The AI artwork controversies have now come to the field of anime, thanks to a hilariously absurd Rock, Paper, Scissors video by the group Corridor Digital.
The video, which runs about seven minutes long, was created using a combination of three different AI programs, known as Stable Diffusion, Dreambooth, and DaVinci Resolve. Diffusion creates images from noise and can be used to turn live-action video into animation. The model was trained using footage of the actors in costume, and the art style was apparently trained using the anime Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. The backgrounds were created in Unreal Engine and had the same style applied to them, then were composited in using greenscreen techniques. The end result is certainly impressive, if not perfect.
The Future of Anime & AI Art?
Anime has been one of the key styles that single-image AI art has been trained on; its generally simplistic nature made it easy for AI to grasp, and it's entirely possible to go and generate an image right at this very moment on any one of dozens of sites. However, the controversy around AI art has been centered on this training. In order to copy an art style, an AI has to look at a lot of art in that style, and much of that work is sourced online without consulting the original creators of the artwork. Some artists have complained that as a result, AI generates art in their styles, hurting their ability to gain employment now that a machine can instantly recreate anything in their personal style. Corridor Digital's piece tried to circumvent this problem as much as possible by relying on a single anime film for their style, but it still doesn't eliminate it entirely.
And despite its impressive look, the final product still has some issues capturing the anime style entirely. The technique that they've created is in many ways similar to an old animation technique known as rotoscoping, where artists would trace the movements of an actor frame-by-frame, drawing over it with an animated character. The Rock, Paper, Scissors video is essentially AI-driven rotoscoping, which again is technically impressive, but isn't quite the same as drawing something from scratch. It's fairly easy to tell, when one is looking for it, what was generated as a single frame and what was taken from the live-action video, as the single frames far more closely match a traditional anime style. While some of the ideas used to generate this video merit further development, it's unlikely that a process like this will be replacing standard anime production, at least in the foreseeable future.
It's understandable how worrying the idea can be for artists, and there are certainly ethical issues with AI in general that have yet to be resolved. The anime industry may be safe for now, but these issues do need to be addressed before the technology matures.
Source: Corridor Digital