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Lately, “AI” machine learning technologies have been creeping into the arts in both fun and damaging ways. While some AI content creators create videos just for harmless fun, others, like the creators of a recent AI-generated anime short, mistakenly believe they have democratized the animation industry when in fact they have come up with a more technologically demanding method of plagiarizing other artists.
Earlier this week, Digital CorridorL.A.-based production studio that creates pop culture YouTube videos uploaded a video titled “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors“. Written and directed by Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski, it revolves around two twins vying for the throne left by their recently deceased father. Their battlefield? A game of rock, paper, “twin blade”. Using a Stable Diffusion machine learning model of text-to-image conversion, Corridor Digital has given camera footage shot in front of a green screen anime-like dramatic look. Basically, it is rotoscoping assisted by artificial intelligence. You can watch the video below.
Read more: Netflix’s AI Anime Gets Baked For Recognizing Artist as ‘Human’
“Part of our humanity is trying to visualize things that don’t exist. Let’s talk about traditional 2D animation. Cartoons, the most creatively liberating medium, are also the least democratized. To make that happen, it takes incredibly skilled people who draw every frame of the film,” Pueringer said separate video on YouTube, titled “Did We Just Change Animation Forever?” “But I think we’ve come up with a new way to animate. A way to transform reality into cartoons, and it’s another step towards true creative freedom where we can easily create whatever we want.”
In a pinned comment underneath, Pueringer wrote that their AI-based animation production technique is not intended to replace human animators, but as a means to bring visual ideas to life without the “nearly insurmountable mountain of work” a major animation studio has to do the job with a large budget would be needed.
“Imagine one person or several friends realizing their crazy ideas. Imagine if a traditional animator could automatically paint and color his drawings. Imagine the elimination of the eerie valley in the CGI faces. These tools have the potential to do just that. We try to figure out how to do it and share our journey. If we want community controlled AI tools, we need to develop them as a community, otherwise they will become proprietary tools locked within the company,” Pueringer wrote.
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In an e-mail from KotakuPeuringer said that while someone can train an AI model to learn the styles of multiple artists, it is wrong to assume that this is the only use case for the technology.
“With this experiment, we are thinking about how we can use (our) own art with these tools to speed up the process. ‘Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors‘ is the first step in our experiments (in) figuring out how it works in the first place,” Pueringer said.
Giving data to an AI model is not creating art
Despite how attractive artificial intelligence is “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors” may seem to fans of Corridor Digital, the anime of the group based on artificial intelligence is another harmful innovation in the animation industry, as it robs real artists in a way that seems little different from the perspective of other machine learning technologies copying and selling actors’ voices without permission.
Unlike breathtaking dragon ball z fan cinema, Dragonball: Legends– which took indie studio Studio Stray Dog four years – Corridor Digital’s attempt to recreate the passion and energy shown in the early days of anime proves to be brutally bizarre and embarrassing, as it’s a soulless recreation of animation techniques haphazardly put together without any technical skill or artistic merit.
Despite acknowledging that anime is all about tying visual language to story through stylized metaphors and art direction, Pueringer revealed that Anime Rock, Paper, ScissorsThe visual style was created by adding background art to the Stable Diffusion AI model and character images they took from an early fantasy anime film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
“We tried to capture frames of different people, a few shots of the face, a few shots of the torso, the whole body, hands, hair, and even some abstract things like flowers, because with all these different objects – each photo actually being a different subject and a different character — when we train a model, it will not learn any single subject. Instead, it will learn the style in which all these subjects were drawn,” Pueringer said.
Eventually, the trained Corridor Digital model threw out a A mess that looks like a TikTok filter in which exaggerated shadow effects constantly cut through character models, despite the best attempts of their technology to prevent all kinds of eerie valley flicker seen in an anime-filtered Snapchat video. Claiming to understand the visual language that anime studios are trying to portray while blatantly copying the art style of anime studio Madhouse’s work literally frame by frame is not “democratizing” anime making. This is just a hack.
Although many Corridor Digital commentators on YouTube see Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors as a way to facilitate content creation, other viewers felt the video was an insult to the human animators.
“It just seems like a way for technicians to infiltrate the artist circle while stealing the work of actual artists to use for science. They should show this to real animators who visit them, I wonder how they would react” YouTube commentator SouperRussian wrote in response to “Did we just change the animation forever?” video.
Many in the animation industry hate it
Unlike many Corridor Digital social media fans, fellow YouTuber Ross O’Donovan believes that the Corridor Digital anime’s AI is on thin ice with professional animators. O’Donovan advised Corridor Digital to find a “first aid kit” to prepare for the discourse that would take place if he was talking to an actual group of animation professionals. Specifically, he suggested that Corridor Digital sit down with people like the team behind Netflix Castlevania series to hear what they think about the development process Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Turns out Corridor won’t have to hit Castlevania the line of director Samuel Deets, because he has already made his opinion known to the public. Deets disagreed with Corridor Digital’s claim that their AI tool was “one step towards true creative freedom” that would democratize the animation industry. Instead, Deets tweeted that Corridor Digital is just “lazy thieves spitting on the whole art form.”
“When AI dudes say ‘democratize’, they only mean ‘steal’ and ‘exploit'” Deets responded in a Twitter thread.
Deets was not alone in his views on Corridor Digital’s advocacy of machine learning models in the animation industry. “This absolutely sucks, I hope this helps” – Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco he wrote in a tweet. Ralph Bakshi, the legendary animator of the underground Fritz the cat and 1978 Lord of the Rings the animated film did not honor Corridor Digital’s claim with a response. Instead of Bakshi he just replied “no comment” in response to a tweet by the cheerleaders of Corridor Digital’s “amazing” AI-powered anime.
Despite the backlash Corridor Digital has received from people in the animation industry, Pueringer believes it Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors is no less ethical than the other Pop culture YouTube videos they uploaded to their channel “to tell their story”.
IN r/Corridor subreddit postPeuringer noted that while sudden change can be scary, “especially if you feel like your passion or livelihood is at risk,” Corridor Digital is exploring use cases for its AI model to “help shed light on the fog for anyone” who wants to bring your imagination to life.
“I see the potential for tools like these to allow the animator to allow this process to easily propagate ink and color throughout the shot, for example. It’s such a potential that excites me about this technology and why we’re doing these experiments at all,” Pueringer said. Kotaku.
