A shortage of artists in the animation industry could lead studios to seek out AI companies for a solution. But, according to PC Mag, Netflix is already taking steps toward plugging that labor hole. The animated work in question is a Netflix Japan short called Dog & Boy. Attack on Titan's Wit Studio employed Rinna, an AI character and scenario company, to create the backgrounds for the anime in question. Netflix Japan admitted in a blog post that this project was an experiment.

Recently, "AI" machine-learning technologies have been creeping their way into artistic fields in both entertaining and harmful ways. While some AI content creators are just making videos for harmless fun, others, like the creators of a recent AI-generated anime short, wrongfully believe they've democratized the animation industry when they've really just come up with a more technologically demanding method of plagiarizing other artists. Earlier this week, Corridor Digital, a Los Angeles-based production studio that creates pop culture YouTube videos, uploaded a video called "Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors." Written and directed by Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski, it revolves around two twins vying for the throne left vacant by their recently deceased father. By leveraging the machine-learning text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, Corridor Digital gave camera footage filmed in front of a green screen a dramatic anime-like appearance.

"Knowing how powerful machine learning has become, it's just a matter of time before it completely takes over the animation industry." In recent years, deep learning has increased the modern scope of animation, making it more accessible and powerful than before. Artificial intelligence has become a shiny new weapon in the creator's arsenal. The advancement of hardware and AI has blurred the lines between virtual and real characters(eg: movies like Alita). Something that could have taken hours to perform by animators is being done by automation in minutes.

Let's say you want to animate a 3D character. In the digital age, it should be easy, right? Technology has advanced enough that you can use motion capture (mocap) to film an actor going through a character's actions, then clean up the resulting animation, rather than manually animate every motion of a character with software. Seems simple from the outside, until you realize the amount of infrastructure you're going to use. You'll need a large amount of camera hardware to capture all the right angles, a dedicated studio with enough space for those cameras and mounting racks, and then you need a motion capture suit for the actor.

Walt Disney is synonymous with mainstreaming of animation. He was a visionary beyond his time. His creativity and imagination turned simple 2-D characters based on a mouse and a duck into a multi-billion dollar business conglomerate. However, back then animation used to be an extremely labour intensive exercise and animators/cartoonists had to frame by frame draw the entire film. That is how things used to be until the arrival of the year 1972 when two researchers from the University of Utah, Ed Catmull and Fred Parke created a computer animated short video of Catmull's left hand.

Recent advances in deep learning and artificial generative models promise to expand existing capabilities of animation tools even further. Norah AI, a revolutionary animation tool recently released by Absentia startup, moves animation and game design industry into the AI era. It enables quick creation of all game elements, including 3D models and animations, game geometry, story weaving, and texturing, all with the minimal human input. The first version of Norah AI features Auto Rig tool, human motion simulation and blending, and Motion Editor that cover a wide variety of user cases in 3D animation and game design.