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.
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.
Because software had room to grow into all industries - which huge ROI, applicable everywhere.
Whereas animation has a capped target: it's content, of a specific type even, not a way to help other industries generate profit, like software is.
However, being a visual effects artist has actually gotten harder. The pay has become lower and the work has become much more demanding.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artis...
>This seems like the logical progression and doesn’t necessarily result in a loss of jobs.
It is not the logical progression. Your conclusion isn't logical at all. It falls into typical biased trappings:
1. People tend to bias towards optimism.
2. People tend to fall for analogies. If one scenario worked they may use that scenario as evidence to scaffold reasoning that suits their interpretation of reality.
When you look at people in the oil business and you ask how do they twist reality such that something like global warming doesn't exist for them; I have an answer for this question. It's from the exact same biased trappings I mentioned above.
When you look at people in the AI business and ask how do they twist reality such that the economic impact of AI can only be absolutely positive; I have an answer for this question. It's from the exact same biased trappings I mentioned above.
Don't be biased. Self reflect and change. AI can be a net benefit to society but it can also be a huge negative as well. Most likely it will be a combination of both.
The industry will still be there. But how much money you can make, and how many people you can afford to have on the payroll, that will diminish.
I think Corridor Crew is showing this effect with virtually every post to their YouTube channel.
I have no doubt that management hopes that they will be able to cut costs through AI! My doubts come from the fact that the people most certain that this possible future will come to pass seem to be armchair experts outside the industry where people in the industry seem mostly excited about new tools and bemused with the IP issues around AI.
It's not like the last 20 years have been free of disruptions from software tools? I have no more of a crystal ball than anyone else, but this is only one of many confident predictions about AI killing human experts that has not yet come to pass. It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't invest based on it.
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.
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)
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.
Most or all top anime content is still hand drawn, even the in between frames.
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.
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.
Note also, NeRF is not an “AI” model, it is more of fancy compact storage for objects, images or scenes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.