For those who might not realise, Anime [1] are expensive to make.
Hopefully someday those top quality Anime would be cheaper to produce with the help of Machine learning and AI. And hopefully those Japanese companies [2] hopefully take the world wide market more seriously.
The top voted reply states: "So anime are not really that expensive to make, in terms of the usual cost of producing a professional level half-hour animated television show with top talent."
Regardless, outside of videogames autogenerated content turns me off (and sometimes even in videogames, you can tell if something was handcrafted or autogenerated). If the way to make animé "survive" means removing meaningful human authorial input, then maybe it's best if it dies?
Well respected sci-fi authors of all times have seen this scenario as a dystopia. I remember one short story -- was it by PKD -- where an author inputs a novel "high concept" into a computer, a second later says "wait, I have a minor correction" and the computer replies "too late, I've already written the novel and its sequels based on your concept, it's already being distributed".
Surely the answer to "this requires top talent and human artistry, and this stuff costs money" cannot be "replace them all with Machine Learning", can it?
>outside of videogames autogenerated content turns me off (and sometimes even in videogames, you can tell if something was handcrafted or autogenerated). If the way to make animé "survive" means removing meaningful human authorial input, then maybe it's best if it dies?
what if it simple generated frames between the ones drawn by hand? so the artist doesn't have to draw every frame just key frames say on ever second or half second and the ai filled in the in between frames while maintaining consistancy
I hope your prediction never comes true. It's terrifying to think of the human element in art as niche. It's a kind of dystopia our scifi authors warned against decades ago...
I don't think anyone ever suggests that weird extreme outside ai-as-art-itself. Usually the idea with ai creation is "would your work be easier if I provided something 90% there that you fix up as needed". People will not get replaced soon, but rather provided with tools like clippy "hey, you're drawing a person, would you like 100 auto-generated running posses that you don't have to draw manually?"
For something like in-betweeners? Maybe. Like someone else pointed out, it's already the case in animation that the pros do the keyframes or even concept art, and the interns/low-paid workers do the rest of the frames. Maybe this could be automated and it'd be a win.
In the general case I'm still skeptical though. Consider the case of comics, with the jobs of penciller and inker. Is the inker an automatable job? Do they not add important artistic decisions to what at first sight would seem like a merely mechanical job, to the point some inkers have their own fan base? (And, it is argued, a good inker can "make or break" the pencil art). And if this is true, could it be also the case that even the lowly in-betweener brings his/her small grain of artistic input to the final piece?
In the context of anime, I'm talking about a hypothetical future (hinted at by the person I was replying to) where characters are designed by ML/computer automation, with minimal human input -- or in a nightmarish scenario, even entire plot lines and episodes! -- to drive costs down.
In the context of videogames, I mean the battle-tested technique of sandbox and roguelikes (and the games they inspired) of generating missions, scenarios and levels programmatically and randomly, so that you don't get the same game twice. It's cute, and for roguelikes it works, but it's also very different to levels created by hand.
It speaks in terms of salary of animators and actors and compares them.
Of course, all salaries and in general production of almost everything is cheaper in most nations than in the U.S.A. simply because very few taxes are paid in the U.S.A., so employees receive more salary, but every product also costs more.
For instance, in 2019, the average net compensation for a salaried worker in the U.S.A. was 51 916 U.S.D., with median beng 34 248 U.S.D.
I found those numbers for Japan to be 39 851 U.S.D. converted, and median 62 9475 U.S.D., actually making median higher due to the top-heavy nature of U.S.A. incomes.
This top-heavy nature might also be why it's not far to compare absolute star shows with each other.
I, frankly, do not really understand how The Simpsons could ever take more resources to produce than anything which involves choreographed, three-dimensional fighting scenes that involves characters dazzling and jumping through buildings:
Hopefully someday those top quality Anime would be cheaper to produce with the help of Machine learning and AI. And hopefully those Japanese companies [2] hopefully take the world wide market more seriously.
[1] https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/39689/why-is-anime...
[2] https://hyperjapan.co.uk/anime/anime-studios-unite-to-create...