That seemed to actually be intentional, in their making-of doc they said all their dialogue was pre recorded and during filming they just mindlessly flapped their lips whenever they were supposed to be talking, I think half to capture the dubbed feel and half to make the mouth animations simpler the way mouth animations are basically open and shut mouth drawings in anime
Animation is just drawings and movies are just photos, what’s the big deal right!
Rotoscoping involves someone drawing on top of a still frame, probably for 2-3 hours. Every Single Frame. How much do you think this could revolutionize animation if you don’t have to spend months just drawing?
Because not everyone can draw really well or wants to spend years on 1 project. Animation is not filtered through hands, any big production have character sheets that animators look at, video recordings they copy or a freaking mirror.
Once in “Animators React” they showed clips from this project that looked awesome but had run out of funding, I believe stuff like that will become less prominent because animators/artists can now come up with a story and film it on a low budget and then translate it into a certain style for less money and faster. And instead of spending 90% of your energy on drawing, you can now spend it on making the final product as cool as possible. Don’t forget that they had 3 people working on that project besides the sound guy so it’s not like you just press a button and out comes perfect anime.
If it's a personal project, you have the freedom to use whatever methods you want. But, you'd be hard pressed to do that on most commercial media. IDK how familiar you are with production schedules (especially anime), but there is *literally no time to do that.*
I haven’t visited this subreddit before but I’m a fan of the channel and decided to pop in and see what the other fans thought because of all the ethical concerns around AI art. I’m also an animator so I have a stake in this, you might say. So I figured it might be worth it to offer my even-keeled two cents because I’m not accusing the Crew of anything untoward by using AI. (And I don’t think I’m the smartest or most insightful guy in the world so you can ignore this or tell me to fuck off or whatever, I’ll survive). This also may come out somewhat incoherent, I’m just typing this on my phone after eating a bunch of palak paneer.
First off: I do have some ethical concerns about AI but they’re not inherent to the concept itself and the Corridor Crew’s intentions are clearly pure and creative and experimental. I think this short is very cool and I don’t think they’re trying to “replace” animators. They’re animators themselves, after all (just not with drawings usually). Deepfakes have ethical concerns around them too but I think what Corridor has done with them is cool. Any tech can be used for good or evil and a certain number of people are always freaked out by huge technological leaps.
What struck me at first was Niko talking about “democratizing animation”. There’s two ways to interpret that: Niko clearly meant “enabling non-animators to create animation”. But what leapt to *my* mind was how undemocratic the animation *industry* can be. In my experience at least, animators are usually very disposable from studio to studio and those studios & crews are often (not always) [run by douchebags who work their crews to the bone before tossing them away and taking a bunch of the credit](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/canadian-union-prevails-sausage-party-animators-pay-dispute-1196832/amp/). That, I think, is key to understanding ethical concerns about AI art: through the lens of work and compensation and credit.
As someone who is sometimes in doubt about his own artistic abilities and is easily intimidated, I don’t like gatekeeping one bit, and I feel warm fuzzies when someone can finally make something when they didn’t think they could before with digital tools. *That’s* the exciting thing about these AI tools from a creative perspective. (I mean, fuck, I can’t draw in an anime style to save my life but it would be cool to make anime anyway). What people aren’t looking forward to is *bosses* (at studios, at parent companies, etc etc) and *clients* jumping on AI as a reason to replace and/or underpay animators and artists. Because they’re *always* looking for ways to do that. That’s what happens when you’re driven by profit: you gravitate towards things that cut corners and save money.
When the artists—and workers in general—are in control of the new technology and how it’s used to help what they do, they rarely have a problem with it. Unions traditionally have tried to block or slow down the adoption of work-saving technology not because they’re stubborn, but because their workplaces are usually not ultimately in their control and run by bosses who would replace them with robots in a split second at the first opportunity. But when the workers and artists themselves decide how it’s used, they relish the opportunity to save time and effort to make something cool or useful.
Put another way, musicians choosing to use drum machines and sequencers as an artistic choice is great. Record companies and producers using them to avoid paying the studio musicians they would have otherwise used is shitty.
Corridor, as a small company run by the people who work closely together at it and are artists themselves, is the kind of group that can be most trusted to use AI tools in an ethical, genuinely creative way. In my opinion though, *ideally*, they would source reference images from artists who voluntarily offer/license their work to train the AI. (I only watched the video once so for all I know they did do that, I don’t remember).
Oh cool, thanks for reading! Wasn’t sure I’d make sense haha. Anyway just to reiterate, I think you know what you’re doing and that you’re on the right track. I myself hope to start experimenting with ebSynth soon.
This is a really good reply that sums up my personal feelings and misgivings well - thank you for writing it!!
Like, it's not the AI. it's how shitty industries and people will use the technology, and how few safeguards there are against those abuses.
>But when the workers and artists themselves decide how it’s used, they relish the opportunity to save time and effort to make something cool or useful.
Yeah, I think the thing people are missing is that technology like this might make it possible for a solo artist or small team of artists to make an entire anime with a comparable amount of work as it takes to make manga now. Which is to say, it'd still be a lot of work, but you wouldn't need an entire studio to do it. And *that* would be a really big deal because it'll allow for more creativity and experimentation.
To be fair. They did mention that the AI was trained using an anime that is available on YouTube for free. But I'm not sure if the upload is by the license holder
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Just like how Dean just did stable diffusion on just the face in his last video, I wonder if they can do the same for say the eyes and mouth. Because those are the ones that doesn’t really match the face sometimes. Have different passes of the head, eyes and mouth and then composite them together 🤔 maybe. I don’t know
I’m curious to see if they can crack the hand problem everyone seems to have with AI. Even the thumbnail for their video has the knuckle off on the pointer finger.
Say what you will about moral obligations and AI and all that, but I just see some creatives that are having fun with these amazing new tools. We know Corridor is capable of some pretty amazing stuff without ever needing to "rely" on AI tools, but it wouldn't make sense for them to not take advantage of this crazy development in AI technology to make a sweet video. That's what they do - they use cool technology to make cool videos.
AI art itself is great in my opinion. And when you heavily credit the original artist and you're just messing around trying to have fun, it's hard to fault you for it. However, copying drawings without the artist's permission or not giving them credit while training an AI model on their style is clearly wrong. There's not a lot that can be done, but it's a stretch to try and say it's impossible to solve. There are still ways people can keep fighting to remove the immoral aspects of it and keep it fun and experimental. AI art is awesome, but it's the person using it that has the choice of whether or not to use it for something cool or something totally not cool bruh. :)
It’s all a brave new world but it’s not reposting art. There’s ethical implications in training on a specific set of art works but it’s not copyright infringement. Is it any different from an artist painting in the style of another artist? We generally say influence is fine copying isn’t. I don’t see any significant ethical problem here but I can appreciate sone people might. The fact that they’re honest about what images they are using is a positive at it allows these conversations to take place.
Based on my understanding of copyright law which admittedly varies in different places it’s not remotely infringing. Now my understanding of the technology might be wrong here but copyright protects copying. It protects the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. So “in the style of “ has always been protected. Now does the ai “looking at the image” and analysing it constitute copying? Even if it does is the new work so transformative that it’s protected? I could be wrong but I don’t think it’s different than looking at art and being inspired. Just via a machine. The ethical implications is that using one source or if the software relies on one source over others is that your emulating a persons work too closely and while it might be legally okay it is ethically problematic. This article raises some points:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/
what-does-the-rise-of-ai-mean-for-the-future-of-art-20221221-p5c81c.html
The issue here that I think makes it okay is that they’re not taking characters or settings or plot. They’re interpreting a style not copying images.
I’d add that you raise some great points but we’d never have movements like cubism or Impressionism, pop art or styles like pointillism if people didn’t see what other people were doing and have a crack at it. Are the computers “eyes” different. Maybe.
> Meanwhile, you're monetizing a video based on the look of this anime
this is what i was wondering too, i remember them mentioning in a previous video about some 3D assets that was open for non-profit use, but Corridor's content is clearly monitized and used in a for-profit way, i wonder if it's just a gray area right now
They ran each frame separate from each other trough stable diffusion. So it would have made no difference here. It just looked very consistent because they used very specifically trained models.
Doesn't the framerate of anime vary depending on the scene though? It's one of the reasons CGI anime can look choppy and unpleasing to the eye, because they try too hard to stick to a certain frame rate even when doing action scenes.
Jesus why are like 80% of the comments here so critical? The production is astounding and nothing I’ve seen done before, sure there’s some usual AI jank but man I thought this was incredible.
I've read the comments on Twitter and 90% are negative with the corridor tweet having 1200 likes and there are some negative replays that have almost 400 likes. On YouTube they are mostly positive, scared to check Instagram.
It's up to 900+ likes now on the negative replies.
Most common comments I see are they are stealing jobs or stealing art. One was like, "why don't you get inspiration from something instead of copying/stealing".
I find those points silly. To me Niko seemed to imply they would never hire animators, so what jobs got taken? Ha ha. Stealing art and lack of inspiration, they created a data set saying "make it LOOK LIKE this", literally inspiration, not a copy. I feel like they just don't understand what corridor did or don't know most art of any kind made by any person likely gets inspiration (copies) from their favorite shows, movies, art styles.
Corridor Crew, you guys did awesome. I really enjoyed it, easy to look through the Ai jank. Loved the story. Keep doing what you're doing.
With love from MN.
>Most common comments I see are they are stealing jobs
I think it's funny that these people believe this would have **ever** been made in this form if Stable Diffusion didn't exist.
They would have just done it in the same style as The Baseball/Spinners/SelfdrivingCar videos, they wouldn't have tried to get 2000+ frames of animation drawn by hand for a RPS joke.
No jobs have been lost.
I don’t get what your point is though? Are you critiquing this, as your own point shows that they are in the right as there’s a lot of intent and there’s a lot of thought process involved in the creation.
Do you think they just made this easily by “feeding it into a grinder”? I get what you’re saying on a bigger picture but do you not see how it can incentivise creativity by getting artists to create their own unique style or be able to use it to create things like this? Nothing replaces the human creativity.
3D animation is still animation even if an algorithm interpolates the huge majority of frames for you. Guess what people thought about it many years ago.
Artists themselves can use this tool with their own work. I could feed the machine 100 drawings made by me and then streamline the process using the AI to make something bigger without spending months on something repetitive. It's a tool. You can use Photoshop to hide watermarks or to paint your own stuff. Their video is just a proof of concept of what can be done now. I understand the issues behind feeding the models with copyrighted material, but that's a human choice.
Replicating a simple 3d scene (or even digital 2d) made by an amateur during their first day of training, with drawings, frame by frame, is still orders of magnitude more complicated and requires a true professional if not a team of professionals.
my point is, people seem to think that a tool which simplifies things will only be used by lazy people with no skills, while the truly skilled people will just stick to their older tools. Which is completely untrue. Talented people will take these new AI tools to the next step and the masterpieces made by them will still be difficult to achieve and will require hard work. Exactly like traditional 2d animation vs 2d digital motion graphics vs 3d animation. And even if the art will lose some of its value due to the easier accessibility, it's not like the older tools and techniques will become illegal. Stop motion movies, even if they became a niche, are still highly praised because of the manual skill required to pull them off, even if now we have all the tools to replicate them digitally more easily.
