Tldr; animators are literaly dying from overwork(long hours and little sustinance) so instead of paying them more and hiring more animators they supliment the shit situation with ai ti avoid fixing it.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Should've unionized.
There is currently a labor crunch in the anime industry due to its unattractive working conditions. A 2024 report by the Nippon Anime and Film Culture Association showed that workers were overworked and underpaid, with hourly rates below the country's minimum wage being common.
TLDR: money
They need to unionize.
"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin
Japan's Copyright Act, amended in 2019, is largely interpreted as allowing the use of copyrighted materials to train AI tools — without the consent of the copyright holder. The law, specifically more permissive than those in the EU or the US, aims to attract AI investors to the Asian country.
It's actually strange that Japan allows this because that country normally has very strict copyright laws compared to the EU and the United States.
Charlie Fink, former Disney producer and current adjunct professor of cinematic AI at Chapman University, feels that the use of the rapidly developing tech will "lead to a new golden age of Hollywood," one that would be "highly democratized, because an individual could make a film for a few thousand dollars," he told DW
If Fink is right in what he says, in the future, I think there will be a debate about whether AI is a good thing or a bad thing. Because if AI makes cinema a movement like free software and/or open source, it's a win-win, right?
As long as the AI is also Free Software or Open Source.
sounds like japan might be desperate for the lack of anime workers.
Much of the animation takes place outside Japan these days. If you watch enough recent anime end credits, you'll see a lot of what look like romanized Vietnamese names. And there was a scandal . . . about a year ago now? . . . when some material for an anime then in production was found on the server of a North Korean studio (probably because a Chinese studio to which the anime had been outsourced then outsourced it further without paying attention to little things like international treaties). And I don't think the teams remaining in Japan have any shortage of recruits.
This issue, as with any business, is "can AI produce more for cheaper at an acceptable quality?" If it does make real inroads, it'll be the outsourcing studios doing the less-important scenes that get replaced first.
It hasn't though? That short "film" in the thumbnail is very not great. Just to summarize a few issues clothing items randomly change colors, clothes randomly switch to different clothes, they attempted to copy the really nice crane shot in Frieren but used "AI" to do it which just smeared ugly green shit around the screen cause there were leaves, a path they are walking on randomly changes material multiple times, ect ect. All the usual AI video crap. They didn't solve any of the issues it has and it there's one "animator" credited.
Spoilers if you care (no I'm not going to actually mark them) but there's a part where using AI would have been a really good directing decision, especially with the faults but because the "director" is just a tech bro who's incapable of understanding art they completely missed an extremely good use case.
Actual animation studios don't and won't use this crap until it's dramatically better. The closest thing they currently use is cacani (actually an interesting tool scroll through that) and it uses absolutely no "Ai" whatsoever
For all of the quality complaints about this anime, we have to remember that the technology is improving at a breakneck pace. What we are seeing there is the state of the technology from over a year ago. They used Stable Diffusion, which barely anyone even uses these days, because it's been left in the dust. It was also an image generation model, which is what caused most of the issues that the anime had--the model was never designed for use on video in the first place. But now we DO have video models, which can make things that look far better than this. Just the other day, what looks to be a new state of the art anime video model was released. A new anime starting production today would look a whole lot different than this. And if we look forward 5 years from now, things are again going to be on an entirely different level.
So what does this mean for anime? I think the technology will slowly start to get adopted more and more as it proves itself. The early days of the anime industry was basically born out of cost cutting measures to make it cheap to produce animated content. Decades ago, we saw studios start producing 3d CG anime because it was cheaper. Most 3d CG anime still looks like crap, but you can also see the technology being integrated into traditionally animated shows and looking really nice. You can also find things these days which I would say barely even qualify as animation. Something like "The Way of the Househusband" is literally just a sequence of still images strung together. Yet we have more anime being produced now than ever before, and are also seeing some of the most beautiful anime ever.
I think we will continue to see some studios take whatever measures they can to produce something at a low cost. AI will continue to get integrated into more and more productions. It will eventually let them start making things that look cool, rather than things that look bad. And then we are still always going to have some studios that go all in and produce a really quality product, because the people involved are passionate about it.
By "embracing", they mean two one-off project with very negative reception?
"When you are in a decision that puts you in danger you accept the tool that you initially rejected."
It seems that Japan has applied this
I didn’t click the link but I’m envisioning the old school studios (if they’re still around) just using the AI to drive physical drawings.
Why [...] AI [...]?
- Money
Meh. There really isn‘t a lot there. The short film mentioned has largely been regarded as a complete flop with no critical acclaim whatsoever. It‘s regarded so bad it’s essentially a meme. A real slop fest.
As for copyright: Using models trained on copyrighted material is more of a gray area than being explicitly allowed. They literally mention the act went active in 2019. That is before the rise of AI. So if anything they‘re just really behind the curve and not so much embracing technology.
This reminds me of the saying that Japan has been in the year 2000 for the past 40 years. Some older folks somehow still think it‘s some futuristic paradise for sci-fi nerds when that hasn‘t been the case for over 20 years.