I’ve said this before, but this article is the view from someone who has no experience in the field who sees technology as the answer to everything.<p>I am someone who has both worked in the animation industry (both as an artist and a developer), and currently work on what I would consider the bleeding edge of graphics engineering with ML (with large teams of course), I feel very confident in saying that people who make articles like this are just spewing technocratic bullshit.<p>There’s no understanding of the craft that goes into making content. There’s no understanding of the iterations and creative control that goes into it. There’s also no understanding of the business of animation.<p>Saying “you’ll lose your jobs” is downright stupid. Yes, AI tools will help streamline jobs. But that’s what they are: tools. Some jobs may be displaced if people don’t learn the new tools (see 2D animation being displaced by 3D) or if you were already just a worker doing menial work. However there’s so much artistry involved in every phase of production that you’re not going to see job reductions for a few decades.<p>I believe the opposite, there’s such a desire for a glut of content, that you’ll see more jobs. AI may help accelerate those tasks, but there’s already so much work that studios are constantly at capacity.<p>The other fact is that it ignores human nature. We still value stop motion animation or 2D even if CGI is better for mass production. There’s a human element that is not purely rational that we crave.<p>Lastly, the reason I think articles like this are bunk is because the people who write them assume studios do little research and development internally. We do so much. Attend any SIGGRAPH session and you’ll see so much mind blowing content.<p>We spend years trying to make it so artists don’t have to do work. I’ve literally automated my job and the job of other artists on other projects.<p>Does that mean my department or those artists get fired? No! It means they spend time working on making the content better instead of spending time on the stuff that was just automated. When they were spending time working on menial things like crowds, they can now spend that time finessing great performances.<p>We often stay on top of the cutting edge of research outside of our industry and make good use of it. It’s not like the industry, made up of countless brilliant engineers and artists, are blind to what’s going on.<p>Anyway, my advice to people: don’t listen to charlatans who sell technology as the answer to problem spaces they’ve never worked in. Yes, every now and then you get an outsider who shakes up the world, but it’s rare without some deeper understanding of the problem space.<p>The people saying Diffusion art generators and nerfs are coming for the animation jobs are quite clueless in my opinion, and are easily hyped by “shiny”.