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

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.