18 ms·

AI will dominate the animation industry in less than 5 years

92 points by spking 4y ago

dtagames 4y ago
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. The same is coming for media production.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > 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."
gfodor 4y ago
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?
- lamroger 4y ago
  Maybe it'll be like the fashion industry. Seasonal main stream, high-end designers. Replicate, and cycle
- mlboss 4y ago
  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.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    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.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Well, the base say superhero might be created by human, just AI used to animate it and generate thousands of frames needed to make a movie out of it.
- tartoran 4y ago
  It may blend into a mush
- heather45879 4y ago
  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.
- guelo 4y ago
  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.
- mostlylurks 4y ago
  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.
version_five 4y ago
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.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  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.
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > ... 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).
ilyt 4y ago
When someone figures out AI that can take reference frame then a bunch of sketches and generate intermediate frames now that will be revolution.
digitalsushi 4y ago
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?
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  I wouldn't worry. Over the years programmers have learnt to operate at a higher level of abstraction than the previous generation. How many people still code in assembly vs (say) Javascript?
- a-dub 4y ago
  i think it may be a little while. it's relatively easy to label images with text, yet much more complicated to do the same for complicated software systems. a bigger threat to swe is probably off-shoring, which will probably pick up as a result of remote work popularity and economic belt tightening.
- qup 4y ago
  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.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  I'm worried our time is coming to end too. CRUD apps, custom implementation of our platform are the bread and butter of my megacorp. Honestly I could see an AI replacing many many of our business analysts, artists, ux engineers, and configuration developers.
falcolas 4y ago
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.
- snek_case 4y ago
  > Generated text looks like the person crafting it is having a constant stream of micro-strokes while writing in their third language. NVIDIA seems to have solved that problem: https://the-decoder.com/nvidias-ediffi-is-an-impressive-alternative-to-dall-e-or-stable-diffusion/ https://the-decoder.com/nvidias-ediffi-is-an-impressive-alte... The tech is improving extremely rapidly, which makes sense considering how much excitement and interest there is.
LarsDu88 4y ago
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.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Why couldn't a AI generate a rigged CG animation? To be refined by a human.
Imnimo 4y ago
I remember when AI was going to replace radiologists. There's a big gap between "Wow, this is really good for being made by a computer" and "Wow, this is consistently better than human experts".
- pessimizer 4y ago
  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.
Etheryte 4y ago
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.
sfpotter 4y ago
Ask Miyazaki about this and see what he thinks.
vaporup 4y ago
The devil's hands were busy...
froggychairs 4y ago
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.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's already happening. Auto-tweening has basically displaced hand animation for most TV cartoons.
  - Retric 4y ago
    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/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
    - ranguna 4y ago
      Really? Most or all top anime content is still hand drawn, even the in between frames.
mkoubaa 4y ago
No
AdammadA 4y ago
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.
joewhatkins 4y ago
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.
- avereveard 4y ago
  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.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Waymo is literally open to the public in multiple cities and does well. FSD is here now.
braingenious 4y ago
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.
- airza 4y ago
  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?
  - Yhippa 4y ago
    > what exogenous factors would stop this process The only thing I can think of is violent revolution but with the way things are going, the wealthy elite will have a monopoly on violence too.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      The wealthy elite had much more of a monopoly during the middle ages and it didn't last.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        1000 years. And they didn't have AI robot dogs and surveillance devices in every pocket.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      You mean as in robot armies? Because somebody still have to program and control those.
  - 4y ago
madiator 4y ago
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.
renonn 4y ago
“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
zigzag312 4y ago
AI generation of inbetweens would already be wonderful.
bilsbie 4y ago
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.
- jgalentine007 4y ago
  I don't know where you shop, but at my grocery store its 16 self check out lanes and 2 cashiers.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    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.
    - melagonster 4y ago
      I don't think cashier find another job. finally, everyone stay in home, starve and waiting death.
65 4y ago
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.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >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...
  - goatlover 4y ago
    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.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > 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”?
jgreen10 4y ago
Does AI completely dominate the translation industry? I suspect not, though it made translation more accessible and widely used.
throwaway1777 4y ago
Plot twist, in less than 5 years AI will dominate the blogging industry. In fact this article was probably written by AI.
karim79 4y ago
"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.
olivertaylor 4y ago
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?
- nonima 4y ago
  >Does it matter that they’re working with an AI instead of moving keyframes around? Yes, because prompting an AI requires much less skill than animating it yourself. Do you think "AI prompters" will earn the same amount as animators?
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    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.
  - olivertaylor 4y ago
    > 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.
pornel 4y ago
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.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
For the Author promising artists losing their jobs, I see a lot of uniformly grotesque animations and artwork being generated…
fedeb95 4y ago
I think the author missed that website about HN users predicitions
SMAAART 4y ago
Remember S1m0ne (2002)? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/
karaterobot 4y ago
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.
ultra_nick 4y ago
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.
- yunwal 4y ago
  There are also plenty of these “80 20” inventions in software (modern IDEs, higher-level languages), but it’s never actually resulted in fewer jobs.
lumost 4y ago
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.
nitwit005 4y ago
> 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.
pydry 4y ago
https://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-the-most-automated-job-in-the-united-states https://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-... When the engraving industry was automated demand went up.
dmix 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
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me551ah 4y ago
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.
Barrin92 4y ago
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.
dagmx 4y ago
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”.
my_city 4y ago
"And there's really nothing you can do about it." 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.
t0bia_s 4y ago
It wont. Same as 3D won't kill 2D animation. Digital drawing wont kill classical drawing, etc. Animation isn't just about moving static images.
kaveh808 4y ago
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.
rysertio 4y ago
AI generated art is mostly bad and needs fixes. So artists will most probably going to start with an generated art instead of a blank canvas.

