Japan's laws allow the use of copyrighted content to train AI models. Even though artists are worried for their future, some of the country's cultural and social aspects might make it easier to accept AI.
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.
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.