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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

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.
    - Retric 4y ago
      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.
      - ranguna 4y ago
        Shirobako, Violet Evergarden, Edge runners 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.
- jrk 4y ago
  This has been true for decades and has nothing to do with “AI,” it’s just classic computer graphics.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    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.
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbetweening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbetweening
- jfengel 4y ago
  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.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    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.
- objclxt 4y ago
  > 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)
- numpad0 4y ago
  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? 1: https://cacani.sg/product/cacani-teams/?v=24d22e03afb2 https://cacani.sg/product/cacani-teams/?v=24d22e03afb2
coldtea 4y ago
>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.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  ...or a bigger pie as it becomes a smaller gamble to launch an animation project...
  - yunwal 4y ago
    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.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    In most cases "bigger pies" are just pipe dreams, and it's all about powerlaw distribution of profits to a few smaller players.
- yunwal 4y ago
  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.
hooverd 4y ago
Maybe someday AI art will solve the problem of everything these models generate having greebles.
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
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.
- htrp 4y ago
  NeRFs feel like where GAN's were about 3 years ago.
- startupsfail 4y ago
  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.
  - infinityio 4y ago
    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
pessimizer 4y ago
> 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.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  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.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    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.
    - olivertaylor 4y ago
      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.
compiskey 4y ago
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.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  Doubtful every culture seems to impose demands on its people. Even the left is anti-free speech these days. I think we'll see the opposite, a few elites using AI to generate the content they force everyone else to consume. Perhaps there will be a black market for AI's, there already is one for illegally trained anime AI's.
  - compiskey 4y ago
    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.
runarberg 4y ago
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.

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.
  - Retric 4y ago
    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.
    - ranguna 4y ago
      Shirobako, Violet Evergarden, Edge runners 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.
jrk 4y ago
This has been true for decades and has nothing to do with “AI,” it’s just classic computer graphics.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  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.
travisgriggs 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbetweening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbetweening
jfengel 4y ago
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.
- coldtea 4y ago
  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.
objclxt 4y ago
> 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)
numpad0 4y ago
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? 1: https://cacani.sg/product/cacani-teams/?v=24d22e03afb2 https://cacani.sg/product/cacani-teams/?v=24d22e03afb2

coldtea 4y ago

>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.

sdenton4 4y ago
...or a bigger pie as it becomes a smaller gamble to launch an animation project...
- yunwal 4y ago
  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.
- coldtea 4y ago
  In most cases "bigger pies" are just pipe dreams, and it's all about powerlaw distribution of profits to a few smaller players.
yunwal 4y ago
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.

hooverd 4y ago

Maybe someday AI art will solve the problem of everything these models generate having greebles.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago

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.

htrp 4y ago
NeRFs feel like where GAN's were about 3 years ago.
startupsfail 4y ago
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.
- infinityio 4y ago
  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

pessimizer 4y ago

> 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.

BeetleB 4y ago
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.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  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.
  - olivertaylor 4y ago
    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.

compiskey 4y ago

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.

stuckinhell 4y ago
Doubtful every culture seems to impose demands on its people. Even the left is anti-free speech these days. I think we'll see the opposite, a few elites using AI to generate the content they force everyone else to consume. Perhaps there will be a black market for AI's, there already is one for illegally trained anime AI's.
- compiskey 4y ago
  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.

runarberg 4y ago

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.