Some of these are very obviously trained on webtoons and manga, probably pixiv as well. This is very clear due to seeing CG buildings and other misc artifacts. So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting. So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
While being very pro AI in terms of any kind of trademaking and copyright, it still make me wonder what will happen to all the people who provided us with entertainment and if the quality continue to increase or if we're going to start losing challenging styles because "it's too hard for ai" and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It doesn't feel the same as people being replaced with computer and machines, this feels like the end of a road.
It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or even a piece of legal text.
As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone.
Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences.
There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.
> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.
You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
Disclaimer: I'm an artist with 30+ years of experience.
Downgraded to AI training? Nonsense. You forget artists do more than just draw for money, we also draw for FUN, and that little detail escapes every single AI-related discussion I've been reading for the last 3 years.
Not an artist myself. I think some artists may become more like head chefs in some Chinese restaurant, who is more like QA and give direction to cooks to improve their work. I think it is hard to notice the details and give concrete feedback if you are not working on it professionally for a long time.
The issue is whether the artists creating things for love of the game will be crowded out even further by studios churning out slop (or in HN terms, Minimal Viable Products) for cash. There are probably 15 disposable reality TV shows created for every scripted sitcom or drama that needs good writers, set designers and directors.
> So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
Doesn’t sound too bad? It sounds like the premise of a dystopian novel. Most artists would be profoundly unhappy making “art” to be fed to and deconstructed by a machine. You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine. “Art” is not drawing random pictures. And how, pray tell, will these artists survive? Who is going to be paying them to “draw whatever they like” to feed to models? And why would they employ more than two or three?
> it still make me wonder (…) if we're going to start losing challenging styles (…) and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It already does. There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
> You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine.
That's the definition of commercial art, which is what most art is.
> “Art” is not drawing random pictures.
It's exactly what it is, if you're talking about people churning out art by volume for money. It's drawing whatever they get told to, in endless variations. Those are the people you're really talking about, because those are the ones whose livelihoods are being consumed by AI right now.
The kind of art you're thinking of, the art that isn't just "drawing random pictures", the art that the term "deconstruction" could even sensibly apply to - that art isn't in as much danger just yet. GenAI can't replicate human expression, because models aren't people. In time, they'll probably become so, but then art will still be art, and we'll have bigger issues to worry about.
> There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
Now that is just marketing communications - advertising, sales, and associated fraud. GenAI is making everyone's lives worse by making the job of marketers easier. But that's not really the fault of AI, it's just the people who were already making everything shitty picking up new tools. It's not the AI that's malevolent here, it's the wielder.
The problem I have with the whole copyright AI thing is that the big ones benefit. If you reference any famous Copyright in chatgpt etc. you will get blocked but a small artist's stuff is not.
"Might makes right" is how we got here. Airbnb and Uber can break hotel and taxi regulations openly, but if you start your own ride-for-cash service, the state will shut you down for any number of by-law violations. They have law firms and lobbyists on retainer and you don't. Similarly, copyright infringement could be a jail sentence for you, but a "legal gray area" for them.
We probably should just stop enforcing copyright. “Stealing” my idea doesn’t deprive me of its use. Think about what the US market might look like if scaling and efficiency were rewarded rather than legal capture of markets. That large companies can buy and bury technology IP to maintain a market position is a tremendous loss for the rest of us.
I find it interesting that you echo the concerns of people who defend artists’ copyright claims, while stating that you are very pro AI in terms of copyright.
It’s a very emotionally loaded space for many, meaning most comments I read lean to the extremes of either argument, so seeing a comment like yours that combines both makes me curious.
Would be interesting to hear a bit more about how you see the role of copyright in the AI space.
At first it will obviously make it easier for artists to create what they want at the expense of doing everything yourself which will take the fun out of it. At first we might see some raise in the money some people can make, but as I said the choice artists will have in the end is being someone who draws pictures for a machine to be trained on.
I also think AI is the next evolution of humanity.
Not GP, though I agree with their views, and make my money from copyrighted work (writing novels).
The role of the artist has always been to provide excellent training data for future minds to educate themselves with.
This is why public libraries, free galleries, etc are so important.
