the content and for the most part that love is not dependent on how the content was made.
Hmm, japanese studios may be pioneering and making use of time-saving 3d/2d hybrid techniques like cel shading, but looking at the modern anime landscape, I see hand drawn animation in the majority of cases.
Not that I have anything against cel shaded 3d, it looks very nice when done properly, but I still see no major shift from hand-drawn animation in the anime industry.
I'm not trying to be glib, but I wonder if people had a similar speculations in the past when photography was first invented. I could certainly see people thinking drawing and painting was doomed because photographs can produce an exact capture in a fraction of the time it would take for an artist to merely depict the likeness of the subject.