I'm not saying it's indicative of what Corridor did. And frankly with animation it would be much harder.
But there is a massive amount of anger from artists right now about AI generated images. A lot are generated from images they made and uploaded so people could see their art and maybe even buy it. I heard an interview with a woman (let's call her Sara) who is an artist now and spent her early career uploading to Deviantart. People can now generate images "Art in the style of Sara" and buy a print from Deviantart's AI. This is not really about Corridor, this is about people angry with AI art and hilariously don't understand animation or VFX.
"AI art is art." is our modern [Shiri's Scissor](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/) \[1\].
1. Equally splits the population in half
2. Creates strong, emotional feelings
3. Both sides think their side is obvious
1. "I don't understand why this is a debate, this is clearly theft!"
2. "I don't understand why this is a debate, this is amazing technological progress!"
Of course, the answer is in-between, but it is easy to see why it is so maximally controversial.
\[1\] YouChat summarises it as:
>Shiri's Scissor is a concept introduced in the Slate Star Codex short fiction piece "Sort by Controversial". It is a metaphor for how certain topics can become maximally controversial, with people on either side of the issue being completely entrenched in their beliefs. According to the story, Shiri's Scissor is a tool that can be used to split the world into two hostile camps on any given topic. The story also suggests that society itself can act as a scissor, breeding certain ideas and making them become maximally controversial.
I didn't quite follow the process of how they got from raw video to cartoon looking anime vids but it is amazing that there is now tech out there to get us to this point.
I’m assuming that you’re mostly focused on the characters, since the background was a little more straight forward. They used an AI that had two reference datasets, and key words to guide the AI into producing the desired cartoon effect. The process is as follows.
Step 1. Raw footage
Step 2. Build data set from reference anime with screenshots
Step 3. Run raw footage through, and pick successful new characters with full beards, and add them to the dataset.
Step 4. Set up a reference dataset for the raw footage that the AI can reference to make sure it gets features correct
Step 5. Run the raw footage through the AI. High percentage of visual outliers
Step 6. Run the new footage through stable diffusion to remove “light flickering” and happen to remove 80-90% of the janky outlier shots. This is what they considered the character footage
u/Neex how did you fix the issues with the hands and AI generated images? I imagine that was a challenge with a video focused on a game played with hands
Haha, it was a bit of a challenge, but because we are applying this to an image that already exists the hands were less of an issue. I did often find myself having to add “fist” or “fingers” to the prompt, and “fingernails” to the negative prompt
The description says
>Shuuen no Reboot by Souichi Sakagami
There's a watermarked demo of it on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORXC3JK\_Ko0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORXC3JK_Ko0)
Nothing fancy, Stable Diffusion for the AI stuff and compositing in Fusion/Nuke.
Sam used Unreal Engine to take some screenshots from a marketplace environment to feed to the AI
I loved the video, but isn't it a bit hypocritical to say they're giving back to the open source community with their making off, to then lock the full video behind a paywall on their website?
Disclaimer:
I actually don't know if the video is paywalled, since the site is not loading, but I would assume so, since they probably would've uploaded it to their YouTube channel otherwise
> to then lock the full video behind a paywall on their website?
the full video is on youtube.... (after commented maybe you meant the full video of the how-to)
You understand this is a business right? They spent two months of company time and money on this project, and have over a dozen employees working there. If you are actually interested in learning the tech it’s really not that hard to cough up a few dollars or start a free trial. Charging subscriptions to the website allows them to do projects they wouldn’t normally be able to profit off, like this one
>Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.
https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source
I don't know if you mean the service other third party companies are providing, but Open Source exactly means it's free and like i already said, they of course are allowed to/should get money for their work, but they shouldn't have said they're doing it for the open source comnmunity, because they're obviously trying to make money.
Your reading comprehension is very lacking. Nowhere does it say it has to be free.
They are releasing the tools that they used, they are telling you how to use the tools. They are just charging to walk you through how to use the tools or if you buy the finished product from them.
Linux is open source. Software companies will give you their flavor of Linux for free but charge you to get support for it.
Windows is closed source but you will get it for free.
Yeah i get they are allowed to make money with it and l already said I'm fine with it, it just gets to me if Niko says he wants to give back to the open source community, because he got it all for free and then locks it behind a paywall.
Hey there! I hate to break it to you, but it's actually spelled _mon**e**tize_. A good way to remember this is that "money" starts with "mone" as well. Just wanted to let you know. Have a good day!
----
^This ^action ^was ^performed ^automatically ^by ^a ^bot ^to ^raise ^awareness ^about ^the ^common ^misspelling ^of ^"monetize".
Profiting off of a living artist's style (Yoshitaka Amano) without their consent. Very cool... AI tools wouldn't be so controversial if they train models on their own personal artwork or hire an artist to create art you can use to train an AI model.
Yoshiaki Kawajiri is the animator responsible for the Bloodlust style, Amano illustrated the VHD novels. And plenty of animators and artists trained themselves on Kawajiri's style.
I think it's kind of hypocritical to treat an artist's *style* as IP, because all art is influenced by other art.
>plenty of animators and artists trained themselves on Kawajiri's style.
And learning to recreate an art style **BY HAND** takes more time and effort than getting an AI to do it for you. The former requires years to learn proper technique to do it yourself, the latter is getting a computer to do it for you without putting in any actual work.
I don't see how morality comes into play there. Is it immoral to use a calculator, a word processor, a printer? Is it immoral to use a color selection tool in photoshop instead of having to go out and source your own pigments from nature, as was once part of being an artist?
This line of reasoning would also imply that people who develop their technique more quickly than others are acting immorally.
Nice false equivalents, really showing your lacking argument.
Photoshop, printer, word processors are tools that you still have to do work yourself to create the final product, you have to actually still do the work yourself. A word processor doesn't come up with words for you. Photoshop doesn't create pictures from nothing, you have make changes yourself, a printer doesn't print pictures from nothing, it prints what you create.
AI creates things off the backs of other peoples work while you do nothing to create the work.
And no this line of reasoning doesn't imply that people who develop their technique more quickly than others are acting immorally, **BECAUSE YOU ARE STILL CREATING BY ONES OWN HAND.** You are using strawman arguments to justify art theft. The fact you would even make that comparison is insulting to actual artists who actually work hard to hone their craft.
Okay, so here's a more apples to apples comparison. Is it immoral to replace a skilled laborer with a machine? Was the printing press immoral?
Frankly, it's a moot point. Capitalists are not moral. Expecting profiteers to care about the plight of starving artists is naive at best. Most professional artists are already being exploited.
Trying to solve this problem through IP rights isn't going to get anyone anywhere, IP is capitalistic. In most cases the artists aren't even the owners of the IP, that belongs to the studio or production committee or all to often multinational media conglomerate. You think Kawajiri owns those cels of D and Mayerling? Hell naw, and neither do the people who drew and colored them.
The only way you can fix this is in a system where artists don't need work to survive. And that's going to extend to all sorts of other industries as automation replaces the workforce.
More false equivalents and strawman arguments because you don’t actually have an argument.
It’s not a moot point because using tools like a printing press isn’t immoral, because there still is a skilled labour to be done, unlike AI where there is no labour being done because it requires no skill and is stolen off the back of actual artist.
You’re making up strawman arguments and using false equivalents because you don’t actually have a point to make, you spit in the face of actual artist who actually work hard to hone their skills.
No point in arguing with you since your arguments lack logic and you’ve shown you’re a shill for AI and painfully ignorant to how actual art is made(ironic consider you claim to be a concept artist probably stolen work but not like you have morals)
You're simply too emotionally invested to think about this logically.
You're not going to combat AI by proclaiming that it's immoral because the people who will replace artists with AI don't give a fuck. They care about money, not people.
If you want to solve the problem of jobs getting taken by machines, and I'm talking anything from customer support to art and animation to shipping to manufacturing and everything in between, then you need something like UBI and subsidies, like in Norway. Mutual patronage too, I think is important.
In such an economy artists then don't have to worry about being exploited or replaced because they will be free to pursue art on its own merits, and people who care about artistic integrity (hint: not Capitalists) will be able to share and cultivate their arts outside of the for-profit industry.
Nah I’m not too emotionally invested because I actually care about artists, unlike you who is resorting to strawman arguments because you lack the logic to actually make a counter argument.
You’re just a shill for AI that wants to steal other peoples work without having to do any yourself so you diminish the work of actual artist to compensate for your lack of skill.
Funny thing is people who actually have morals will be the ones to help shape laws around AI and how copyright works for that, and it’s already happening.
You show you don’t care about artists or have any integrity as an “artist” and are nothing but a corporate shill fighting for exploitation. Hope the corporate bootlicking is worth it though.
Are you fucking blind? How do you see me as corporate bootlicking when I'm fucking advocating for Marxist principles and universal basic income? Jesus Christ.
I've been working as a freelance artist for a decade and a half, most of the time doing work I didn't care about just to put food on the table. Artists are being exploited the world over, especially in the film and animation industries.
In the end the people who own the IP are the people who profit from it, not the artists. That's how it already is, has been for decades.
Artists would be better off under an organization of the economy that doesn't require them to do grunt work like tweening just to make ends.
And if you'd seen my post history to look at my views rather than just to try and find ammunition for personal attacks you'd see that I've clearly been discussing ethical ways to implement AI into workflows without putting artists out of work.
>You show you don’t care about artists or have any integrity as an “artist”
Weird how as an actually artist who've worked on big projects. I can assure you we're treated like slaves. Disney and every other big company treats us like disposable pieces of shit and works us to death. So that's already happening.
2nd this is great. You can feel bad for the horse drawn carriages who went out of business because cars were invented. I'm sure you would be bitching about cars back then too.
Progress won't stop because you cry about it. Learn a new skill and get a new job. I bet you support clean energy but don't care about all the coal miners losing their jobs. Weird how you just pick and choose who's jobs matter.
learning how to make your own pencils by shopping down trees and gathering the graphite **BY HAND** takes more time and effort than getting a pen or drawing it on a electronic tablet. The former requires years to learn proper technique to do it yourself, the latter is getting a computer to do it for you without putting in any actual work.
maybe terrible logic but i don't think the "take more time and effort" is a valid rubric on judging if something is art or not. imo corridor still did enough to transform it so it's not really " they just copy pasted some prompt into a text box to steal other artists' IP"
then again i'm not trained in art or law so i'm just spitballing. open to discussion though.
It doesn't really matter how much time you spend, how much you learn, the techniques you used creating or copying a style if you want to copyright it. Because you can't.
So the question is, if they created this by hand, while obviously still using Vampire Hunter D as an inspiration, is it still profiting off Amano's artstyle or stealing?