Historically, art has been ‘best’ when the process of its creation has been heavily funded by a wealthy body (the church or state, for example).
‘Copyright’, as a legal idea, hasn’t existed for very long, relative to ‘subsidizing the creation of excellent training data’.
If ‘excellent training data for educating minds’ genuinely becomes a bottleneck for AI (though I’d argue it’s always a bottleneck for humanity!), funding its creation seems a no-brainer for an AI company, though they may balk at the messiness of that process.
I would strongly prefer that my taxes paid for this subsidization, so that the training data could be freely accessed by human minds or other types of mind.
Copyright isn’t anything more than a paywall, in my opinion. Art isn’t for revenue generation - it’s for catalyzing revenue generation.
Audiences too. People loses interest fast for anything that something faceless can provide, whether the thing is machines or humans, or whether the act is drawing art or assembling iPhone.
I think the “paper rock cross blade” short films by Corridor is absolute great and can by all accounts be called art and if they make a 3rd they will probably use this model.
In terms of losing styles, that is already been happening for ages. Disney moved to xeroxing instead of inking, changed the style because inking was “too hard”. In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw a burst of cartoons with a flash animation style on TV because it was a lot easier and cheaper to animate in flash.
I disagree with the positive characterisation. Those videos have a funny schtick of exaggerating anime tropes for a couple of minutes and that’s the extent of it. The animation is all over the place, reactions, expressions, mouth movements often fail, style changes from frame to frame. It maybe kind of works precisely because it’s a short exaggerated parody and we have a high tolerance for flaws in comedy, but even then the seams are showing. Anything even remotely more substantive would no longer have worked.
> Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting.
The rise of GPT slop is making it increasingly clear to me that this distinction doesn't exist, and it's just an under-appreciation of the skill that goes into good writing. That thing where LLMs generate overly-wordy mealy-mouthed text is just what bad writing looks like: the writing equivalent of a bad drawing. Subtle inaccuracies and ill-fitting metaphors are just the text version of visual artifacts.
Not to diminish the plight of art and artists, but it's the same as the plight of writers and writing. Writers are also having their copyrighted works used against their will to destroy their own industry. LLMs also need big human-written datasets to keep the magic running, that are drying up as they get poisoned by their own output.
AI is just going to absolutely blow the bottom 50% out of any market it's in.
Examples:
Disney isn't going to start using AI art. But all those gacha games on the iOS app store are ABSOLUTELY going to. And I suspect gacha apps support at least 10-100x more artists than Disney staffs.
Staff engineers aren't going anywhere - AI can't tell leadership the truth. But junior engineers are going to be gutted by this, because now their already somewhat dubious direct value proposition - turning tickets into code while they train up enough to participate more in the creative and social process of Software Engineering - now gets blasted by LLMs. Mind you, I don't personally hold this ultra-myopic view of juniors - but mgmt absolutely does, and they pick headcount.
Hmm yknow I could actually see Big Books getting the "top" end eaten by AI instead of the bottom, actually. All the penny dreadfuls you see lining the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Vs the truly creative work already happens at the bottom anyway, and is self-published.
Also, as someone who's watched copyright from the perspective of a GPL fanboy, good fucking luck actually enforcing anything copyright related. The legal system is pay to play and if you're a small (or even medium!) fry, you will probably never even know your copyright is being violated. Much less enforcing it or getting any kind of judgement.
>So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Is it? I have no knowledge of this product, but I recall Novel AI paid for a database of tagged Anime style images. Its not impossible for something similar to have happened here.
I think "text" is irrelevant, the distinction is between art and the synthetic, where art might be written or visual. It's a vague term that's often used to mean "graphics", confusing matters, and the meaning of art is endlessly debated, like the meaning of intelligence.
Obviously we have synthetic graphics (like synthetic text). So something else must be meant by "art" here.
I think many artists will see that if they publish anything original then AI companies will immediately use it as training data without regards to copyright.
The result will be less original art. They will simply stop creating it or publishing it.
IMO music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
AI will do the same for illustration.
It won’t do the same for _art_ in the “contemporary art” sense, as great art is mostly beyond the abilities of AI models. That’s probably an AGI complete task. That’s the good news.
