AI has been a trending topic over the past months, especially with the rise of AI text and art generators. In line with the recent AI developments, Netflix recently revealed an anime short that makes use of AI-generated art.
On the Netflix Japan page, an anime short entitled Dog and Boy was shared.
This short is made by Netflix Anime Creators' Base with the help of AI. It is aimed as an experimental effort to help the anime industry’s labor shortage.
AI Art and Anime
While AI-generated art has been experimented on for years now, recent models such as OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have caused the popularity of AI art to skyrocket.
Some say that these AI art generators will help in a myriad of ways. For instance, indie game developers can generate artwork for games quickly.
The creation of backgrounds for anime works is also another possible application.
However, many people online, especially artists, have been deeply critical of AI art. Many say that AI artworks are “soulless” and that they aren’t true art.
There are also concerns about how this disruptive technology may come at the cost of many artists’ livelihoods.
With the discourse on AI art continuing online, a clip of a Hayao Miyazaki documentary resurfaced, showing how critical the legendary anime director is of art generation technology.
Despite the criticisms and concerns regarding the technology, many are still experimenting with ways to implement AI art into various creative fields.
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Netflix’s AI-Generated Anime
This new Netflix short is one such experiment. While this is not a fully AI-generated anime (as the level of technology is not there yet), it does feature AI art in the form of backgrounds.
Working on the short is technology developer rinna Inc. along with Wit Studio, the animation studio behind recent hits such as Ranking of Kings and Spy x Family.
Check out the new anime short here:
While the short uses AI-generated backgrounds, the credits revealed that they aren’t purely made by AI.
Instead, they still had to be touched up after generation. But it does make the drawing process faster, at least in this case.
At this point though, it remains to be seen if AI models will become a tool that will be used in more anime projects moving forward.
There’s a possibility that it might be, given the recent labor shortages in the anime industry.
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Source: Netflix Japan
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