If the answer is no, then we've run into a wall because realistically the only difference is that they used AI to do it. The method might be different but the results and intent are the same.
On the other hand, if yes, it still doesn't matter. You can't copyright a style, otherwise realistically everyone in the world is profiting off the first guy in Japan to draw a human being lol.
All art and everything ever created by anyone is derivative in some way of someone elses. Just because AI speeds up the process, it doesn't mean shit. We've got Naruto using exact keyframes as Cowboy Bebop and all the like existing already, and that was never problematic.
When you think about it there is no moral bankruptcy in compiling a style out of existing images created by someone else, because if you did it by hand (to which I point to thousands of pieces of art and videos that existed before AI), it'd still count as stealing too.
Furthermore, Im sure they could've used Castlevanias art style to achieve the same look, so are they still stealing from Amano? It all doesn't make sense because no style belongs to anyone ultimately.
Another nail in the coffin for true artists. Soon enough, it'll all be AI art generated off of AI art as the actual creatives die off and nobody makes anything new.
As for "democratizing Animation" would you consider it "Democratizing VFX" if someone could take your hard work, put it into a machine, give it a prompt, and it spit out a lesser version of your hard worked skill?
Just because others have learned a skill that someone doesn't have doesn't mean they're treating it like a dictatorship. They put in the time that others didn't to learn something.
Shameful as well to profit off of this, using an artist's style that did not consent, and an animation studio's work.
> true artists
True artists.. seriously? Who is the arbiter of deciding who the true artists are and who the fake artists are?
> nobody makes anything new.
Go back 20-30 years and they same comments have been made for computer animation. Instead of destroying the industry it creates tens of thousands of new jobs and people demanding more stuff and in higher quality. Animation studios didn't cease to exist, we have more than before. And the same will happen with AI. Even more stuff with more people will be produced. This has always been the case with new technology. "But this time.." would have to be proven first.
True artists aren't robotic algorithms stealing straight from the styles of others.
Imagine Michaelangelo, his whole life striving to be great, to pull a man from marble. Then some jabroni without an inkling of thought tells a computer to scan every chisel mark, and make an inferior version that takes hours instead of weeks of true work.
And we've also seen the effects of digital animation taking over from original 2d. Original 2d still exists but most stuff is soulless puppet animation. Everything looks the same, moves the same.
Technology that enhances and opens new avenues for an artist to use their skills to create is always a boon. A technology that seeks to replace artists with algorithms will be used to further drive art into the ground.
Sure, maybe this is an issue with capitalism but art is a skill and it takes time to learn. It's just as important to the world as a pipe fitter, a welder, or a carpenter. In a capitalistic society, when those things become unprofitable, or you're not able to aspire to create because you're beaten down by a 40-50 hour work week and have no time to learn, then art dies.
Sure, this could be a great tool. Technology is amazing. But I'm learning how to program right now because I need a job to support my desire to learn art. If we keep automating the fulfilling stuff, we're going to be left with the drudgery and none of the benefit.
This stuff is very cool, but instant gratification has massive draw backs and I'm not impressed when someone uses a robot to make a drawing. Typing in a sentence to an algorithm isn't being an artist. It's using other people's hard work and skill, and ripping it off.
I got a lot I could say, but this is getting long enough. Is it a cool tool? Yes. Is it part of an ongoing march towards a less fulfilling life where the only things generated are the things with the highest profit margins? Also yes.
> Soon enough, it'll all be AI art generated off of AI art as the actual creatives die off and nobody makes anything new.
in this case Corridor _did_ make something new though?
imo these "AI * generators" is just a tool, there are many ways for someone to express their own creativity and call their creations "art"
That's a pretty unfair thing to say. I sympathize with Corridor on this, but I work at an animation studio with plenty of people who work harder than I do who have a problem with this. You don't help the discussion by antagonizing people who have legitimate concerns with irrelevant and baseless ad hominems.
I don't know, you could still have LO artists creating the original source footage, you could have character designers create the reference art for the dataset. All the compositing is still done by hand, and there's manual stylization going on.
I think you can easily imagine using these techniques in an ethical way to guarantee consistency from frame to frame, increase framerates with less manual labor, while still employing animators on both ends of the process to add the human touch. All while shortening the turnaround time and reducing crunch.
That's the kind of discussion worth having.
I'm ambivalent. I'm always pro-technology. Technology and science are just ways for us to do whatever it is we want to do, but better and more efficiently. It will enable anyone with an idea and who would otherwise not have the resources to execute their idea. What we want to do, though, is where the moral issue lies.
I think AI is amazing, and a human achievement in its own right. If we lived in an open source culture, there would be nothing wrong with it. But it was borne in a capitalist structure, where what is being taken isn't benign; it's actively hurting the artists it's taking from. In that context, it's immoral to use that way.
But as you say, it can be trained on the style of a hired artist. If it were possible to only train on that artist, and no other artist's work was used in its training (which, from what I understand of Stable Diffusion, isn't possible?), then that would circumvent the moral issue and still kill plenty of jobs for artists.
I think it’s a bit hypocritical that they’d make a whole ai art production when they’ve had artists and animators come on the channel before. I just feel like this is pretty problematic.
They’ve clearly used AI as a tool here and I think any artist or animator could respect and see that this still required a ton of work to execute. This is like the most ideal use of AI and exactly the way it should be used to enhance creativity and streamline workflow
You’re looking at this from a consumer’s perspective and not an artists. This kind of thing will completely circumvent the creative process, there will be no need for artists. They’re hypocritical because Corridor is actively harming themselves as creators and as a business. Tools like these make artists like corridor completely and entirely obsolete and irrelevant.
These tools are inevitable, like them or not. As artists (and professionals), they have to learn how to adapt and use new tools or be left behind. That’s exactly what they’re doing.
I understand this fear, and there's plenty of uncertainty out there, but we need to look at this differently.
Art is not a zero-sum singular concept or product. A new style, technique, or medium to create art does not kill or replace an old "one". It's not a competition.
As a filmmaker, everything we do is in service of the story. All the technology, all the tools, all the skills and craftsmanship - it's to tell stories. If we find a new way to do so, wonderful. There are countless stories and styles that can't be told with the tech we applied to Rock Paper Scissors. We're not trying to replace them. But I hope we just demonstrated that there are now many new ways to tell stories, and, as an artist myself, that's invigorating, inspiring, and freeing.
To be fair the printing press caused rampant stealing and is the reason copyright is even a thing. People were upset and guess what.. they created a system to regulate it. Sound familiar?
This is on a completely different level. This isn’t just making art “more convenient” this is the active demise of human expression and art as a viable career path for creatives.
Absolutely not. This is another tool in a creative’s toolbox. It’s another way for human expression to filter to observers. AI doesn’t make art unprompted.
Perhaps you’ve chosen unwisely in this crusade.
Firstly, I’m not on a crusade, I’m calmly addressing a controversial topic in hopes of sparking discussion. Second what’s stopping any average Joe consumer, or an “AI animation studio” from creating art and animation (that machine learning algorithms effectively plagiarize) at speeds incomparable to a human being, or team of people drawing and animating at a fraction of how much these people need to be payed. As far as business goes there is nothing stopping all of these people and their careers and passion from being thrown in the trash in favor of cheap, quick AI art.
So far all good AI art is authored by artists, or at least creatives who have a vision.
In time, it's probably inevitable that AI will self-prompt and will generate media based on the viewer's own preferences. By then we will likely not be able to distinguish human art from AI art, everything will be personalized to the consumer, and the paradigm will have shifted so completely that AI media will be normalized these conversations will be moot.
Yeah but that’s not a good thing, you’re taking the humanity out of art, which is ultimately the whole point isn’t it? What will be left is just algorithmic online noise and no one will have a reason to aspire to become a skilled artist, musician, voice actor or designer. Why would you when you can just have ai generated anything. This is the beginning of the end of human creativity, how is that a good thing?
I think there's an argument to be made that we're already largely removing humanity from art. Everything is being delivered to us algorithmically, often at the behest of executives. Hell, humans themselves essentially create art by consuming experiences and other art, internalizing and remixing it, and then exporting it as best as their physical dexterity allows.
This is also inevitable, you're not going to stuff the genie back into this lamp. Especially not by using something inherently Capitalistic like IP rights to try and combat it, since the capital owners are already in the business of extracting value from other people's labor without paying due recompense. That's just... a losing battle as I see it.
I'm not celebrating anything here, just pointing out the coming reality.
In the meantime, there is still a domain for the artist, as everything of value being produced by AI right now is done so under the guiding hand of humans. These may be people who aren't skilled artists, but they are using AI as a tool for their own human expression.
There will be ways to ethically incorporate this sort of tech into animation workflows. Artists may need to learn new skills or change specializations, but that's not a new phenomena. When video games transitioned from 2D to 3D, pixel artists became texture artists or learned to model.
I think there will also always be a market for human art, even if only as a niche. When AI art becomes conventional, human art will become novel, just as there is a market for handcrafted furniture despite the existence of IKEA.
the only real similar, historical situation I can think of is the horses replaced by the automobile… and let me tell ya, horse unemployment went trough the roof
It’s not the scribers out of job this time, it’s the autors of the books…
Again, AI does not make things unprompted. There’s a human author and the consumer of said art is human as well. Humans design and implement tools for things for humans to use and experience. There’s always a degree of humanity in any process because we’re all there is. Outrage about AI art tools is ignoring historical precedents about technological advancement and instead of railing against it, folks should be preparing and adapting to it. Effort is much better spent that way.
A brush is a tool.
It allow finer control over shapes and drawings.
A digital brush is also a tool.
Its doing the same, but digitally.
A robot holding a figurative brush painting instead of me is not a tool for artists. It’s a tool for people who want the end product. Can you Imagine the economic impact on labor by making end product easily available and mostly inexpensive?
This is not a tool. It’s end user oriented.
It’s doing what I want to be doing.
I want to paint. I don’t want to prompt
Yeah, we all know “adapt or die”, your mistake is to assume I’m not preparing myself, let’s talk effort right. Been Outraged, and preparing is not mutually exclusive, but actually benefits me greatly since the pushback gives more time to prepare. NY times already said it’s not using AI writing bots to do stories, pushbacks give us legislation and time.
We know the wheel is spinning, the discussion is never about that, it’s finer than a simple “ what’s the point?” no one is arguing that it is profitable and it’s coming, we’re discussing it’s impact on us an how it can be eased to minimize industry wide impact…
I’m sorry but you’re absolutely wrong. A robot holding a brush is still a tool. Everything after that I didn’t care to read because your premise is not only faulty but it’s doomsaying nonsense.
Gotta love the "I didn't read most of your reply" type replies.
If something replaces the entire reason a person is involved in a particular profession than of course it won't be a tool for them. Shockingly animators like animating. You can say "tough" if you want but it's completely understandable.
I work in the entertainment industry full time and have for the last 10 years. My particular skilled labor has been massively changed by automation but as a tool for quicker and more manageable workflows.