I’m kinda sad about it. The abilities of the models are impressive, but they rely on harvesting the collective efforts of so many talented and hardworking artists, who are facing a double whammy: their own work is being dubiously used to put them out of a job.
Sometimes I feel like the tech community had an opportunity to create a wonderful future powered by technology. And what we decided to do instead was enshittify the world with ads, undermine the legal system, and extract value from people’s work without their permission.
Back in the day real hackers used to gather online to “stick it to the man”. They despised the greed and exploitation of Wall Street. And now we have become torch bearers for the very same greed.
> music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
Is there data for this? I feel there's more musicians than ever and there's more very talented musicians than ever and the most famous ones are more famous than ever so I would like to see if that's correct.
I don't think future tense is appropriate here as it's been few years since appearance of open weights image models. We're already transitioning into the gap phase between Napster to Vocaloid.
I wonder if there is a mitigation strategy for this. Is there a way to make (human-made-art) scraping robustly difficult, while leaving human discovery and exploration intact?
It is a fluke visual training sets are far less amenable to sabotage than textual ones. Not that I suggest engaging in such a horrible, terrible, very bad manners, do I?
You know, I wouldn't short what AI can do in the future, even if not trained on lots of art. It does not seem far out to me to think an AI could be trained to identify in images concepts like structure, balance, contrast, composition, narrative, etc, and then to pursue generation of such in procedural, iterative loops of drawing/painting using test time compute and a prompt for an objective.
Literally the first proper anime series (not including movies or like DBZ) that I ever watched. Still fondly remember it and still salty about how the director killed it. It would be the greatest gift of a lifetime if anyone ever either finished the series or rebooted and completed it.
1. Haruhi is based on light novels, so has to actually perform to get a release. Japanese market is upside down, the anime often goes to free to air to support a manga release where the real money is made (I have no idea how this works economically this is just how its explained to me) as there isn't any more manga or light novels to release, the likelihood of another season is low. It was sort of always a passion project.
I tested this out with a promotional illustration from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The model works quite well, but there are some temporal artifacts w.r.t. the animation of the hair as the head turns:
> a variable-length training approach is adopted, with training durations ranging from 2 to 8 seconds. This strategy enables our model to generate 720p
video clips with flexible lengths between 2 and 8 seconds.
I'd like to see it benched against FramePack which in my experience also handles 2d animation pretty well and doesn't suffer from the usual duration limitations of other models.
There are so many glitches even on the very first example. Arm of the shirt glitching, moving hair disappear and appear out of no where. Rest is just moving arm and clouds.
“It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements”.
If it isn’t covered (after all it’s the AI that drew all the pictures) then anyone using such service to produce a movie would be screwed - anyone could copy it or its characters).
I’m leaving out the problem of whether the service was trained on copyright material or not.
I would like to see how the fight scenes in The Beginning After the End could improve from being passed through this tool.
In all seriousness I wonder where is this all headed? Are people long term going to be more forgiving of visual artifacts if it will mean that their favourite franchise gets another season? Or will generated imagery be shunned just like the not-so-subtle use of 3D models?
Toei Animation is looking to utilize AI in areas such as
storyboarding, coloring, and “color specification,” as
well as in-between animation and backgrounds.
The specific use cases mentioned include:
• Storyboarding: Leveraging AI to “generate simple
layouts and shooting of the storyboards.”
• Colors: Employing AI to “specify colors and
automatically correct colors.”
• In-betweens: Utilizing AI to “automatically correct
line drawings and generate in-betweens.”
• Backgrounds: Using AI to “generate backgrounds from
a photo.”
I think this is fine. The director will still make sure there's no visual artifacts. On the other hand indies will be able to create their own works, maybe with some warts, but better than nothing.
We're discussing the implications of this here when this has presented nothing novel in this medium/genre? I gave it a shot and it still has the same pitfalls for video genAI. Dealing with chains of dynamic actions is the biggest challenge, moreso with anime with its several fight scenes. No, it did not do good, and none of the non open-source models can do a good job of it for the most part either
But seriously, I had the same thought, considering the general lack of guardrails surrounding high-profile Chinese genAI models... Eventually, someone will know the answer... It's inevitable...
