Traditional animation by itself is nothing short of insanity, convincingly blending live action and traditional animation takes it a step further, and then there's the "Bumping the Lamp"[0] scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
The film as a whole refuses to keep the camera static to make things easy for the animators, which was unusual enough by itself, but then they went above and beyond — they casually bumped a pendant lamp and let it flail about. Every time it slows down, it gets bumped again. And they shaded and cast shadows for the damned rabbit for every single frame of that sequence. Madness.
This water-morph effect is undesirable for inbetweens.
The artwork is inside a scene, SD does not understand that scene. The artwork has spatial and human readable emotional relationships. SD does not understand those relationships.
SD can maybe create morphs between frames, as a lateral move between two pieces of generated information, but it will never know how to connect up those images in a manner that satisfies the human requirement of creating a good image.
We already have mathematical tools for interpolating between frames. They are wholly unsatisfying for creating novel artworks. Adding SD to that stack doesn't magically solve that problem.
Your dream idea of killing the inbetween with mathematics would require automating what an artist does by hand to construct and bend space-time upon a blank piece of paper. Describing what an artist does takes time. CTRL+Paint does a good job. With mapping out every possible emotional/visual interpretation of those shapes, between the two frames and allowing the user to pick the resulting outcome.
That is the "tea, earl grey, hot" star trek replicator for art inbetweens. SD is just another tool for filling in gaps with random spam. The real value in this, is that there's a hoarde of young people who want SD and it's outcome. The real art will continue unphased, using SD as a tool, where it fits.
A few years ago I heard people saying the same thing about going from a piece of text to a picture that "satisfies the human requirement of creating a good image"
Inbetweening is not going to be the obstacle that these AI approaches are finally going to be unable to manage.
Yeah, never say never. If AI can replace artists, it can replace animators, it can replace programmers, and ultimately it can replace humanity altogether.
I think we all knew this in the abstract but the pace is a bit faster than anybody expects.
These comments on every single post are getting really boring.
And so on.
Even the direct costs of using OpenAI APIs are not zero.
While I can't expect it to interest everyone, I don't personally mind discussions of specific industries when it looks like their time is coming up though. Each industry is going to have to deal with the change in their own way and we'll all have to adapt in different ways. The more interested in the industry I am, the more interesting I'll find it's decline/collapse. Brace yourself, because when AI comes for the coders that topic is going to dominate this site for some time (at least until the AIs themselves start commenting)
I've always loved animation, but I'll admit part of that comes from the hubris involved. It's pure insanity that people ever drew, by hand, mountains of individual drawings each slightly changed and assembled them into compelling illusions to tell stories. The amount of work that goes into animation is just staggering and anyone sensible would have rejected the entire concept as absurd. I wonder if animation will start losing part of its magic for me when it's done primarily by AI.
On the other hand though, another thing I've always loved about animation as a storytelling medium is that it isn't as limited by practical concerns like physics or reality. If something can be imagined, it can be drawn and animated if somebody has the skill and the resources to fund the massive amounts of work. It's time/money that forces animators to take shortcuts and make compromises. Creative decisions are made and rejected all the time due to those constraints. If AI driven animation gets more advanced to the point where that's no longer such a barrier it could create output more in line with the vision of creators and that's exciting too!
I hope that traditional hand drawn animation never dies, but I look forward to seeing how AI continues to change the industry and the output.