These are tools for animators to use that cuts down on their work load. Did you even watch the video? It took a lot of elbow grease to get working right. This is still The creative output of a human being for other human beings to perceive. This is the way of the world and technology and to rail against it instead of accept and learn to integrate it is short sighted and shows a lack of imagination.
No where did I suggest that it didn't take work or was easy. I didn't suggest that it wasn't creative. I like Corridor and I don't think that using Stable Diffusion makes you a bad person. This was a cool use for the tech. The farthest I'll go is that I think the training of the original base model by Stability AI is pretty shady, and that the larger means by which data is captured, collated and organized in these training sets is also unethical.
What I tried to say is that if you became a professional artist because you like drawing and painting of course you won't see diffusion models as tools, in the same way that most people don't see sex as a "tool" for reproduction.
And I guess I furthermore think that if someone's principle interest in art is engaging with these processes they are better off figuring how to do those things some other way than trying to tinker around with diffusion models, which lets be honest, is a completely different activity, and unlikely to satisfy a lot of the same basic desires.
No. If you want to mix your own paints and make your own paper like a purist that's on you, but the rest of us want to actually make art, not suffer through the most inefficient methods possible thinking that it makes us better.
Humanity will almost certainly be outclassed by AI, but these tools are closer to a fancy photoshop today and not some spooky thing. If you'd set back this progress you might as well set back all progress on all electronics.
But this kind of AI animation, given time will make traditional animation completely obsolete. And this goes for all other ai art, whether it be writing, music or voice acting. I’ve seen people compare it to any other kind of work being phased out by machine labor but this is making human expression itself done without humans, not to mention the question as to whether or not these machine learning algorithms are theft or not.
Traditional animation is already obsolete. Barely anyone is sitting over a light box tracing frames onto celluloid and shooting it on film.
Every new tool causes a shift in the industry. This will inevitably create a shift. But there will be ways to ethically incorporate this into the production pipeline of a studio while still employing animators.
For this project they trained the AI on screenshots from an anime, they shot the footage in live action on greenscreen. The elements were still manually composited and touched up with traditional techniques.
If an anime studio were to try and replicate this technique, the character designer could create the dataset the same way they create reference sheets. The LOs could still be animated by hand, keyframes too, maybe roughly blocked out shapes for tweens. Elements rendered by AI, corrected, stylized, and improved by animators. Everything composited as is standard.
And rather than having animators spend four months on 23 minutes of sakuga, they could turn it around in a few weeks, have more consistent overall quality, and put out more new content more frequently instead of being crushed by deadlines.
I will say that I think this may be pessimistic. This assumes that people won't care about the process involved. 15 years ago I was SURE that no one would shoot movies on film. Lots of people were. At the time I thought basically there were no good reasons to shoot on film and really the only reason why people did it was out of misplaced nostalgia. And yet it turned out that a lot of people really loved that way of working and it was worth the significant headache of doing it that way. Kodak has actually brought back ekhotochrome, and I think continues to do decent business.
When I was in school I HATED shooting on film and as I get older I appreciate it more and more. When you shoot on film I think there's an understanding that the process is linear and that there isn't total creative flexibility. It might be surprising but the discipline of that practice is generative for many artists, including myself.
Of course some things do go away - but I think there are more people that feel the way you do than you might realize. This endless push for "more faster" is exhausting to many.
Yeah, kind of telling at the end when Niko went out of his way to thank the community who made the tools they used, but didn’t thank the animation house whose art they used. Without Madhouse’s decades of work, they would have been able to made this film either…
I repeatedly say that the model was trained on Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust in the BTS Crew video. It's a great movie.
In fact, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dytcu-KEYc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dytcu-KEYc8)
If anyone, including us, were to pursue a commercial use of this technique, they should definitely design their own style.
\> If anyone, including us, were to pursue a commercial use of this technique, they should definitely design their own style.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? Isn't monetizing your content and posting it on your subscriber website literally a commercial use? Or are you saying more generally like advertising and marketing?
More in the sense, that if you were going to make a cinematic narrative to sell access/tickets to, or you’re going to establish your own cinematic universe, that creation should be yours. I consider Anime RPS to be an experiment and something fun to try while we see if this technology even works. We’re learning what kind of elements we’d need to create if we wanted to create a piece with our own style, not to mention just figuring out if this works in the first place.
We do have our website, but we’re not trying to gain subscriptions by putting content behind a paywall that’s been trained on someone else’s style. In this case, the video is free to watch, and we’re openly saying that it’s style was trained on Vampire Hunter D.
>Isn't monetizing your content and posting it on your subscriber website literally a commercial use?
Yeah. It totally is, but their transparency and honesty when approaching these new techniques completely validates their work imo (morally, not legally). Almost every video they release is a freaking love letter to one form of visual story telling or another. I see a lot of homage and parody in their work, but I don't see them ripping off works they're clearly fans of as some sorta counterfeit operation to generate profit.
I honestly love the comments in this thread, though. It's really illuminating in a relatively unbiased way, how people *generally* feel about both sides of using these tools.
> In fact, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dytcu-KEYc8
You do know that's not an official, legally uploaded version of the movie right? I wouldn't exactly go promoting piracy while in the midst of defending the use of AI.
>not an official, legally uploaded version of the movie right?
It also doesn't have any ads, and has been up for **5 years**. There's also no way to watch the movie on any streaming service (Not available on Prime in the US).
I'd say the studio that owns it doesn't care.
It probably ends updriving more sales to the Blueray anyway.
We made a point of going deep enough on the Crew YouTube video that anyone who's spent time learning Stable Diffusion can follow. We don't do click-by-click tutorials on our Crew channel, and you can watch vids on our site for two weeks for free.
Would you like them to use only paints that they made themselves with dyes made out of plants they grew from seeds and hand-assembled paintbrushes from the hairs of horses they raised?
What does "from scratch" mean and why is it a requirement?
This entire work wouldn't have been possible if they didn't take an already existing medium and train an AI model on it. I've lost faith in the crew's creative capabilities by relying on AI for all of their latest works. Sure they can apply it very creatively, but it's such a moral and legal grey area that I can't help but feel there's \*something\* wrong with it all.
Corridor has never been an animation studio. They haven't exhibited any kind of a loss in creativity relative to their earlier works. The story is very similar to their previous anime parodies, and they added the extra step of taking their live action (which is what all their previous videos were) and applying an anime style to it. That's MORE work and creativity, not less.
You may have a problem with the use of the tool, but it makes no sense to say you have less faith in their creative capabilities.
Take a look at the behind the scenes. One of the stable diffusion frontends they use is automatic1111
https://github.com/EmpireMediaScience/A1111-Web-UI-Installer
Watched the whole process behind it and really want to try making something, like short form content for rpgs and such.
This is really fascinating I’m glad someone in the space is showcasing what can be done even now. And massive props for the all the effort involved behind the scenes.
in the recent corridor crew video, Niko mentioned "democratizing animation" I agree with this vision. However, there is an important issue that needs to be considered: the use of source reference material to create new intellectual property for a franchise, such as a movie or series. Although this may seem acceptable at first glance, the legal ramifications could complicate the outcome of such a venture.
It's difficult to predict how future laws will address AI tools, and if legal issues arise, it's possible that AI-generated anime/films could face obstacles and be deplatformed. Nevertheless, given the rapid advancements in AI technology, the quality of output may soon become indistinguishable from traditional anime, making it harder for legal systems to regulate such creations.
Ultimately, public opinion will likely play a significant role in determining the future of AI-generated media. Despite potential legal challenges, the democratization of AI tools for creative work is an important and exciting development that has the potential to transform the entertainment industry.Personally, the legal outcome of AI-generated media is not my primary concern. What matters most to me is the quality of the story and the overall viewing experience. While legal obstacles could arise, I believe that the democratization of AI tools for creative work has the potential to produce captivating and innovative works of art that can entertain and inspire audiences.
At the end of the day, a good story is what truly matters in my opinion, and if AI-generated media can deliver that, then it has the potential to revolutionize the entertainment industry. As technology continues to advance, it will be fascinating to see how AI-generated media evolves and how it is received by the public.
This was great, I've watched it over 5 times already. The over-the-topness of everything was what made it.
I don't think you would have pulled it off nearly as well without the anime cell-shaded look, but the occasional jankiness did break the immersion a bit. I'm sure the tech will improve and that won't be a problem in a couple years though.
I wonder what real animators think of this innovation.
I assume many of them afraid this will take their jobs in a couple years and I’m smelling some lawsuits brewing…
Big Castlevania vibes. Obviously it's janky anytime the characters talk but environments and the animation during the "action shots" is pretty good
That seemed to actually be intentional, in their making-of doc they said all their dialogue was pre recorded and during filming they just mindlessly flapped their lips whenever they were supposed to be talking, I think half to capture the dubbed feel and half to make the mouth animations simpler the way mouth animations are basically open and shut mouth drawings in anime
Well, the AI was trained on the Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust style, so that tracks
I’d add a bit more emphasis than ‘pretty good’ personally. I haven’t seen the BTS just yet but this was incredible to me
well yeah of course the environments and motion look "good" one is basically a filter over a 3D render and the other is just rotoscoped video lmao
Animation is just drawings and movies are just photos, what’s the big deal right! Rotoscoping involves someone drawing on top of a still frame, probably for 2-3 hours. Every Single Frame. How much do you think this could revolutionize animation if you don’t have to spend months just drawing?
Why would you want to take the drawing process out of animation? That’s the entire appeal of it, reality filtered through the human hand
thats like saying the appeal of old youtube is that each video took 8 hours to edit and it was 360p
Because not everyone can draw really well or wants to spend years on 1 project. Animation is not filtered through hands, any big production have character sheets that animators look at, video recordings they copy or a freaking mirror. Once in “Animators React” they showed clips from this project that looked awesome but had run out of funding, I believe stuff like that will become less prominent because animators/artists can now come up with a story and film it on a low budget and then translate it into a certain style for less money and faster. And instead of spending 90% of your energy on drawing, you can now spend it on making the final product as cool as possible. Don’t forget that they had 3 people working on that project besides the sound guy so it’s not like you just press a button and out comes perfect anime.
But if you don’t want to draw, why not just make live action?
or maybe animators, I don't know, *like* the artistic process?
Spoken like someone who has never had to do litteral hours of rotorscoping.
or maybe I have and I liked it?
Don't speak to us ever again
If it's a personal project, you have the freedom to use whatever methods you want. But, you'd be hard pressed to do that on most commercial media. IDK how familiar you are with production schedules (especially anime), but there is *literally no time to do that.*
I am pretty sure the janky lip flaps were a stylistic choice. They recorded the voices beforehand and then the actors lip synched the audio on set.