Why? Who needs this? Who wants this? I still don't get why you would produce art with generation models instead of letting human artists do their thing. It's only funny as long as it's bad, but once it becomes better it's just creepy and most of all totally pointless.
Why is it pointless? People want anime. This technology allows more anime to exist. It's like you're saying "why do we need cast-iron moulds? Just let artisans do their craft."
People that don't like East Asian monopoly of anime style contents. Manga and anime style contents are sold at completely broken price/performance ratio while it continues to invasively permeate into cultures globally.
There are increasingly more reports of foreign scalpers stocking couples of $5 doujinshi in weekend cons and demanding receipts, and authors are moving to block them. That's like mafias genuinely smuggling charity home baked cookies. It shouldn't make sense. This astronomical gap in supply and demand, alone, should be enough to create incentives for people to even just mess up and ruin the market.
> There are increasingly more reports of foreign scalpers stocking couples of $5 doujinshi in weekend cons and demanding receipts, and authors are moving to block them.
I haven’t heard about this. Do you have a link to some more info about this?
I am super conflicted about this kind of AI. I want artists to create the next amazing season of Solo Leveling, but I dont want to wait 1 year for it.
You could argue that those tools in the hands of skilled craftsman will create amazing things faster, but we all know what will happen is absolute flood of AI slop in every entertainment category.
There has always been slop in animation. Some of it quite successful. "Why does this anime have fewer frames than the manga it's based on" has been a reoccurring topic over the years.
South Park looks like MS-Paint drawings hastily animated by someone without access to Adobe Animate. It still manages to be a good and beloved show because it shines in other ways
The world of entertainment is big enough for both Studio Ghibli productions and South Park to exist. AI slop will find its niche too. It will consume some animation jobs just as all the automaton and tooling coming before has, but I'm of the strong belief there will still be a market for good handmade art
I know there is a huge market for those excited for infinite anime music videos and all things anime.
This is great for an abundance of content and everyone will become anime artists now.
Japan is truly is embracing AI and there will be new jobs for everyone thanks to the boom AI is creating as well as Jevons paradox which will create huge demand.
I don't know, I used to like some anime and mangas when I was 14 in the mid 90's.
Nowadays it seems everyone is interested by "anime style" of content but all I see is terrible in term of quality. It seems quantity increased so much in the last 30 years it only made quality stuff more invisible and we are inundated with animelike trash.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean good things aren’t being made today. In fact, plenty of recent shows are better (in every regard: pacing, animation quality, character development, themes, …) than most popular stuff we had in the 90s. Heck, they’re better than many live action shows today. Quality from the 90s era looks skewed in the West, because we had such limited access that what even crossed the barrier were outliers in their own right.
YouTube channels like Mother’s Basement help picking out something to watch. Geoff has routinely pointed how he literally watches anime for a living and it’s still hard to watch everything worthy he finds.
Video titles are pretty self-explanatory. If you want to find something to watch, fire up one of “The BEST Anime of [season] [year]” and you’ll get plenty of recommendations, nicely ordered and with some short explanation of what it is about and why it’s noteworthy.
The percentage of anime I like is low and has always been low. I find a new anime I like comes along about every three years (I have to dig for it though.) In general, I care about the writing and story more than the visuals. So with a great increase in the amount of anime a single writer can create, shouldn't this allow for more well-written sloppy-visuals anime to exist? I'm excited to see.
This is absolutely correct. The quality has nosedived so hard in the first three months of 2025 that there wasn't anything worth watching whatsoever even if you were in the target demographic.
Not that different. Bilibili is a big, above-board video streaming service; they definitely have distribution rights to a large collection of anime content. (They also have YouTube-style user uploads where proper licensing is less likely.)
It's the equivalent of Crunchyroll putting out a video generation model. If the rightsholders disagree with this usage, it'll come up during the negotiations for new releases.
Some of these are very obviously trained on webtoons and manga, probably pixiv as well. This is very clear due to seeing CG buildings and other misc artifacts. So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting. So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
While being very pro AI in terms of any kind of trademaking and copyright, it still make me wonder what will happen to all the people who provided us with entertainment and if the quality continue to increase or if we're going to start losing challenging styles because "it's too hard for ai" and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It doesn't feel the same as people being replaced with computer and machines, this feels like the end of a road.
