AI has made plenty of artists mad for allowing just about anyone to generate art with relatively little effort, and Netflix seemingly wants to be part of that growing controversy. The world’s leading streamer recently launched a new anime short called the Dog & The Boy, and while the content seems innocent enough (robot dog with boy), it’s drawn a lot of controversy because it uses AI-generated artwork for its backgrounds. Netflix says that it decided to try AI because of a labor shortage in the anime industry.
From a Netflix Japan post (machine translation):
On January 31, Netflix Anime Creators Base (hereafter, Creators Base), rinna, and WIT STUDIO released the joint project animation “Dog and Boy”. In this project, which started in January 2022, we also challenged the joint development of animation background image generation tools in parallel with animation production. We experimented to see if the latest technology could be used to assist anime background art production.
Since its opening in September 2021, Creators Base has searched for best practices in the production process with various partners in order to support animation production in the long term. This project was carried out experimentally as part of that effort.
From a Vice report:
The tweet drew instant criticism and outrage from commenters who felt that Netflix was using AI to avoid paying human artists. This has been a central tension since image-generation AI took off last year, as many artists see the tools as unethical—due to being trained on masses of human-made art scraped from the internet—and cudgels to further cut costs and devalue workers. Netflix Japan’s claim that the AI was used to fill a supposed labor gap hit the bullseye on these widespread concerns.
Netflix アニメ・クリエイターズ・ベース×技術開発のrinna株式会社×WIT STUDIOによる共同プロジェクトアニメ『犬と少年』のショートムービー。
— Netflix Japan | ネットフリックス (@NetflixJP) January 31, 2023
人手不足のアニメ業界を補助する実験的な取り組みとして、3分間の映像全カットの背景画に画像生成技術を活用！ pic.twitter.com/GYuWONSqlJ
Discussion (18 replies)
Join Discussion →Luddites be luddites. AI is a tool, a tool's purpose is to make things easier for people. It does not make people suddenly artists. The amount of crap AI art is proof enough of that. You still need a sense for the aesthetics to be able to put out decent AI generated art.
Some "artists" are mad cauze it will be harder for them to monetize their stuff, but if you are truly in it for the art and not to get rich kvik then you can contine making art the old fashioned way.
As for the naysayers who have not made a single piece of art before, but are now complaining, go ahead be an artist if you think it is so easy now.
AI art has a huge future, no question. I see no problems with Netflixs actios tbh.
I'm not really an AI fan, but I can see the appeal, as long as the end product is good.
The differences between industries sure are interesting.
If AI was used to generate 3d artwork for games, and I mean the whole thing, not just the backgrounds, no one would care as loing as the results were good, but in Anime it is apparently a problem.
I don't get the HC anime crowd, they also hated on Ghost in The Shell SAC2045 for being 3D computer animated instead or regularly drawn. Who gives a damn how is it made as long as the end product is good? Anime aren't sausages.
I guess its just that people like it, and want to ' maintain' the culture or some such. Same as anything really, meh. Humans move on, its no disrespect or whatever, its just life I guess. I do the same criticism here and there, but in the end I know what's what and normally don't start or join any internet fuss.
I don't know anything about this Netflix controversy, but there are copyright issues involved when AI models are trained from human-created content, and those appear anything but resolved. We've already seen this in other domains with projects such as GitHub CoPilot.
As a viewer, I couldn't care less how the art is produced, and I see nothing unethical about the use of AI-generated images per se.
The most fitting way to deal with legal issues that stem from the use of AI is of course to hire a lawyer... a robot lawyer!
An AI robot lawyer was set to argue in court. Real lawyers shut it down. — NPR.org
(The link is not relevant to the Netflix controversy, but too funny not to post.)
The only potential qualm I could think of is that AI doesn't create anything on its own. It uses materials that are fed to it (usually stuff on the Internet) and as such it is a form of derivative work using art made by others which might be copyrighted and who I am guessing have not been compensated for it.
But that is probably not what the Anime fans are complaining about.
Right, and that is exactly the issue I was referring to in my first sentence. ;) But without further information than what is provided from the FPS article, how it applies to the Netflix situation is left as a question mark.
Yeah, I meant to express that comment more along the lines of "I agree, ..." but somehow I left that out :p
Maybe I should comment less from my phone when in the middle of other things :p
That's actually incorrect, but a common misconception. AI software does not contain any of the images, and it does not use the copyrighted images to generate its own. It only uses the abstract latent data what it has learnt during training.
If we replaced the AI with any human artist the accusation of copyright breach would be utterly stupid: "You looked at the Mona Lisa before painting your own picture, you thief!"
I disagree. Without human input there can be no original content. It's just an algorithm that mashed together existing stuff and attempts to pass it off as it's own.
It is a fact that it was created by a human that makes it real. Anything a machine algorithm does is just reusing that humans creation in increasingly abstract ways.
As opposed to what its name would suggest, artificial intelligence has no Intelligence, and never will have any integgilgence. It just gets increasingly better at mimicking intelligence. Turing got that one wrong. Fooling a human that it is real does not make it real, no matter how convincing it gets.
I just explained how AI works, you can dislike it, but that won't change the fundamentals of it. When a human artist learns to paint he/she also looks at thousands of works from others, that is not theft, that is learning and getting inspiration.
There is no such thing as truly original content, humans are also incapable of making something from nothing, they can only mix and match what they seen elsewhere. Take our depictions of an "alien" for example. We can not make something truly alien, we can only take elements we already saw in the animal kingdom and mix and match them. This is exactly how AI art works also.
I don't know what that means. AI art is real and it is here to stay whether some people like it or not. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. They can put up roadblocks preventing AI assisted art from being copyrighted or monetized, but that only prevents its use in professional circles, but it can no longer be taken away from hobbyists.
I told you it does not reuse anything. After it has been trained, the original imagery that it has learnt from is discarded, poof, gone, no longer there.
When you see AI art that looks almost the same as an original traditional artwork, that is not normal, that was manipulated by a human to make it look similar. And thus it is the human's fault for trying to steal someone else's art. If you just use the AI normally with no malicious intent, it can not accurately recreate any original art that was used in its training. It's like you trying to draw something you saw once from memory.
And I've been saying that for a decade to doomsday fearmongers. AI has no will or ambitions, outside of what the human controller programs into it.
Yes, but this has nothing to do with AI generated art or whether AI generated art is stealing other people's work.
Hmm, this is a good comment.
Could one consider a sunset "art"? Or only a photograph or painting of a sunset?
Aren't humans just reusing creation from nature, in increasingly abstract ways?
Well, I guess Valve disagrees:
And honestly, if I had my way we would force the industry to destroy all AI models trained on user data without those users explicit consent. (No, an EULA or privacy policy that everyone just scrolls past anyway, wouldn't count)
[URL unfurl="true"]https://forums.thefpsreview.com/threads/valve-is-banning-games-with-ai-generated-art-from-steam-developers-say.13076/[/URL]