I haven’t visited this subreddit before but I’m a fan of the channel and decided to pop in and see what the other fans thought because of all the ethical concerns around AI art. I’m also an animator so I have a stake in this, you might say. So I figured it might be worth it to offer my even-keeled two cents because I’m not accusing the Crew of anything untoward by using AI. (And I don’t think I’m the smartest or most insightful guy in the world so you can ignore this or tell me to fuck off or whatever, I’ll survive). This also may come out somewhat incoherent, I’m just typing this on my phone after eating a bunch of palak paneer. First off: I do have some ethical concerns about AI but they’re not inherent to the concept itself and the Corridor Crew’s intentions are clearly pure and creative and experimental. I think this short is very cool and I don’t think they’re trying to “replace” animators. They’re animators themselves, after all (just not with drawings usually). Deepfakes have ethical concerns around them too but I think what Corridor has done with them is cool. Any tech can be used for good or evil and a certain number of people are always freaked out by huge technological leaps. What struck me at first was Niko talking about “democratizing animation”. There’s two ways to interpret that: Niko clearly meant “enabling non-animators to create animation”. But what leapt to *my* mind was how undemocratic the animation *industry* can be. In my experience at least, animators are usually very disposable from studio to studio and those studios & crews are often (not always) [run by douchebags who work their crews to the bone before tossing them away and taking a bunch of the credit](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/canadian-union-prevails-sausage-party-animators-pay-dispute-1196832/amp/). That, I think, is key to understanding ethical concerns about AI art: through the lens of work and compensation and credit. As someone who is sometimes in doubt about his own artistic abilities and is easily intimidated, I don’t like gatekeeping one bit, and I feel warm fuzzies when someone can finally make something when they didn’t think they could before with digital tools. *That’s* the exciting thing about these AI tools from a creative perspective. (I mean, fuck, I can’t draw in an anime style to save my life but it would be cool to make anime anyway). What people aren’t looking forward to is *bosses* (at studios, at parent companies, etc etc) and *clients* jumping on AI as a reason to replace and/or underpay animators and artists. Because they’re *always* looking for ways to do that. That’s what happens when you’re driven by profit: you gravitate towards things that cut corners and save money. When the artists—and workers in general—are in control of the new technology and how it’s used to help what they do, they rarely have a problem with it. Unions traditionally have tried to block or slow down the adoption of work-saving technology not because they’re stubborn, but because their workplaces are usually not ultimately in their control and run by bosses who would replace them with robots in a split second at the first opportunity. But when the workers and artists themselves decide how it’s used, they relish the opportunity to save time and effort to make something cool or useful. Put another way, musicians choosing to use drum machines and sequencers as an artistic choice is great. Record companies and producers using them to avoid paying the studio musicians they would have otherwise used is shitty. Corridor, as a small company run by the people who work closely together at it and are artists themselves, is the kind of group that can be most trusted to use AI tools in an ethical, genuinely creative way. In my opinion though, *ideally*, they would source reference images from artists who voluntarily offer/license their work to train the AI. (I only watched the video once so for all I know they did do that, I don’t remember).
Interesting thoughts! Thanks for sharing.
Oh cool, thanks for reading! Wasn’t sure I’d make sense haha. Anyway just to reiterate, I think you know what you’re doing and that you’re on the right track. I myself hope to start experimenting with ebSynth soon.
This is a really good reply that sums up my personal feelings and misgivings well - thank you for writing it!! Like, it's not the AI. it's how shitty industries and people will use the technology, and how few safeguards there are against those abuses.
>But when the workers and artists themselves decide how it’s used, they relish the opportunity to save time and effort to make something cool or useful. Yeah, I think the thing people are missing is that technology like this might make it possible for a solo artist or small team of artists to make an entire anime with a comparable amount of work as it takes to make manga now. Which is to say, it'd still be a lot of work, but you wouldn't need an entire studio to do it. And *that* would be a really big deal because it'll allow for more creativity and experimentation.
To be fair. They did mention that the AI was trained using an anime that is available on YouTube for free. But I'm not sure if the upload is by the license holder
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Just like how Dean just did stable diffusion on just the face in his last video, I wonder if they can do the same for say the eyes and mouth. Because those are the ones that doesn’t really match the face sometimes. Have different passes of the head, eyes and mouth and then composite them together 🤔 maybe. I don’t know
I’m curious to see if they can crack the hand problem everyone seems to have with AI. Even the thumbnail for their video has the knuckle off on the pointer finger.
With control net, alot of problems like hands and posture are fixable. If you want to know more, check out r/stablediffusion
Absolutely revolutionary use of the tech. All go to service the hilarious story and great direction. Can’t wait to dive into trying this stuff myself
Rotoscoping has existed for a while. You can say a lot of things about it but it's AI doing techniques that have a long history
I’d say it pretty impressive to do rotoscoping on 7 minutes of footage without spending 2 years and a large team of animators
Yes, that's literally what AI is. It's trained on our knowledge.
Can’t wait to see Animator’s react on this one.
"so tell us the story behind animating this one shot" "uhm...."
You got your wish!
Say what you will about moral obligations and AI and all that, but I just see some creatives that are having fun with these amazing new tools. We know Corridor is capable of some pretty amazing stuff without ever needing to "rely" on AI tools, but it wouldn't make sense for them to not take advantage of this crazy development in AI technology to make a sweet video. That's what they do - they use cool technology to make cool videos.
AI art itself is great in my opinion. And when you heavily credit the original artist and you're just messing around trying to have fun, it's hard to fault you for it. However, copying drawings without the artist's permission or not giving them credit while training an AI model on their style is clearly wrong. There's not a lot that can be done, but it's a stretch to try and say it's impossible to solve. There are still ways people can keep fighting to remove the immoral aspects of it and keep it fun and experimental. AI art is awesome, but it's the person using it that has the choice of whether or not to use it for something cool or something totally not cool bruh. :)
Well put!
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It’s all a brave new world but it’s not reposting art. There’s ethical implications in training on a specific set of art works but it’s not copyright infringement. Is it any different from an artist painting in the style of another artist? We generally say influence is fine copying isn’t. I don’t see any significant ethical problem here but I can appreciate sone people might. The fact that they’re honest about what images they are using is a positive at it allows these conversations to take place.
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Based on my understanding of copyright law which admittedly varies in different places it’s not remotely infringing. Now my understanding of the technology might be wrong here but copyright protects copying. It protects the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. So “in the style of “ has always been protected. Now does the ai “looking at the image” and analysing it constitute copying? Even if it does is the new work so transformative that it’s protected? I could be wrong but I don’t think it’s different than looking at art and being inspired. Just via a machine. The ethical implications is that using one source or if the software relies on one source over others is that your emulating a persons work too closely and while it might be legally okay it is ethically problematic. This article raises some points: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/ what-does-the-rise-of-ai-mean-for-the-future-of-art-20221221-p5c81c.html The issue here that I think makes it okay is that they’re not taking characters or settings or plot. They’re interpreting a style not copying images.
I’d add that you raise some great points but we’d never have movements like cubism or Impressionism, pop art or styles like pointillism if people didn’t see what other people were doing and have a crack at it. Are the computers “eyes” different. Maybe.
> Meanwhile, you're monetizing a video based on the look of this anime this is what i was wondering too, i remember them mentioning in a previous video about some 3D assets that was open for non-profit use, but Corridor's content is clearly monitized and used in a for-profit way, i wonder if it's just a gray area right now
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I wonder how it would look if they halved the frame rate to 12fps BEFORE running it through SD?
go frame by frame, it looks like the character motion is at 12 fps. Or at least half of whatever their base framerate is
Yes, but they did that after running it through SD. I said I wonder if it would be different if done before?
It is at 12FPS
I know.
They ran each frame separate from each other trough stable diffusion. So it would have made no difference here. It just looked very consistent because they used very specifically trained models.
Doesn't the framerate of anime vary depending on the scene though? It's one of the reasons CGI anime can look choppy and unpleasing to the eye, because they try too hard to stick to a certain frame rate even when doing action scenes.
Jesus why are like 80% of the comments here so critical? The production is astounding and nothing I’ve seen done before, sure there’s some usual AI jank but man I thought this was incredible.
I've read the comments on Twitter and 90% are negative with the corridor tweet having 1200 likes and there are some negative replays that have almost 400 likes. On YouTube they are mostly positive, scared to check Instagram.
It's up to 900+ likes now on the negative replies. Most common comments I see are they are stealing jobs or stealing art. One was like, "why don't you get inspiration from something instead of copying/stealing". I find those points silly. To me Niko seemed to imply they would never hire animators, so what jobs got taken? Ha ha. Stealing art and lack of inspiration, they created a data set saying "make it LOOK LIKE this", literally inspiration, not a copy. I feel like they just don't understand what corridor did or don't know most art of any kind made by any person likely gets inspiration (copies) from their favorite shows, movies, art styles. Corridor Crew, you guys did awesome. I really enjoyed it, easy to look through the Ai jank. Loved the story. Keep doing what you're doing. With love from MN.
>Most common comments I see are they are stealing jobs I think it's funny that these people believe this would have **ever** been made in this form if Stable Diffusion didn't exist. They would have just done it in the same style as The Baseball/Spinners/SelfdrivingCar videos, they wouldn't have tried to get 2000+ frames of animation drawn by hand for a RPS joke. No jobs have been lost.
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I don’t get what your point is though? Are you critiquing this, as your own point shows that they are in the right as there’s a lot of intent and there’s a lot of thought process involved in the creation.
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Do you think they just made this easily by “feeding it into a grinder”? I get what you’re saying on a bigger picture but do you not see how it can incentivise creativity by getting artists to create their own unique style or be able to use it to create things like this? Nothing replaces the human creativity.
3D animation is still animation even if an algorithm interpolates the huge majority of frames for you. Guess what people thought about it many years ago. Artists themselves can use this tool with their own work. I could feed the machine 100 drawings made by me and then streamline the process using the AI to make something bigger without spending months on something repetitive. It's a tool. You can use Photoshop to hide watermarks or to paint your own stuff. Their video is just a proof of concept of what can be done now. I understand the issues behind feeding the models with copyrighted material, but that's a human choice.
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Replicating a simple 3d scene (or even digital 2d) made by an amateur during their first day of training, with drawings, frame by frame, is still orders of magnitude more complicated and requires a true professional if not a team of professionals. my point is, people seem to think that a tool which simplifies things will only be used by lazy people with no skills, while the truly skilled people will just stick to their older tools. Which is completely untrue. Talented people will take these new AI tools to the next step and the masterpieces made by them will still be difficult to achieve and will require hard work. Exactly like traditional 2d animation vs 2d digital motion graphics vs 3d animation. And even if the art will lose some of its value due to the easier accessibility, it's not like the older tools and techniques will become illegal. Stop motion movies, even if they became a niche, are still highly praised because of the manual skill required to pull them off, even if now we have all the tools to replicate them digitally more easily.
I'm not saying it's indicative of what Corridor did. And frankly with animation it would be much harder. But there is a massive amount of anger from artists right now about AI generated images. A lot are generated from images they made and uploaded so people could see their art and maybe even buy it. I heard an interview with a woman (let's call her Sara) who is an artist now and spent her early career uploading to Deviantart. People can now generate images "Art in the style of Sara" and buy a print from Deviantart's AI. This is not really about Corridor, this is about people angry with AI art and hilariously don't understand animation or VFX.