It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or even a piece of legal text.
As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
Here’s the argument:
The output of her translations had no copyright. Language developed independently of translators.
The output of artists has copyright. Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
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My prediction:
It will be like furniture.
A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone.
Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences.
There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.
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> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.
You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
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You can't compare translation to creating new works of art. Sorry mom, but that's apples and oranges. A dangerously false comparison.
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Disclaimer: I'm an artist with 30+ years of experience.
Downgraded to AI training? Nonsense. You forget artists do more than just draw for money, we also draw for FUN, and that little detail escapes every single AI-related discussion I've been reading for the last 3 years.
Not an artist myself. I think some artists may become more like head chefs in some Chinese restaurant, who is more like QA and give direction to cooks to improve their work. I think it is hard to notice the details and give concrete feedback if you are not working on it professionally for a long time.
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This is exactly what I meant when I said "people can draw what they want *for fun*.
The issue is whether the artists creating things for love of the game will be crowded out even further by studios churning out slop (or in HN terms, Minimal Viable Products) for cash. There are probably 15 disposable reality TV shows created for every scripted sitcom or drama that needs good writers, set designers and directors.
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> So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
Doesn’t sound too bad? It sounds like the premise of a dystopian novel. Most artists would be profoundly unhappy making “art” to be fed to and deconstructed by a machine. You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine. “Art” is not drawing random pictures. And how, pray tell, will these artists survive? Who is going to be paying them to “draw whatever they like” to feed to models? And why would they employ more than two or three?
> it still make me wonder (…) if we're going to start losing challenging styles (…) and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It already does. There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
> You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine.
That's the definition of commercial art, which is what most art is.
> “Art” is not drawing random pictures.
It's exactly what it is, if you're talking about people churning out art by volume for money. It's drawing whatever they get told to, in endless variations. Those are the people you're really talking about, because those are the ones whose livelihoods are being consumed by AI right now.
The kind of art you're thinking of, the art that isn't just "drawing random pictures", the art that the term "deconstruction" could even sensibly apply to - that art isn't in as much danger just yet. GenAI can't replicate human expression, because models aren't people. In time, they'll probably become so, but then art will still be art, and we'll have bigger issues to worry about.
> There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
Now that is just marketing communications - advertising, sales, and associated fraud. GenAI is making everyone's lives worse by making the job of marketers easier. But that's not really the fault of AI, it's just the people who were already making everything shitty picking up new tools. It's not the AI that's malevolent here, it's the wielder.
I don't consider facebook a good sample group.
Surely we’re way past the point now that models could be improved via RLHF using upvotes, or something equally banal?
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The problem I have with the whole copyright AI thing is that the big ones benefit. If you reference any famous Copyright in chatgpt etc. you will get blocked but a small artist's stuff is not.
Open it for all or nothing.
"Might makes right" is how we got here. Airbnb and Uber can break hotel and taxi regulations openly, but if you start your own ride-for-cash service, the state will shut you down for any number of by-law violations. They have law firms and lobbyists on retainer and you don't. Similarly, copyright infringement could be a jail sentence for you, but a "legal gray area" for them.
We probably should just stop enforcing copyright. “Stealing” my idea doesn’t deprive me of its use. Think about what the US market might look like if scaling and efficiency were rewarded rather than legal capture of markets. That large companies can buy and bury technology IP to maintain a market position is a tremendous loss for the rest of us.
I find it interesting that you echo the concerns of people who defend artists’ copyright claims, while stating that you are very pro AI in terms of copyright.
It’s a very emotionally loaded space for many, meaning most comments I read lean to the extremes of either argument, so seeing a comment like yours that combines both makes me curious.
Would be interesting to hear a bit more about how you see the role of copyright in the AI space.
At first it will obviously make it easier for artists to create what they want at the expense of doing everything yourself which will take the fun out of it. At first we might see some raise in the money some people can make, but as I said the choice artists will have in the end is being someone who draws pictures for a machine to be trained on.
I also think AI is the next evolution of humanity.
