WIT Studio released an animated short titled The Dog and The Boy, a joint collaborative effort that came as a result of the Netflix Anime Creator Base. The animation short notably is created with the help of an AI.
The Dog and the Boy animation features backgrounds generated by AI, which were created after a human created the concept art before it was finally touched up again by a human. Netflix says the use of AI is an attempt to “alleviate the lack of manpower in the anime industry”, and credits the backgrounds to AI+Human, but doesn’t specify who drew the initial concept art or who made the final touch-ups.
The concept sounds interesting, an animation partially created with the help of AI. But the internet at large didn’t seem to think so, and as of writing, the video’s reactions are mostly mixed with it having just as many likes as it does dislikes.
So… why’s the internet so divided between The Dog and The Boy?
▍ The Dog and The Boy Animation Short
▍ AI Art and the Artist
A good chunk of the replies to The Dog and The Boy can be found on Twitter where reactions are pretty mixed about the prospect of using AI to replace artists. English Musician DJ Fresh replied to the post asking if Netflix and WIT really did look for animators as he claims there is actually a huge supply of animators looking for work.
It’s been speculated that rather than being used as a way to mitigate a lack of animators, Netflix, and other studios may be looking to AI to replace artists, as many animators in the industry are refusing to work for the dismal pay often spoken of behind the scenes.
Naturally many artists are worried about how this will affect their role in the industry, as it seems now their careers can be seemingly replaced by artificial intelligence. Why pay someone to painstakingly draw art when a computer can now do it? Fears have spread that this will even further devalue their work, which is already plaguing the industry. Stories like these aren’t uncommon when outlets like The New York Times made an article discussing the low pay rates animators have to deal with.
Even setting aside the aspect of AI Art taking away from human work, many share the sentiment that using AI to create art is fundamentally wrong, with artists and big names within the industry like Hayao Miyazaki famously bashing the use of AI in a presentation.
While it’s still unlikely that humans will be replaced by AI in terms of art and animation, the concern is definitely not unfounded with the proliferation of AI artwork and how the technology is advancing with even big studios now experimenting with it.
Even artists like sasakure.uk (whose music can be heard in the animation) used an AI code called “M” to help create the song “AINOUTA” for The Dog and the Boy, which sounds very similar to Hatsune Miku. While there’s no doubt sasakure.UK can make great tracks without the use of an AI, it was still used this time around and likely cut down on the time they needed to spend creating the song in some, but not all areas.
You can compare the phases of one of the backgrounds shown at the end of The Dog and the Boy below. What do you think about AI art in animation? Do you think its value lies as an animation tool and would still require skilled artists? Or do you think AI has no place in art and should be left to people, or somewhere in between?