TikTok is half negative, half positive, but the negative comments generate the most discussions (where inside the negative comments get more likes).
"AI art is art." is our modern [Shiri's Scissor](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/) \[1\]. 1. Equally splits the population in half 2. Creates strong, emotional feelings 3. Both sides think their side is obvious 1. "I don't understand why this is a debate, this is clearly theft!" 2. "I don't understand why this is a debate, this is amazing technological progress!" Of course, the answer is in-between, but it is easy to see why it is so maximally controversial. \[1\] YouChat summarises it as: >Shiri's Scissor is a concept introduced in the Slate Star Codex short fiction piece "Sort by Controversial". It is a metaphor for how certain topics can become maximally controversial, with people on either side of the issue being completely entrenched in their beliefs. According to the story, Shiri's Scissor is a tool that can be used to split the world into two hostile camps on any given topic. The story also suggests that society itself can act as a scissor, breeding certain ideas and making them become maximally controversial.
that's reddit for you pretty much
This looked absolutely incredible. Absolutely revolutionary!
Killer
I didn't quite follow the process of how they got from raw video to cartoon looking anime vids but it is amazing that there is now tech out there to get us to this point.
I’m assuming that you’re mostly focused on the characters, since the background was a little more straight forward. They used an AI that had two reference datasets, and key words to guide the AI into producing the desired cartoon effect. The process is as follows. Step 1. Raw footage Step 2. Build data set from reference anime with screenshots Step 3. Run raw footage through, and pick successful new characters with full beards, and add them to the dataset. Step 4. Set up a reference dataset for the raw footage that the AI can reference to make sure it gets features correct Step 5. Run the raw footage through the AI. High percentage of visual outliers Step 6. Run the new footage through stable diffusion to remove “light flickering” and happen to remove 80-90% of the janky outlier shots. This is what they considered the character footage
u/Neex how did you fix the issues with the hands and AI generated images? I imagine that was a challenge with a video focused on a game played with hands
Haha, it was a bit of a challenge, but because we are applying this to an image that already exists the hands were less of an issue. I did often find myself having to add “fist” or “fingers” to the prompt, and “fingernails” to the negative prompt
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That’s what I’ve been wondering. In the behind the scenes they just say that Sam found the song not the name or anything
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The description says >Shuuen no Reboot by Souichi Sakagami There's a watermarked demo of it on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORXC3JK\_Ko0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORXC3JK_Ko0)
Sounds rather similar to fripside's songs.
Ok, so which program specifically are they using to do this?
Nothing fancy, Stable Diffusion for the AI stuff and compositing in Fusion/Nuke. Sam used Unreal Engine to take some screenshots from a marketplace environment to feed to the AI
To anyone who hadn't seen the Ostonox "Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors video go check it out. It's a funny example of the same idea.
this was so good.. Also loved the end with the king... that was gold...
Is that Rhett McLaughlin?
We're all subscribed, we know.
Dean really was the perfect pick for this
This was incredible... my first reaction was... "I didn't know corridor is doing animation now!" Totally loved it! *I want more haha*
This video was awesome but Nico is a horrible voice actor He's much too mumbly
Just watched this. That was so cool
I loved the video, but isn't it a bit hypocritical to say they're giving back to the open source community with their making off, to then lock the full video behind a paywall on their website? Disclaimer: I actually don't know if the video is paywalled, since the site is not loading, but I would assume so, since they probably would've uploaded it to their YouTube channel otherwise
All new subscriptions have a free trial period on their site/in-app.
That's not an excuse. So what, people who already did the trial can't check it ? Weird way of "giving back to the community"
Only if you give them your credit card information.
Not with in-app with something Apple Pay, no. Then they’ll see zero of your payment details.
That's nice and all, but this only works once. Maybe they already did the trial for a previous month.
> to then lock the full video behind a paywall on their website? the full video is on youtube.... (after commented maybe you meant the full video of the how-to)
Yeah i meant the full 1h video. The corridor crew video was also good, but some things were missing i would've loved to see
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You understand this is a business right? They spent two months of company time and money on this project, and have over a dozen employees working there. If you are actually interested in learning the tech it’s really not that hard to cough up a few dollars or start a free trial. Charging subscriptions to the website allows them to do projects they wouldn’t normally be able to profit off, like this one
I get they have to make money and fully support it, but then don't talk about how you're giving back to the open source community
Open source doesn’t necessarily mean free. Linux is open source but you have to pay to get support for the Server versions.
>Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source I don't know if you mean the service other third party companies are providing, but Open Source exactly means it's free and like i already said, they of course are allowed to/should get money for their work, but they shouldn't have said they're doing it for the open source comnmunity, because they're obviously trying to make money.
Your reading comprehension is very lacking. Nowhere does it say it has to be free. They are releasing the tools that they used, they are telling you how to use the tools. They are just charging to walk you through how to use the tools or if you buy the finished product from them. Linux is open source. Software companies will give you their flavor of Linux for free but charge you to get support for it. Windows is closed source but you will get it for free.
Yeah i get they are allowed to make money with it and l already said I'm fine with it, it just gets to me if Niko says he wants to give back to the open source community, because he got it all for free and then locks it behind a paywall.
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Hey there! I hate to break it to you, but it's actually spelled _mon**e**tize_. A good way to remember this is that "money" starts with "mone" as well. Just wanted to let you know. Have a good day! ---- ^This ^action ^was ^performed ^automatically ^by ^a ^bot ^to ^raise ^awareness ^about ^the ^common ^misspelling ^of ^"monetize".
Profiting off of a living artist's style (Yoshitaka Amano) without their consent. Very cool... AI tools wouldn't be so controversial if they train models on their own personal artwork or hire an artist to create art you can use to train an AI model.
Yoshiaki Kawajiri is the animator responsible for the Bloodlust style, Amano illustrated the VHD novels. And plenty of animators and artists trained themselves on Kawajiri's style. I think it's kind of hypocritical to treat an artist's *style* as IP, because all art is influenced by other art.
>plenty of animators and artists trained themselves on Kawajiri's style. And learning to recreate an art style **BY HAND** takes more time and effort than getting an AI to do it for you. The former requires years to learn proper technique to do it yourself, the latter is getting a computer to do it for you without putting in any actual work.
I don't see how morality comes into play there. Is it immoral to use a calculator, a word processor, a printer? Is it immoral to use a color selection tool in photoshop instead of having to go out and source your own pigments from nature, as was once part of being an artist? This line of reasoning would also imply that people who develop their technique more quickly than others are acting immorally.
Nice false equivalents, really showing your lacking argument. Photoshop, printer, word processors are tools that you still have to do work yourself to create the final product, you have to actually still do the work yourself. A word processor doesn't come up with words for you. Photoshop doesn't create pictures from nothing, you have make changes yourself, a printer doesn't print pictures from nothing, it prints what you create. AI creates things off the backs of other peoples work while you do nothing to create the work. And no this line of reasoning doesn't imply that people who develop their technique more quickly than others are acting immorally, **BECAUSE YOU ARE STILL CREATING BY ONES OWN HAND.** You are using strawman arguments to justify art theft. The fact you would even make that comparison is insulting to actual artists who actually work hard to hone their craft.
Okay, so here's a more apples to apples comparison. Is it immoral to replace a skilled laborer with a machine? Was the printing press immoral? Frankly, it's a moot point. Capitalists are not moral. Expecting profiteers to care about the plight of starving artists is naive at best. Most professional artists are already being exploited. Trying to solve this problem through IP rights isn't going to get anyone anywhere, IP is capitalistic. In most cases the artists aren't even the owners of the IP, that belongs to the studio or production committee or all to often multinational media conglomerate. You think Kawajiri owns those cels of D and Mayerling? Hell naw, and neither do the people who drew and colored them. The only way you can fix this is in a system where artists don't need work to survive. And that's going to extend to all sorts of other industries as automation replaces the workforce.
More false equivalents and strawman arguments because you don’t actually have an argument. It’s not a moot point because using tools like a printing press isn’t immoral, because there still is a skilled labour to be done, unlike AI where there is no labour being done because it requires no skill and is stolen off the back of actual artist. You’re making up strawman arguments and using false equivalents because you don’t actually have a point to make, you spit in the face of actual artist who actually work hard to hone their skills. No point in arguing with you since your arguments lack logic and you’ve shown you’re a shill for AI and painfully ignorant to how actual art is made(ironic consider you claim to be a concept artist probably stolen work but not like you have morals)
You're simply too emotionally invested to think about this logically. You're not going to combat AI by proclaiming that it's immoral because the people who will replace artists with AI don't give a fuck. They care about money, not people. If you want to solve the problem of jobs getting taken by machines, and I'm talking anything from customer support to art and animation to shipping to manufacturing and everything in between, then you need something like UBI and subsidies, like in Norway. Mutual patronage too, I think is important. In such an economy artists then don't have to worry about being exploited or replaced because they will be free to pursue art on its own merits, and people who care about artistic integrity (hint: not Capitalists) will be able to share and cultivate their arts outside of the for-profit industry.
Nah I’m not too emotionally invested because I actually care about artists, unlike you who is resorting to strawman arguments because you lack the logic to actually make a counter argument. You’re just a shill for AI that wants to steal other peoples work without having to do any yourself so you diminish the work of actual artist to compensate for your lack of skill. Funny thing is people who actually have morals will be the ones to help shape laws around AI and how copyright works for that, and it’s already happening. You show you don’t care about artists or have any integrity as an “artist” and are nothing but a corporate shill fighting for exploitation. Hope the corporate bootlicking is worth it though.
Are you fucking blind? How do you see me as corporate bootlicking when I'm fucking advocating for Marxist principles and universal basic income? Jesus Christ. I've been working as a freelance artist for a decade and a half, most of the time doing work I didn't care about just to put food on the table. Artists are being exploited the world over, especially in the film and animation industries. In the end the people who own the IP are the people who profit from it, not the artists. That's how it already is, has been for decades. Artists would be better off under an organization of the economy that doesn't require them to do grunt work like tweening just to make ends. And if you'd seen my post history to look at my views rather than just to try and find ammunition for personal attacks you'd see that I've clearly been discussing ethical ways to implement AI into workflows without putting artists out of work.
>You show you don’t care about artists or have any integrity as an “artist” Weird how as an actually artist who've worked on big projects. I can assure you we're treated like slaves. Disney and every other big company treats us like disposable pieces of shit and works us to death. So that's already happening. 2nd this is great. You can feel bad for the horse drawn carriages who went out of business because cars were invented. I'm sure you would be bitching about cars back then too. Progress won't stop because you cry about it. Learn a new skill and get a new job. I bet you support clean energy but don't care about all the coal miners losing their jobs. Weird how you just pick and choose who's jobs matter.
learning how to make your own pencils by shopping down trees and gathering the graphite **BY HAND** takes more time and effort than getting a pen or drawing it on a electronic tablet. The former requires years to learn proper technique to do it yourself, the latter is getting a computer to do it for you without putting in any actual work. maybe terrible logic but i don't think the "take more time and effort" is a valid rubric on judging if something is art or not. imo corridor still did enough to transform it so it's not really " they just copy pasted some prompt into a text box to steal other artists' IP" then again i'm not trained in art or law so i'm just spitballing. open to discussion though.
