A lot of the defence of AI from industry execs has focused on how it will do the jobs that creatives don’t want. A former Netflix producer has now taken that further with a pretty bold statement.
Taiki Sakurai, who was executive producer on Pokémon Concierge and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and now heads animation studio Salamander Inc, has suggested that animators themselves are in favour of AI. They don’t want to have to draw by hand, he says (although they’ll still need to turn AI’s drawing to video in the best animation software).
As reported by the Japanese site Internet Watch and picked up by CBR, Sakurai was speaking at a panel discussion entitled “The AI Agent Industrial Revolution and Japan’s Potential” at the CEATEC trade show in October.
He talked about his experience of using AI for production, including on The Dog & The Boy (see the trailer above). Released over two years ago, that short anime filme became one of Netflix’s first big AI controversies because of its use of backgrounds generated entirely by AI.
But Sakurai seems to believe that it’s only fans that have a problem with AI, while the animators themselves are all for it.
“There are negative voices towards AI from anime fans, saying, ‘It’s inhumane for humans to be replaced by machines’. But from the perspective of those who create the anime, it also feels inhumane to draw 100,000 pictures all by hand,” he said.
That view is likely to surprise many animators and other artists. We’ve reported many times about the opposition to AI from creatives, both because of fears about job losses and concerns about how many AI models were trained without respect for the rights of copyright holders.
But Sakurai also suggested that the prospect of job losses isn’t a problem, at least in Japan, since the anime industry actually faces a shortage of workers.
“With the declining birthrate meaning fewer people are entering the anime industry, there are dark jokes about how, in an era where everything has been replaced by AI, there will be no one left in the production studio,” he added.
Sakurai did recognise that there are differences of opinion among creatives in different sectors, with manga artists being more opposed to AI because AI is more able to generate still images than video, while AI video still suffers from technical issues.
“Once a manga or illustration is printed, there is a real possibility that it could be replaced by AI on the spot. In the case of anime, even if it’s just pictures, it needs to be turned into a video, and at the moment, it’s still a high hurdle to get to the point where it’s just a big hurdle to get to a video.”
Even if Sakurai were right and animators do favour the use of AI, it’s still a genuine problem for studios if fans reject it.
The debate about AI in animation, and in all creative sectors, continues to be complicated by the sheer breadth of what the term can refer to. There are animation tools that make use of AI to speed up processes without generating finished artwork, but Sakurai has favoured the latter.
Speaking about the backlash against The Dog & The Boy, he said: “People wrote things like Netflix had finally wiped out humans and was trying to make all its videos with AI”. But his recent comments aren’t likely to convince people that this isn’t the ultimate intention.
He revealed that his new studio Salamander is working on an experiment in which it’s training an AI mode on concept artist Kenichiro Tomiyasu’s art style so that the artist can draw a rough doodle, which the AI will turn into a finished artwork – so a bit like Microsoft Paint Cocreator, then. Sakurai claims that his studio has agreed to destroy the AI mode when the project is over.
Many will be hoping the Netflix doesn’t continue to follow Sakurai’s views on the matter, particularly after it’s seen a recent revival in animation (see the new KPop Demon Hunters art book).