92 points by spking 4y ago

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. The same is coming for media production.

pessimizer 4y ago
> 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."

gfodor 4y ago

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?

lamroger 4y ago
Maybe it'll be like the fashion industry. Seasonal main stream, high-end designers. Replicate, and cycle
mlboss 4y ago
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.
- gfodor 4y ago
  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.
ilyt 4y ago
Well, the base say superhero might be created by human, just AI used to animate it and generate thousands of frames needed to make a movie out of it.
tartoran 4y ago
It may blend into a mush
heather45879 4y ago
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.
guelo 4y ago
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.
mostlylurks 4y ago
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.

version_five 4y ago

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.

shadowgovt 4y ago
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.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > ... 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).

ilyt 4y ago

When someone figures out AI that can take reference frame then a bunch of sketches and generate intermediate frames now that will be revolution.

digitalsushi 4y ago

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?

SanjayMehta 4y ago
I wouldn't worry. Over the years programmers have learnt to operate at a higher level of abstraction than the previous generation. How many people still code in assembly vs (say) Javascript?
a-dub 4y ago
i think it may be a little while. it's relatively easy to label images with text, yet much more complicated to do the same for complicated software systems. a bigger threat to swe is probably off-shoring, which will probably pick up as a result of remote work popularity and economic belt tightening.
qup 4y ago
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.
stuckinhell 4y ago
I'm worried our time is coming to end too. CRUD apps, custom implementation of our platform are the bread and butter of my megacorp. Honestly I could see an AI replacing many many of our business analysts, artists, ux engineers, and configuration developers.

falcolas 4y ago

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.

snek_case 4y ago
> Generated text looks like the person crafting it is having a constant stream of micro-strokes while writing in their third language. NVIDIA seems to have solved that problem: https://the-decoder.com/nvidias-ediffi-is-an-impressive-alternative-to-dall-e-or-stable-diffusion/ https://the-decoder.com/nvidias-ediffi-is-an-impressive-alte... The tech is improving extremely rapidly, which makes sense considering how much excitement and interest there is.