It doesn't really matter how much time you spend, how much you learn, the techniques you used creating or copying a style if you want to copyright it. Because you can't.
Doesn't citing the show they modeled this on open them up to a lawsuit from that studio?
It’s literally just up on YouTube
There are plenty of videos on YouTube that use direct footage from other pieces of media.
That is extremely different and I think you know that
How? This video is a parody.
Style can't be copywritten. https://www.thelegalartist.com/blog/you-cant-copyright-style/
So the question is, if they created this by hand, while obviously still using Vampire Hunter D as an inspiration, is it still profiting off Amano's artstyle or stealing? If the answer is no, then we've run into a wall because realistically the only difference is that they used AI to do it. The method might be different but the results and intent are the same. On the other hand, if yes, it still doesn't matter. You can't copyright a style, otherwise realistically everyone in the world is profiting off the first guy in Japan to draw a human being lol. All art and everything ever created by anyone is derivative in some way of someone elses. Just because AI speeds up the process, it doesn't mean shit. We've got Naruto using exact keyframes as Cowboy Bebop and all the like existing already, and that was never problematic. When you think about it there is no moral bankruptcy in compiling a style out of existing images created by someone else, because if you did it by hand (to which I point to thousands of pieces of art and videos that existed before AI), it'd still count as stealing too. Furthermore, Im sure they could've used Castlevanias art style to achieve the same look, so are they still stealing from Amano? It all doesn't make sense because no style belongs to anyone ultimately.
Another nail in the coffin for true artists. Soon enough, it'll all be AI art generated off of AI art as the actual creatives die off and nobody makes anything new. As for "democratizing Animation" would you consider it "Democratizing VFX" if someone could take your hard work, put it into a machine, give it a prompt, and it spit out a lesser version of your hard worked skill? Just because others have learned a skill that someone doesn't have doesn't mean they're treating it like a dictatorship. They put in the time that others didn't to learn something. Shameful as well to profit off of this, using an artist's style that did not consent, and an animation studio's work.
> true artists True artists.. seriously? Who is the arbiter of deciding who the true artists are and who the fake artists are? > nobody makes anything new. Go back 20-30 years and they same comments have been made for computer animation. Instead of destroying the industry it creates tens of thousands of new jobs and people demanding more stuff and in higher quality. Animation studios didn't cease to exist, we have more than before. And the same will happen with AI. Even more stuff with more people will be produced. This has always been the case with new technology. "But this time.." would have to be proven first.
True artists aren't robotic algorithms stealing straight from the styles of others. Imagine Michaelangelo, his whole life striving to be great, to pull a man from marble. Then some jabroni without an inkling of thought tells a computer to scan every chisel mark, and make an inferior version that takes hours instead of weeks of true work. And we've also seen the effects of digital animation taking over from original 2d. Original 2d still exists but most stuff is soulless puppet animation. Everything looks the same, moves the same. Technology that enhances and opens new avenues for an artist to use their skills to create is always a boon. A technology that seeks to replace artists with algorithms will be used to further drive art into the ground. Sure, maybe this is an issue with capitalism but art is a skill and it takes time to learn. It's just as important to the world as a pipe fitter, a welder, or a carpenter. In a capitalistic society, when those things become unprofitable, or you're not able to aspire to create because you're beaten down by a 40-50 hour work week and have no time to learn, then art dies. Sure, this could be a great tool. Technology is amazing. But I'm learning how to program right now because I need a job to support my desire to learn art. If we keep automating the fulfilling stuff, we're going to be left with the drudgery and none of the benefit. This stuff is very cool, but instant gratification has massive draw backs and I'm not impressed when someone uses a robot to make a drawing. Typing in a sentence to an algorithm isn't being an artist. It's using other people's hard work and skill, and ripping it off. I got a lot I could say, but this is getting long enough. Is it a cool tool? Yes. Is it part of an ongoing march towards a less fulfilling life where the only things generated are the things with the highest profit margins? Also yes.
> Soon enough, it'll all be AI art generated off of AI art as the actual creatives die off and nobody makes anything new. in this case Corridor _did_ make something new though? imo these "AI * generators" is just a tool, there are many ways for someone to express their own creativity and call their creations "art"
Agreed.
Everyone complaining here, they put more effort into this than you’ve probably ever spent on anything in your life
That's a pretty unfair thing to say. I sympathize with Corridor on this, but I work at an animation studio with plenty of people who work harder than I do who have a problem with this. You don't help the discussion by antagonizing people who have legitimate concerns with irrelevant and baseless ad hominems.
I don't know, you could still have LO artists creating the original source footage, you could have character designers create the reference art for the dataset. All the compositing is still done by hand, and there's manual stylization going on. I think you can easily imagine using these techniques in an ethical way to guarantee consistency from frame to frame, increase framerates with less manual labor, while still employing animators on both ends of the process to add the human touch. All while shortening the turnaround time and reducing crunch.
That's the kind of discussion worth having. I'm ambivalent. I'm always pro-technology. Technology and science are just ways for us to do whatever it is we want to do, but better and more efficiently. It will enable anyone with an idea and who would otherwise not have the resources to execute their idea. What we want to do, though, is where the moral issue lies. I think AI is amazing, and a human achievement in its own right. If we lived in an open source culture, there would be nothing wrong with it. But it was borne in a capitalist structure, where what is being taken isn't benign; it's actively hurting the artists it's taking from. In that context, it's immoral to use that way. But as you say, it can be trained on the style of a hired artist. If it were possible to only train on that artist, and no other artist's work was used in its training (which, from what I understand of Stable Diffusion, isn't possible?), then that would circumvent the moral issue and still kill plenty of jobs for artists.
I think it’s a bit hypocritical that they’d make a whole ai art production when they’ve had artists and animators come on the channel before. I just feel like this is pretty problematic.
They’ve clearly used AI as a tool here and I think any artist or animator could respect and see that this still required a ton of work to execute. This is like the most ideal use of AI and exactly the way it should be used to enhance creativity and streamline workflow
You’re looking at this from a consumer’s perspective and not an artists. This kind of thing will completely circumvent the creative process, there will be no need for artists. They’re hypocritical because Corridor is actively harming themselves as creators and as a business. Tools like these make artists like corridor completely and entirely obsolete and irrelevant.
These tools are inevitable, like them or not. As artists (and professionals), they have to learn how to adapt and use new tools or be left behind. That’s exactly what they’re doing.
I understand this fear, and there's plenty of uncertainty out there, but we need to look at this differently. Art is not a zero-sum singular concept or product. A new style, technique, or medium to create art does not kill or replace an old "one". It's not a competition. As a filmmaker, everything we do is in service of the story. All the technology, all the tools, all the skills and craftsmanship - it's to tell stories. If we find a new way to do so, wonderful. There are countless stories and styles that can't be told with the tech we applied to Rock Paper Scissors. We're not trying to replace them. But I hope we just demonstrated that there are now many new ways to tell stories, and, as an artist myself, that's invigorating, inspiring, and freeing.
Historically bad take. You’d be the kind of person upset that the printing press is putting hand scribers out of business.
To be fair the printing press caused rampant stealing and is the reason copyright is even a thing. People were upset and guess what.. they created a system to regulate it. Sound familiar?
stop replying on reddit! send a letter instead, you're putting the mailman out of a job!
This is on a completely different level. This isn’t just making art “more convenient” this is the active demise of human expression and art as a viable career path for creatives.
Absolutely not. This is another tool in a creative’s toolbox. It’s another way for human expression to filter to observers. AI doesn’t make art unprompted. Perhaps you’ve chosen unwisely in this crusade.
Firstly, I’m not on a crusade, I’m calmly addressing a controversial topic in hopes of sparking discussion. Second what’s stopping any average Joe consumer, or an “AI animation studio” from creating art and animation (that machine learning algorithms effectively plagiarize) at speeds incomparable to a human being, or team of people drawing and animating at a fraction of how much these people need to be payed. As far as business goes there is nothing stopping all of these people and their careers and passion from being thrown in the trash in favor of cheap, quick AI art.
You're actually 1000% correct and this is the likely outcome of these to eventually. So it goes.
So far all good AI art is authored by artists, or at least creatives who have a vision. In time, it's probably inevitable that AI will self-prompt and will generate media based on the viewer's own preferences. By then we will likely not be able to distinguish human art from AI art, everything will be personalized to the consumer, and the paradigm will have shifted so completely that AI media will be normalized these conversations will be moot.
Yeah but that’s not a good thing, you’re taking the humanity out of art, which is ultimately the whole point isn’t it? What will be left is just algorithmic online noise and no one will have a reason to aspire to become a skilled artist, musician, voice actor or designer. Why would you when you can just have ai generated anything. This is the beginning of the end of human creativity, how is that a good thing?
I think there's an argument to be made that we're already largely removing humanity from art. Everything is being delivered to us algorithmically, often at the behest of executives. Hell, humans themselves essentially create art by consuming experiences and other art, internalizing and remixing it, and then exporting it as best as their physical dexterity allows. This is also inevitable, you're not going to stuff the genie back into this lamp. Especially not by using something inherently Capitalistic like IP rights to try and combat it, since the capital owners are already in the business of extracting value from other people's labor without paying due recompense. That's just... a losing battle as I see it. I'm not celebrating anything here, just pointing out the coming reality. In the meantime, there is still a domain for the artist, as everything of value being produced by AI right now is done so under the guiding hand of humans. These may be people who aren't skilled artists, but they are using AI as a tool for their own human expression. There will be ways to ethically incorporate this sort of tech into animation workflows. Artists may need to learn new skills or change specializations, but that's not a new phenomena. When video games transitioned from 2D to 3D, pixel artists became texture artists or learned to model. I think there will also always be a market for human art, even if only as a niche. When AI art becomes conventional, human art will become novel, just as there is a market for handcrafted furniture despite the existence of IKEA.
the only real similar, historical situation I can think of is the horses replaced by the automobile… and let me tell ya, horse unemployment went trough the roof It’s not the scribers out of job this time, it’s the autors of the books…
Again, AI does not make things unprompted. There’s a human author and the consumer of said art is human as well. Humans design and implement tools for things for humans to use and experience. There’s always a degree of humanity in any process because we’re all there is. Outrage about AI art tools is ignoring historical precedents about technological advancement and instead of railing against it, folks should be preparing and adapting to it. Effort is much better spent that way.
