You must log in or register to comment.
Tldr; animators are literaly dying from overwork(long hours and little sustinance) so instead of paying them more and hiring more animators they supliment the shit situation with ai ti avoid fixing it.
There is currently a labor crunch in the anime industry due to its unattractive working conditions. A 2024 report by the Nippon Anime and Film Culture Association showed that workers were overworked and underpaid, with hourly rates below the country’s minimum wage being common.
TLDR: money
Japan’s Copyright Act, amended in 2019, is largely interpreted as allowing the use of copyrighted materials to train AI tools — without the consent of the copyright holder. The law, specifically more permissive than those in the EU or the US, aims to attract AI investors to the Asian country.
It’s actually strange that Japan allows this because that country normally has very strict copyright laws compared to the EU and the United States.
Charlie Fink, former Disney producer and current adjunct professor of cinematic AI at Chapman University, feels that the use of the rapidly developing tech will “lead to a new golden age of Hollywood,” one that would be “highly democratized, because an individual could make a film for a few thousand dollars,” he told DW
If Fink is right in what he says, in the future, I think there will be a debate about whether AI is a good thing or a bad thing. Because if AI makes cinema a movement like free software and/or open source, it’s a win-win, right?
As long as the AI is also Free Software or Open Source.
sounds like japan might be desperate for the lack of anime workers.
Much of the animation takes place outside Japan these days. If you watch enough recent anime end credits, you’ll see a lot of what look like romanized Vietnamese names. And there was a scandal . . . about a year ago now? . . . when some material for an anime then in production was found on the server of a North Korean studio (probably because a Chinese studio to which the anime had been outsourced then outsourced it further without paying attention to little things like international treaties). And I don’t think the teams remaining in Japan have any shortage of recruits.
This issue, as with any business, is “can AI produce more for cheaper at an acceptable quality?” If it does make real inroads, it’ll be the outsourcing studios doing the less-important scenes that get replaced first.
The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual “anime elements” and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste.
OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I’ll still spell it out.
The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it’s almost like feudal Europe’s system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish.
There’s no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-<companies> having sort of an internal social collapse in year 2005 right after Revenge of the Sith being premiered ; I love the prequels, despite all the pretense and cringe, but their verbal parts are almost fillers, their cinematographic language and matching music are flawless, the dialogue just disrupts it all while not adding much, - I think Lucas should have been more decisive, a bit like Tartakovsky with the Clone Wars cartoon, just more serious, because non-verbal doesn’t equal stupid). OK, my thought wandered away.
Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian.
Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I’d want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.
Why […] AI […]?
- Money
Meh. There really isn‘t a lot there. The short film mentioned has largely been regarded as a complete flop with no critical acclaim whatsoever. It‘s regarded so bad it’s essentially a meme. A real slop fest.
As for copyright: Using models trained on copyrighted material is more of a gray area than being explicitly allowed. They literally mention the act went active in 2019. That is before the rise of AI. So if anything they‘re just really behind the curve and not so much embracing technology.
This reminds me of the saying that Japan has been in the year 2000 for the past 40 years. Some older folks somehow still think it‘s some futuristic paradise for sci-fi nerds when that hasn‘t been the case for over 20 years.
