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INTEREST: WIT Studio Produces 'The Dog & The Boy' Anime Short With AI Generated Backgrounds




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TheSleepyMonkey



Joined: 11 Jul 2022
Posts: 895
PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2023 11:16 pm Reply with quote
This type of thing makes me wish George Wada got kicked and Tetsuya Nakatake replaced him as CEO.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4575
PostPosted: Thu Feb 02, 2023 11:54 pm Reply with quote
They have the balls to claim there's a "lack of manpower" when the reality is that there are a ton of talented people out there, but they're not willing to work for below-poverty-line wages. Oh, and those backgrounds look like absolute dogshit, so congratulations!
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gsilver



Joined: 04 Nov 2007
Posts: 617
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:09 am Reply with quote
I want AI art to stick around for people like me, with ideas in their head but not the artistic talent to bring them to life... but AI art is bad when it takes away work from artists.

Artists struggle enough to make a living even without being replaced by a soulless algorithm.

The worrying thing is not that they'll be bad, but that it'll be good enough to put people out of work, and far more is lost from an artist leaving their profession than other forms of production.
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lehuy0210



Joined: 03 Aug 2022
Posts: 13
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:27 am Reply with quote
TheSleepyMonkey wrote:
This type of thing makes me wish George Wada got kicked and Tetsuya Nakatake replaced him as CEO.

i mean this project, Ishikawa ( chairman of I.G Port ) suggested for sure bro haha, remember anime 4K of Netflix ?
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Toyokaaaa





PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:31 am Reply with quote
Oh wow, first they ruin family sharing and now this.
It's like Netflix is making worst business decisions on purpose.
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Wyvern



Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Posts: 1555
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:35 am Reply with quote
It's profoundly insulting for them to claim this is because of a "labor shortage." There are tons of talented people who want to work in this industry but who can't because of the starvation wages being paid by employers. And then they go and introduce an AI gimmick that won't make shows look better but will devalue the cost of artist's labor even further. Screw this.
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AsleepBySunset



Joined: 07 Sep 2022
Posts: 203
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 2:13 am Reply with quote
Quote:
Imagica Group and OLM Digital joined forces with the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) to develop a technique for automatic coloring, further expanding AI options.


This type of program doesn't need to be Ai. You could already create decent software to do this if you wanted to, a process similar to this would be usable: step one is locate enclosed regions delineated by black lines within a drawing, perhaps with a minimum thickness (to deal with crosshatching), step two is then flood fill each region with a random colour. To make this work in animation, if you located the centre within each enclosed region on a frame by frame, ensuring that that point was actually between the lines, then compare that frame to the frame directly before it/after it, if this centre point is ontop of a red pixel in the previous frame, make the region red in this frame.

People are just using AI for things which could be better done by manually creating a computer program for no reason, perhaps because they aren't sure if this type of thing is possible without AI. We had hatsune miku, which as far as I know, in early versions used no AI at all, making the results fully predictable, yet tech pushes for AI TTS. The end goal of all of this is to normalise using more and more AI. People will look and say, "all this media I like was made using AI to add lines to CGI" or "AI was used to colour in animation", "so I guess I have to bite the bullet and accept AI backgrounds", "I accepted AI backgrounds, so now I have to bite the bullet and accept AI animation", and so on, and so forth. The end goal of all this isn't so we can all enjoy "AI (+human) media", and certainly not so we can enjoy "human (+ai)" media. Its so you type in "Peter Rabbit in the Style of Ghibli" and out comes a whole movie. People who passionately support "AI assisted" (read: media entirely made by an AI) don't really hide it, they're excited for text to movie AI.
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onpufan



Joined: 22 Dec 2022
Posts: 122
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 3:45 am Reply with quote
AsleepBySunset wrote:
People are just using AI for things which could be better done by manually creating a computer program for no reason, perhaps because they aren't sure if this type of thing is possible without AI. We had hatsune miku, which as far as I know, in early versions used no AI at all, making the results fully predictable, yet tech pushes for AI TTS.