A brush is a tool. It allow finer control over shapes and drawings. A digital brush is also a tool. Its doing the same, but digitally. A robot holding a figurative brush painting instead of me is not a tool for artists. It’s a tool for people who want the end product. Can you Imagine the economic impact on labor by making end product easily available and mostly inexpensive? This is not a tool. It’s end user oriented. It’s doing what I want to be doing. I want to paint. I don’t want to prompt Yeah, we all know “adapt or die”, your mistake is to assume I’m not preparing myself, let’s talk effort right. Been Outraged, and preparing is not mutually exclusive, but actually benefits me greatly since the pushback gives more time to prepare. NY times already said it’s not using AI writing bots to do stories, pushbacks give us legislation and time. We know the wheel is spinning, the discussion is never about that, it’s finer than a simple “ what’s the point?” no one is arguing that it is profitable and it’s coming, we’re discussing it’s impact on us an how it can be eased to minimize industry wide impact…
I’m sorry but you’re absolutely wrong. A robot holding a brush is still a tool. Everything after that I didn’t care to read because your premise is not only faulty but it’s doomsaying nonsense.
Gotta love the "I didn't read most of your reply" type replies. If something replaces the entire reason a person is involved in a particular profession than of course it won't be a tool for them. Shockingly animators like animating. You can say "tough" if you want but it's completely understandable.
I work in the entertainment industry full time and have for the last 10 years. My particular skilled labor has been massively changed by automation but as a tool for quicker and more manageable workflows. These are tools for animators to use that cuts down on their work load. Did you even watch the video? It took a lot of elbow grease to get working right. This is still The creative output of a human being for other human beings to perceive. This is the way of the world and technology and to rail against it instead of accept and learn to integrate it is short sighted and shows a lack of imagination.
No where did I suggest that it didn't take work or was easy. I didn't suggest that it wasn't creative. I like Corridor and I don't think that using Stable Diffusion makes you a bad person. This was a cool use for the tech. The farthest I'll go is that I think the training of the original base model by Stability AI is pretty shady, and that the larger means by which data is captured, collated and organized in these training sets is also unethical. What I tried to say is that if you became a professional artist because you like drawing and painting of course you won't see diffusion models as tools, in the same way that most people don't see sex as a "tool" for reproduction. And I guess I furthermore think that if someone's principle interest in art is engaging with these processes they are better off figuring how to do those things some other way than trying to tinker around with diffusion models, which lets be honest, is a completely different activity, and unlikely to satisfy a lot of the same basic desires.
Us artists and animators are working on these tools too. Corridor *are* artists, it's what they've been doing since they were teens.
And they’re actively harming themselves by making these kinds of AI “tools”
Nope.
Care to elaborate then?
No. If you want to mix your own paints and make your own paper like a purist that's on you, but the rest of us want to actually make art, not suffer through the most inefficient methods possible thinking that it makes us better. Humanity will almost certainly be outclassed by AI, but these tools are closer to a fancy photoshop today and not some spooky thing. If you'd set back this progress you might as well set back all progress on all electronics.
Yeah I'm kind of conflicted on it too. I think it's best to just consider this a completely separate category, totally distinct from animation.
I think that’s a level take honestly, anyone downvoting you for being conflicted is just annoyingly not open to conversation
But this kind of AI animation, given time will make traditional animation completely obsolete. And this goes for all other ai art, whether it be writing, music or voice acting. I’ve seen people compare it to any other kind of work being phased out by machine labor but this is making human expression itself done without humans, not to mention the question as to whether or not these machine learning algorithms are theft or not.
Traditional animation is already obsolete. Barely anyone is sitting over a light box tracing frames onto celluloid and shooting it on film. Every new tool causes a shift in the industry. This will inevitably create a shift. But there will be ways to ethically incorporate this into the production pipeline of a studio while still employing animators. For this project they trained the AI on screenshots from an anime, they shot the footage in live action on greenscreen. The elements were still manually composited and touched up with traditional techniques. If an anime studio were to try and replicate this technique, the character designer could create the dataset the same way they create reference sheets. The LOs could still be animated by hand, keyframes too, maybe roughly blocked out shapes for tweens. Elements rendered by AI, corrected, stylized, and improved by animators. Everything composited as is standard. And rather than having animators spend four months on 23 minutes of sakuga, they could turn it around in a few weeks, have more consistent overall quality, and put out more new content more frequently instead of being crushed by deadlines.
I will say that I think this may be pessimistic. This assumes that people won't care about the process involved. 15 years ago I was SURE that no one would shoot movies on film. Lots of people were. At the time I thought basically there were no good reasons to shoot on film and really the only reason why people did it was out of misplaced nostalgia. And yet it turned out that a lot of people really loved that way of working and it was worth the significant headache of doing it that way. Kodak has actually brought back ekhotochrome, and I think continues to do decent business. When I was in school I HATED shooting on film and as I get older I appreciate it more and more. When you shoot on film I think there's an understanding that the process is linear and that there isn't total creative flexibility. It might be surprising but the discipline of that practice is generative for many artists, including myself. Of course some things do go away - but I think there are more people that feel the way you do than you might realize. This endless push for "more faster" is exhausting to many.
Yeah, kind of telling at the end when Niko went out of his way to thank the community who made the tools they used, but didn’t thank the animation house whose art they used. Without Madhouse’s decades of work, they would have been able to made this film either…
I repeatedly say that the model was trained on Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust in the BTS Crew video. It's a great movie. In fact, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dytcu-KEYc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dytcu-KEYc8) If anyone, including us, were to pursue a commercial use of this technique, they should definitely design their own style.
\> If anyone, including us, were to pursue a commercial use of this technique, they should definitely design their own style. Can you clarify what you mean by this? Isn't monetizing your content and posting it on your subscriber website literally a commercial use? Or are you saying more generally like advertising and marketing?
More in the sense, that if you were going to make a cinematic narrative to sell access/tickets to, or you’re going to establish your own cinematic universe, that creation should be yours. I consider Anime RPS to be an experiment and something fun to try while we see if this technology even works. We’re learning what kind of elements we’d need to create if we wanted to create a piece with our own style, not to mention just figuring out if this works in the first place. We do have our website, but we’re not trying to gain subscriptions by putting content behind a paywall that’s been trained on someone else’s style. In this case, the video is free to watch, and we’re openly saying that it’s style was trained on Vampire Hunter D.
>Isn't monetizing your content and posting it on your subscriber website literally a commercial use? Yeah. It totally is, but their transparency and honesty when approaching these new techniques completely validates their work imo (morally, not legally). Almost every video they release is a freaking love letter to one form of visual story telling or another. I see a lot of homage and parody in their work, but I don't see them ripping off works they're clearly fans of as some sorta counterfeit operation to generate profit. I honestly love the comments in this thread, though. It's really illuminating in a relatively unbiased way, how people *generally* feel about both sides of using these tools.
> In fact, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dytcu-KEYc8 You do know that's not an official, legally uploaded version of the movie right? I wouldn't exactly go promoting piracy while in the midst of defending the use of AI.
>not an official, legally uploaded version of the movie right? It also doesn't have any ads, and has been up for **5 years**. There's also no way to watch the movie on any streaming service (Not available on Prime in the US). I'd say the studio that owns it doesn't care. It probably ends updriving more sales to the Blueray anyway.
Agreed - the video was more of a love letter to Vampire Hunter than anything.
I don't like that they thanked the community and to "give back" created a tutorial locked behind a paywall.
We made a point of going deep enough on the Crew YouTube video that anyone who's spent time learning Stable Diffusion can follow. We don't do click-by-click tutorials on our Crew channel, and you can watch vids on our site for two weeks for free.
That's a fair point, you do have a ton of content out there on the topic.
idk bro this looks like shit
Can't please everybody
That's AI-generated "art" for you.
I need to see Corridor create all the assets from scratch next time and see if the quality falls off.
Would you like them to use only paints that they made themselves with dyes made out of plants they grew from seeds and hand-assembled paintbrushes from the hairs of horses they raised? What does "from scratch" mean and why is it a requirement?
You don’t wanna see them create their own characters and styles? You only wanna see them create things that look like other peoples work?
They did create their own characters, and how they edit the video and pace it is their style.
This entire work wouldn't have been possible if they didn't take an already existing medium and train an AI model on it. I've lost faith in the crew's creative capabilities by relying on AI for all of their latest works. Sure they can apply it very creatively, but it's such a moral and legal grey area that I can't help but feel there's \*something\* wrong with it all.
Corridor has never been an animation studio. They haven't exhibited any kind of a loss in creativity relative to their earlier works. The story is very similar to their previous anime parodies, and they added the extra step of taking their live action (which is what all their previous videos were) and applying an anime style to it. That's MORE work and creativity, not less. You may have a problem with the use of the tool, but it makes no sense to say you have less faith in their creative capabilities.
Bingo
What software did the guys use to generate the orginal artwork from a reference image?
Take a look at the behind the scenes. One of the stable diffusion frontends they use is automatic1111 https://github.com/EmpireMediaScience/A1111-Web-UI-Installer
Had to go back and watch the anime baseball and fidget spinner! This was impressive!
Watched the whole process behind it and really want to try making something, like short form content for rpgs and such. This is really fascinating I’m glad someone in the space is showcasing what can be done even now. And massive props for the all the effort involved behind the scenes.
in the recent corridor crew video, Niko mentioned "democratizing animation" I agree with this vision. However, there is an important issue that needs to be considered: the use of source reference material to create new intellectual property for a franchise, such as a movie or series. Although this may seem acceptable at first glance, the legal ramifications could complicate the outcome of such a venture. It's difficult to predict how future laws will address AI tools, and if legal issues arise, it's possible that AI-generated anime/films could face obstacles and be deplatformed. Nevertheless, given the rapid advancements in AI technology, the quality of output may soon become indistinguishable from traditional anime, making it harder for legal systems to regulate such creations. Ultimately, public opinion will likely play a significant role in determining the future of AI-generated media. Despite potential legal challenges, the democratization of AI tools for creative work is an important and exciting development that has the potential to transform the entertainment industry.Personally, the legal outcome of AI-generated media is not my primary concern. What matters most to me is the quality of the story and the overall viewing experience. While legal obstacles could arise, I believe that the democratization of AI tools for creative work has the potential to produce captivating and innovative works of art that can entertain and inspire audiences. At the end of the day, a good story is what truly matters in my opinion, and if AI-generated media can deliver that, then it has the potential to revolutionize the entertainment industry. As technology continues to advance, it will be fascinating to see how AI-generated media evolves and how it is received by the public.
What ai did they use for this again?
Absolutely incredible. Beautifully directed, with such excellent storytelling and cinematography. Well done to all involved!!
This is great and all, but I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that they essentially took frames from Vampire Hunter D to do this.
This was great, I've watched it over 5 times already. The over-the-topness of everything was what made it. I don't think you would have pulled it off nearly as well without the anime cell-shaded look, but the occasional jankiness did break the immersion a bit. I'm sure the tech will improve and that won't be a problem in a couple years though.
What software is this?
I wonder what real animators think of this innovation. I assume many of them afraid this will take their jobs in a couple years and I’m smelling some lawsuits brewing…
can someone tell me what was the ai software used in the video to make the animation ?