LarsDu88 4y ago

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.

rowanG077 4y ago
Why couldn't a AI generate a rigged CG animation? To be refined by a human.

Imnimo 4y ago

I remember when AI was going to replace radiologists. There's a big gap between "Wow, this is really good for being made by a computer" and "Wow, this is consistently better than human experts".

pessimizer 4y ago
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.

Etheryte 4y ago

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.

sfpotter 4y ago

Ask Miyazaki about this and see what he thinks.

vaporup 4y ago

The devil's hands were busy...

froggychairs 4y ago

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.

shadowgovt 4y ago
It's already happening. Auto-tweening has basically displaced hand animation for most TV cartoons.
- Retric 4y ago
  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/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
  - ranguna 4y ago
    Really? Most or all top anime content is still hand drawn, even the in between frames.

mkoubaa 4y ago

AdammadA 4y ago

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.

joewhatkins 4y ago

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.

avereveard 4y ago
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.
bergenty 4y ago
Waymo is literally open to the public in multiple cities and does well. FSD is here now.

braingenious 4y ago

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.

airza 4y ago
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?
- Yhippa 4y ago
  > what exogenous factors would stop this process The only thing I can think of is violent revolution but with the way things are going, the wealthy elite will have a monopoly on violence too.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    The wealthy elite had much more of a monopoly during the middle ages and it didn't last.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      1000 years. And they didn't have AI robot dogs and surveillance devices in every pocket.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    You mean as in robot armies? Because somebody still have to program and control those.
- 4y ago

madiator 4y ago

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.

renonn 4y ago

“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

zigzag312 4y ago

AI generation of inbetweens would already be wonderful.

bilsbie 4y ago

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.

jgalentine007 4y ago
I don't know where you shop, but at my grocery store its 16 self check out lanes and 2 cashiers.
- goatlover 4y ago
  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.
  - melagonster 4y ago
    I don't think cashier find another job. finally, everyone stay in home, starve and waiting death.

65 4y ago

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.

coldtea 4y ago
>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...
- goatlover 4y ago
  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.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > 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”?

jgreen10 4y ago

Does AI completely dominate the translation industry? I suspect not, though it made translation more accessible and widely used.

throwaway1777 4y ago

Plot twist, in less than 5 years AI will dominate the blogging industry. In fact this article was probably written by AI.

karim79 4y ago

"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.

olivertaylor 4y ago

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?

nonima 4y ago
>Does it matter that they’re working with an AI instead of moving keyframes around? Yes, because prompting an AI requires much less skill than animating it yourself. Do you think "AI prompters" will earn the same amount as animators?
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  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.
- olivertaylor 4y ago
  > 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.

pornel 4y ago

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.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

For the Author promising artists losing their jobs, I see a lot of uniformly grotesque animations and artwork being generated…

fedeb95 4y ago

I think the author missed that website about HN users predicitions

SMAAART 4y ago

Remember S1m0ne (2002)? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/

karaterobot 4y ago

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.

ultra_nick 4y ago

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.

yunwal 4y ago
There are also plenty of these “80 20” inventions in software (modern IDEs, higher-level languages), but it’s never actually resulted in fewer jobs.

lumost 4y ago

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.

nitwit005 4y ago

> 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.

pydry 4y ago

https://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-the-most-automated-job-in-the-united-states https://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-... When the engraving industry was automated demand went up.

dmix 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago

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me551ah 4y ago

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.

Barrin92 4y ago

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.

dagmx 4y ago

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”.

my_city 4y ago

"And there's really nothing you can do about it." 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.

t0bia_s 4y ago

It wont. Same as 3D won't kill 2D animation. Digital drawing wont kill classical drawing, etc. Animation isn't just about moving static images.

kaveh808 4y ago

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.

rysertio 4y ago

AI generated art is mostly bad and needs fixes. So artists will most probably going to start with an generated art instead of a blank canvas.