An AI-generated anime is announced.
Summary:
- G-Vis has announced World Maker — an anime that uses generative AI.
- Generative AI uses stolen art, and is horrible for creative industries.
- We sincerely hope this project fails miserably.
This Tuesday, studio G-Vis announced its short anime World Maker, to be released on TikTok and YouTube in January. Though there’s a small, yet an extremely harrowing issue with their creation — it is made using 3DCG and generative AI.
Generative AIs are horrible, no question
“Generative AI” is such a deceptive term. It sounds like it’s an AI that generates entirely new content, and if the AI is good enough, so are the things it generates. However, once you learn more about it, “Reiterative AI” sounds like a more accurate term.
The use of AI has become quite a controversial topic in the past few years. After all, on the one hand, AIs like Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion allow you to generate an image based entirely on your text prompt. On the other hand, these engines are not generating images out of thin air — in order to be even remotely passable, AI has to be trained, using countless points of data. And these points of data are usually composed of stolen art — from screenshots and videos of our favorite shows “borrowed” regardless of copyright, to drawings made by both professional and hobbyist artists alike, and taken without their agreement. So yeah, stolen.
And the end result is not a NEW image either. Rather, it’s a regurgitated unholy mesh of multiple images that were fed into the engine. Moreover, these generative AI engines are not just encroaching on the territory of real artists — they are actively threatening the jobs in the industry. In April 2023, 70% of game illustrators in China lost their jobs — and it can and WILL happen in any other artistic industry that is allowed to substitute human effort with machines. AI labor is very cheap, after all.
The possible cost of AI for the anime industry
The anime industry is no stranger to making dubious decisions to make a profit. Many modern anime are “safe enough” adaptations of popular light novels, while the lion's share of animation is outsourced to South Korea to make it cheaper, even as animators themselves are severely underpaid — so this announcement creates a very dangerous precedent for the anime industry as a whole.
It doesn’t matter if a machine is fed only the works of the best of the best. Even if you make a perfect AI created with lawfully borrowed works of Miyazaki and Shinkai, the end result will still be a blind parroting of their styles with no artistic vision of its own — even as it takes away the jobs of actual animators. Or, in other words — prepare for the deluge of worse, soulless anime made at a push of a button of a company exec, while artists with the passion to actually create are drawing small, indie anime at best.
As a part of this project, G-Vis studio plans to release multiple dance and music videos to gather viewers’ attention and improve upon this technology. And in the heart of our hearts, we sincerely hope that this project fails miserably.