Not GP, though I agree with their views, and make my money from copyrighted work (writing novels).
The role of the artist has always been to provide excellent training data for future minds to educate themselves with.
This is why public libraries, free galleries, etc are so important.
Historically, art has been ‘best’ when the process of its creation has been heavily funded by a wealthy body (the church or state, for example).
‘Copyright’, as a legal idea, hasn’t existed for very long, relative to ‘subsidizing the creation of excellent training data’.
If ‘excellent training data for educating minds’ genuinely becomes a bottleneck for AI (though I’d argue it’s always a bottleneck for humanity!), funding its creation seems a no-brainer for an AI company, though they may balk at the messiness of that process.
I would strongly prefer that my taxes paid for this subsidization, so that the training data could be freely accessed by human minds or other types of mind.
Copyright isn’t anything more than a paywall, in my opinion. Art isn’t for revenue generation - it’s for catalyzing revenue generation.
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Artists push the envelope.
With AI tools artists will be able to push further, doing things that AI can't do yet.
Audiences too. People loses interest fast for anything that something faceless can provide, whether the thing is machines or humans, or whether the act is drawing art or assembling iPhone.
Push further can only artists that weren't crippled by AI.
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I think the “paper rock cross blade” short films by Corridor is absolute great and can by all accounts be called art and if they make a 3rd they will probably use this model.
In terms of losing styles, that is already been happening for ages. Disney moved to xeroxing instead of inking, changed the style because inking was “too hard”. In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw a burst of cartoons with a flash animation style on TV because it was a lot easier and cheaper to animate in flash.
I disagree with the positive characterisation. Those videos have a funny schtick of exaggerating anime tropes for a couple of minutes and that’s the extent of it. The animation is all over the place, reactions, expressions, mouth movements often fail, style changes from frame to frame. It maybe kind of works precisely because it’s a short exaggerated parody and we have a high tolerance for flaws in comedy, but even then the seams are showing. Anything even remotely more substantive would no longer have worked.
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> Art is something that cannot be generated
Of course it can be, you're seeing it first hand with your very own eyes.
I think we're seeing machine generation of derivative visual materials.
There's a difference, in my mind at least. "Art" is cultural activity and expression, there needs to be intent, creativity, imagination..
A printer spooling out wallpaper is not making art, even if there was artistry involved in making the initial pattern that is now being spooled out.
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> Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting.
The rise of GPT slop is making it increasingly clear to me that this distinction doesn't exist, and it's just an under-appreciation of the skill that goes into good writing. That thing where LLMs generate overly-wordy mealy-mouthed text is just what bad writing looks like: the writing equivalent of a bad drawing. Subtle inaccuracies and ill-fitting metaphors are just the text version of visual artifacts.
Not to diminish the plight of art and artists, but it's the same as the plight of writers and writing. Writers are also having their copyrighted works used against their will to destroy their own industry. LLMs also need big human-written datasets to keep the magic running, that are drying up as they get poisoned by their own output.
AI is just going to absolutely blow the bottom 50% out of any market it's in.
Examples:
Disney isn't going to start using AI art. But all those gacha games on the iOS app store are ABSOLUTELY going to. And I suspect gacha apps support at least 10-100x more artists than Disney staffs.
Staff engineers aren't going anywhere - AI can't tell leadership the truth. But junior engineers are going to be gutted by this, because now their already somewhat dubious direct value proposition - turning tickets into code while they train up enough to participate more in the creative and social process of Software Engineering - now gets blasted by LLMs. Mind you, I don't personally hold this ultra-myopic view of juniors - but mgmt absolutely does, and they pick headcount.
Hmm yknow I could actually see Big Books getting the "top" end eaten by AI instead of the bottom, actually. All the penny dreadfuls you see lining the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Vs the truly creative work already happens at the bottom anyway, and is self-published.
Also, as someone who's watched copyright from the perspective of a GPL fanboy, good fucking luck actually enforcing anything copyright related. The legal system is pay to play and if you're a small (or even medium!) fry, you will probably never even know your copyright is being violated. Much less enforcing it or getting any kind of judgement.
>So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Is it? I have no knowledge of this product, but I recall Novel AI paid for a database of tagged Anime style images. Its not impossible for something similar to have happened here.
