This New Technology Brings Animation to Life

“Did we just change animation forever?” is on the minds of the internet’s favourite pop-culture producers at Corridor Digital. The group of nine creators at the VFX company recently shared a fantastic anime video — made on Stable Diffusion. 

But some disagree and say the creators have only changed the art direction of live action. The tech and final result was impressive. But followers have asked the art group to reconsider the road they’re taking as the artists have previously talked down on AI tools stealing other people’s art. 

“As an animator… this scares me. I’ve dedicated my life to drawing and to recreate motion within the drawings. Only to be replaced in a couple of years,” reads the most liked comment under the video which was posted 3 days ago and has over a million views already. Another professional blamed the video for absolutely ruining his day. 

The fear of being replaced has been looming over the art community since the introduction of text-to-image tools which lets a user generate dream-like images just by describing in text the intended output. The panic may seem reasonable as all hell broke loose when Netflix released an AI generated trailer of a new show, The Dog & The Boy. 

The ‘problematic’ post was captioned, “As an experimental effort to help the anime industry, which has a labour shortage, we used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts!”

The greatest Japanese animation director has previously expressed how “utterly disgusting” he finds AI art. Fantasy film director Guillermo Del Toro had also said he will always ‘consume and love art made by humans’ and was not interested in illustrations made by machines and the extrapolation of information’.