God the commentary is just depressing. Only finally able to be able to choose to actually do what you love after 7 years and to still talk that they can still very well consider quitting. All of it said on an anniversary.

Animator is the one area I really hope they can soon start using AI to do the in betweens so the working animators can lessen their load.

azurelorochi said:

Animator is the one area I really hope they can soon start using AI to do the in betweens so the working animators can lessen their load.

That's a very idealistic outlook. In practice, automation doesn't lighten the workload on individual workers; it just results in fewer workers. No profit-minded company is going to take steps to reduce the amount of human labor without seizing the opportunity to reduce headcount.

Besides, what makes you think they'd stop at using AI for in-betweens? Once the technology is there, why wouldn't they also automate the keyframes, and storyboarding, and character design, and writing?

iridescent_slime said:

That's a very idealistic outlook. In practice, automation doesn't lighten the workload on individual workers; it just results in fewer workers. No profit-minded company is going to take steps to reduce the amount of human labor without seizing the opportunity to reduce headcount.

I dunno. Animators are talented people. So if you ask would I rather have them join the industry with the dream thinking they could make something they love, only to be forced to draw shit Isekai nobody watches and won't even be profitable, all for slave wage that's cheaper than working at McDonald's that they can't even feed themselves with, that most animators will burn out and quit within 3 years anyway even before covid and even before AIs, I think "the machines are stealing our jobs!" is the least of your concerns.

Besides, what makes you think they'd stop at using AI for in-betweens? Once the technology is there, why wouldn't they also automate the keyframes, and storyboarding, and character design, and writing?

Because for the foreseeable future, AI still can't make something coherent in the long run. The more you make them write something for you the more monkey on typewriters it becomes.
AIs can generate standalone images just fine, no problem. But if you think an AI can just shit out a whole 24 episode series with hundreds of thousands of frames and with coherent plot and visuals from a single sentence prompt, you're also massively misled.
The longer you make an AI work, the more you'll also need a human to rewrite the prompts, to fix the AI's mistakes that eventually it's not much different works than manually writing it from scratch.

The only way for AIs to truly replace artists is if the machines can actually make better products the consumers want to buy. The big suits might try to fire its workers to reduce cost, but no different than what happened in both the anime industry and Hollywood, if the end product they make is shit, no one's gonna buy it regardless of whether it was made by human or AI.