When AI painting starts to grab the jobs of anime people

Original source: China Youth Daily

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI‌

Every change in productivity, while bringing technological progress and higher efficiency, will inevitably bring about a change of talents. In the past few years, artificial intelligence has achieved extremely rapid development, including "image generation technology" based on machine learning and deep learning. The emergence of ChatGPT4 has lowered the threshold for AI drawing to almost zero. Ordinary users can output images with unique style and imagination just by inputting text sentences. However, the side effect of this is violent turmoil in industries such as animation design, illustration, and game design.

Many game companies introduce AI painting into the workflow to get rid of the talent pressure and financial anxiety brought about by the game industry. Some game teams cut down the original art outsourcing team, and some game outsourcing companies directly laid off half of the people. "The original artist used Al to complete the plan, and the work efficiency can be increased by at least 50%. Before the company needed 38 original artists, and now 20 people have been laid off. The company does not support idlers!" The technical director of a game art outsourcing company that has just completed layoffs revealed.

AI Drawing Is Unstoppable, How Can Design Practitioners Respond? At the ongoing China Beijing Animation Week, animation practitioners discussed this issue.

Status: Some companies have reduced their staff from hundreds to 30

"The animation and game industry is a creative industry that integrates labor. How to save costs and improve efficiency and performance is the focus of most animation companies. At this time, artificial intelligence (AI) appeared. It has an incomparable advantage in text generation, early-stage art design schemes, and mid-term detail performance improvements." Zhang Juan, Dean of the School of Film and Animation, Chengdu University, has been paying attention to the impact of AI graphics on the animation industry.

She introduced that compared with the mid-to-late production process, AI technology has the greatest impact on industries such as comics, illustrations, picture books, games and animation pre-art design, which are mainly graphic creative performance. "Especially in the sketch presentation and effect refinement of conceptual art design schemes, AI is very replaceable."

"The pre-art design of two-dimensional animation and the main writer of the comic illustration company, the concept art design of the game and other positions have also been impacted. My colleagues and I found that these positions have experienced different degrees of recruitment reduction or cuts and job mergers." During the investigation, Zhang Juan found that a Sichuan original painting outsourcing company that participated in well-known game projects such as "Glory of the King", "Three Kingdoms" and "The Fifth Personality". Painting projects are also shrinking. In the current recruitment of animation companies and game companies, we found that everyone is recruiting AI painters, and it is clearly stated in the job requirements that they must generate completed drawings according to the project, use various AI painting tools proficiently, and refine AI-generated drawings according to project needs.”

Zhang Juan pointed out that AI currently has a great impact on animation companies in the early stage, and 3D cannot adjust its production mode as a whole in the middle stage of the project, so it is relatively less impacted by AI for the time being. "However, this is temporary. The iteration of AI is very fast. Once some bottlenecks such as the shortening of the digital model construction cycle and the optimization of digital asset management are resolved, the impact is only a matter of time."

Impact: animation majors are put to the test

Changes in the animation industry have a direct impact on the employment of upstream animation students. According to Zhang Juan’s analysis, “At present, the probability of basic application talents being replaced by artificial intelligence is the highest. Therefore, for the majors that implement conventional and traditional animation technology pedagogy, the development and employment prospects of this major are the least optimistic. For animation technology professionals who are familiar with the animation production process, such as illustration picture books, industry colorists, 3D animation industry modelers, etc., their professional abilities are mainly used in the production of original content in film and television animation, comic illustration picture books, and game production. To a multi-functional type with one specialty. The requirements for professionalism have also been raised again.”

In order to adapt to the changes in talents, colleges and universities will also adjust the training programs for animation professionals. "The difference between ordinary animators and senior animators is that in addition to techniques, the latter will also emphasize original creative planning, proficient application of animation principles, and deep grasp of animation performance." Zhang Juan said, "Therefore, in addition to proficiency in professional skills, we should also broaden their professional vision, improve students' cultural and historical level, exercise their academic accomplishment, and story planning ability.

In addition, Zhang Juan believes that students majoring in animation must have the ability to appreciate and select while facing so many massive generated images. Only in this way can artificial intelligence be harnessed in the future.

Thinking: AI cannot replace human understanding of roles

Specifically, Ma Hua, a professor at the Animation School of Beijing Film Academy and a Ph.D. in film studies, gave four suggestions, "First, in teaching, more students should be familiarized with AI, whether it is new production technology or technology in the design field."

Second, it is necessary to further strengthen practical teaching. Only by improving students' understanding of animation in a practical way can students truly understand the second step of improvement in content or content creation itself after the realization of AI technology.

MCA said that practical teaching will also exercise students' cross-border cooperation ability and teamwork ability. AI is now reducing manpower or reducing the human creation process (cost) to a certain extent. However, the creation of animation has always been carried forward by a cooperative team or mutual realization of the project in the team process. In the process of cooperation, the spark of thought generated by the collision between people cannot be replaced by AI. Even if there are disputes, collisions, or even quarrels during the team creation process, these parts are all precious things.

Third, in addition to AI, our teaching will now encounter more fragmented learning. In this case, more emphasis should be placed on integrated theoretical teaching. In the teaching process, we should emphasize the part of film history, animation history, film art history, and art comprehensive cultivation, because AI only samples from a large amount of data. It does not have the ability to summarize and develop creative laws that are constantly iterated and accumulated over time in the development of films and animations. This part is a very important theoretical reserve and foundation for you to use and control AI in the future.

The last thing is to return to the story of creation. MCA observes that at present, AI can create logical stories, but what can’t be replaced is human’s understanding of the characters and the presentation of the characters’ emotions. “We read and feel the stories, and what we leave with emotional resonance is precisely a kind of memory left by the emotional collision between people at this moment or at that moment. This part is difficult to replace by relying on big data and sampling alone. Therefore, returning to the story, the characters, and the excavation of the emotions of the characters, AI is currently not involved.”

Observation: The big change in animation, starting from the panda "Panpan"

Before the era of AI painting, China's animation industry also experienced a transformation in which humans were replaced by computers. Li Zhongqiu, vice chairman of the International Animation Association, is a witness of that change. In 1990, my country created the first 3D animation domestically produced by Panpan Panda (the mascot) of the Asian Games. Li Zhongqiu was the introduction of 3D animation technology at that time. "At that time, the industry in China was zero, so there was no word '3D animation', and I translated it."

Since then, Li Zhongqiu has been engaged in the promotion of the animation industry with Mr. Zhang Songlin, the old chairman of the China Animation Association. He remembers the first time he went to Meiying Studio, he brought that machine and introduced it to everyone, saying that animation in the future can be done by computer. Several seniors of Meiying Studio didn’t think so.

Zhang Songlin gave a very good reply. He said: "Old money, let me tell you, unless we never use this. If suddenly everyone freezes up and freezes, when you wake up ten years later, do you think you will still use paper? If computers were used at that time, then we might as well start trying today."

Around 2003, the domestic animation industry finally turned hand-painted animation into computers, and then developed technologies such as paperless animation, VR, and motion capture... Then, what will happen in the era of AI painting that has come. Both pessimism and optimism appear thin, because this era has already begun and cannot be reversed.

On April 21st, Ruan Jia, a domestic CG veteran, used her self-drawn "Elden Ring" demonstration sketch against the AI. The time limit was 30 minutes, allowing the majority of netizens to use AI to refine it, and then compare it with her finished draft. Many people are paying attention to this war without gunpowder. "After the war," Teacher Ruan Jia said, "I'm not resisting technological progress, but I don't think I should insult those who fell in this wave of shock. If the times kill you, then I will try my best to fight to the end in my profession."