In my personal experience newer programs like SynthV blow older software out of the water and AI has been nothing but a boon to the vocal synth community. Vocaloid 5 was not a very good software and I'm happy Vocaloid 6 added AI instruments so they can compete with their competitors. That new ElevenLabs speech synthesis program has been popping off on social media recently and really does a great job showcasing how AI tuning and learning can help this kind of stuff like TTS or Vocaloid.

Now I'm not a big fan of CG anime in general but I will admit the art in that trailer looked pretty nice for what it was. If AI can help animators like it did for the vocal synth community then I'm all for it. I don't really see the point of refusing to use new technology outside of being set in ones ways and disliking change.
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Gamen



Joined: 13 Jun 2006
Posts: 221
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 4:55 am Reply with quote
AsleepBySunset wrote:
This type of program doesn't need to be Ai. You could already create decent software to do this if you wanted to, a process similar to this would be usable: step one is locate enclosed regions delineated by black lines within a drawing, perhaps with a minimum thickness (to deal with crosshatching), step two is then flood fill each region with a random colour. To make this work in animation, if you located the centre within each enclosed region on a frame by frame, ensuring that that point was actually between the lines, then compare that frame to the frame directly before it/after it, if this centre point is ontop of a red pixel in the previous frame, make the region red in this frame.


The first half of this - but not with random color but instead based on what color stroke the artist paints over those areas - is available in Krita as Colorize Mask.

That said, the history of anime is one of finding cheaper ways to do animation, from speedlines to CG, so I'm not at all surprised. ....except looking at their "Layout" "AI Generation" and "Final BG" samples in the credits, the use of AI appears to be a joke, or stunt. It looks like rather than being merely "revised by hand" the backgrounds were entirely repainted.
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Beatdigga



Joined: 26 Oct 2003
Posts: 4370
Location: New York
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 6:27 am Reply with quote
onpufan wrote:

Now I'm not a big fan of CG anime in general but I will admit the art in that trailer looked pretty nice for what it was. If AI can help animators like it did for the vocal synth community then I'm all for it. I don't really see the point of refusing to use new technology outside of being set in ones ways and disliking change.


Any technological advancement, especially one that is working out the kinks, being used for the sole purpose of replacing people instead of improving quality, is never going to get a warm welcome. We know AI art isn't ready to replace human artists, especially with AI hands being a meme online. And while the idea of taking on workloads from an industry that's at capacity sounds nice on paper, reality shows that more often than not, this kind of labor-replacing tech is designed to keep wages down, regardless of quality issues, instead of paying people what they're worth, lest project costs rise.
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Vanadise



Joined: 06 Apr 2015
Posts: 493
PostPosted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 10:28 am Reply with quote
AsleepBySunset wrote:
People are just using AI for things which could be better done by manually creating a computer program for no reason

It's important to keep in mind that even calling this "AI" is a bit of propaganda; there's nothing magical going on here and nothing that approaches the level of complexity of a human brain. It's just writing an algorithm that produces an algorithm that tries to replicate human-generated input. I know several guys who work in computer vision who do AI-based research, and a common joke among them is that the difference between traditional hand-written algorithms and "AI" is just that you don't know exactly how the AI algorithm works (which also makes it impossible to debug and therefore less useful for many applications).
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MarshalBanana



Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 5316
PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2023 4:13 am Reply with quote
Gamen wrote:
That said, the history of anime is one of finding cheaper ways to do animation, from speedlines to CG, so I'm not at all surprised.
The history of animation in general, most notably the introduction of Xeroxing to bypass the inking process and the segmentation of cels into interchangeable layers to cut down heavily on drawings, or in other words Hanna-Barbera.
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@ASAnime6



Joined: 08 Feb 2022
Posts: 381
PostPosted: Wed Feb 15, 2023 3:17 am Reply with quote
looks fine and AI can help decrease the efforts needed to make anime and I had no problem with anything in the video as well , looked like what hand-drawn would look or even better
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