“Animators are going to lose jobs.”
Walk Like an Egyptian
A cutesy Pixar-style animation clip featuring what appears to be an Ancient Egyptian girl is going viral this week because it’s entirely AI generated, seemingly demonstrating the quantum leap that AI video has made in a relatively short amount of time.
Los Angeles-based director and photographer Ellenor Argyropoulos released the short, silent clip this week on X-formerly-Twitter, where it quickly racked up 7.5 million views in just a few days.
“I am absolutely BLOWN AWAY,” Argyropoulos wrote.
Video Drone
In a reply, Argyropoulos explained she first created an image using a “variety of techniques (some hand drawings also)” and then used tech company Luma’s AI video generator, Dream Machine, to animate the image into something that wouldn’t look out of place in a Pixar or DreamWorks kid’s movie.
Luma claims on its website that Dream Machine can also do text-to-video prompts like OpenAI’s Sora, in addition to being able to make “physically accurate, consistent and eventful shots” with “great character consistency and accurate physics.”
The video elicited much praise, but also derision from luddites in the peanut gallery and existential angst from artists.
“This is horrifying,” one artist replied. “I have never felt such little hope in becoming an animator. This genuinely breaks me, I hope this never ever picks up traction. But that’s a hopeless hope, Disney is a soulless corporation, once they find out how to do this, animators are going to lose jobs.”
Art-Pocalypse
The animation industry is in trouble, with many layoffs last year and this year, mainly due to economic woes in streaming and mergers between media companies like WarnerMedia and Discovery.
And while generative AI isn’t a mainstream tool in the animation industry yet, many predict that a lot of animation jobs will be eliminated in the future.
Still, the time of humans in the arts isn’t over quite yet. For one thing, generative AI still has thorny copyright issues to sort out. And making a movie-quality video can still require immense quantities of human intervention in the post-production phase because the models still spit out unworkable and weird outputs.
Still, if you compare the viral Pixar-style animation video to AI animation efforts in years past, those could be technical problems that machine learning engineers bulldoze over very soon.
More on AI video: OpenAI Reveals Impressive AI That Generates Photorealistic Video
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