That wouldn’t change the fact that the images are copyrighted material.
If you believe NovelAI is only trained on legally acquired content, I have a bridge to sell you.
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> Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text
10 years ago: "real real text cannot be generated like stock phrases, so writing will be nearly forever powered by human writers."
I think "text" is irrelevant, the distinction is between art and the synthetic, where art might be written or visual. It's a vague term that's often used to mean "graphics", confusing matters, and the meaning of art is endlessly debated, like the meaning of intelligence.
Obviously we have synthetic graphics (like synthetic text). So something else must be meant by "art" here.
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Now: "you can block that AI slop with uBlock, switch to Firefox if you haven't"
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I think many artists will see that if they publish anything original then AI companies will immediately use it as training data without regards to copyright.
The result will be less original art. They will simply stop creating it or publishing it.
IMO music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
AI will do the same for illustration.
It won’t do the same for _art_ in the “contemporary art” sense, as great art is mostly beyond the abilities of AI models. That’s probably an AGI complete task. That’s the good news.
I’m kinda sad about it. The abilities of the models are impressive, but they rely on harvesting the collective efforts of so many talented and hardworking artists, who are facing a double whammy: their own work is being dubiously used to put them out of a job.
Sometimes I feel like the tech community had an opportunity to create a wonderful future powered by technology. And what we decided to do instead was enshittify the world with ads, undermine the legal system, and extract value from people’s work without their permission.
Back in the day real hackers used to gather online to “stick it to the man”. They despised the greed and exploitation of Wall Street. And now we have become torch bearers for the very same greed.
> music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
Is there data for this? I feel there's more musicians than ever and there's more very talented musicians than ever and the most famous ones are more famous than ever so I would like to see if that's correct.
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I don't think future tense is appropriate here as it's been few years since appearance of open weights image models. We're already transitioning into the gap phase between Napster to Vocaloid.
100% Agree.
I wonder if there is a mitigation strategy for this. Is there a way to make (human-made-art) scraping robustly difficult, while leaving human discovery and exploration intact?
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It is a fluke visual training sets are far less amenable to sabotage than textual ones. Not that I suggest engaging in such a horrible, terrible, very bad manners, do I?
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Well said.
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You know, I wouldn't short what AI can do in the future, even if not trained on lots of art. It does not seem far out to me to think an AI could be trained to identify in images concepts like structure, balance, contrast, composition, narrative, etc, and then to pursue generation of such in procedural, iterative loops of drawing/painting using test time compute and a prompt for an objective.
We’re so close to finally being able to generate our own Haruhi season 3… what a time to be alive.
Let’s have that conversation in five or ten years again. It doesn’t look so close to me now, I’m curious how that will play out.
Literally the first proper anime series (not including movies or like DBZ) that I ever watched. Still fondly remember it and still salty about how the director killed it. It would be the greatest gift of a lifetime if anyone ever either finished the series or rebooted and completed it.
Or fix NGE
You can’t fix perfection
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Dude… are you telling me it isnt actually finished? I am watching season 1 for the first time…
My memory is:
1. Haruhi is based on light novels, so has to actually perform to get a release. Japanese market is upside down, the anime often goes to free to air to support a manga release where the real money is made (I have no idea how this works economically this is just how its explained to me) as there isn't any more manga or light novels to release, the likelihood of another season is low. It was sort of always a passion project.
2. The studio was firebombed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Animation_arson_attack
3. Season 2 was critically panned, but I dunno I thought it was pretty genius.
My suggestion, watch both series, then read the english translation of the novels.
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No it's not. 4 of 10 volumes.
The IP is likely doa anyway as it's on indefinite hiatus
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Shit i haven't heard of this anime in over 10 years. That was a shot of nostalgia
Sure, if you're happy eating the dogshit that is AI.
I tested this out with a promotional illustration from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The model works quite well, but there are some temporal artifacts w.r.t. the animation of the hair as the head turns:
https://goto.isaac.sh/neon-anisora
Prompt: The giant head turns to face the two people sitting.
Oh, there is a docs page with more examples:
https://pwz4yo5eenw.feishu.cn/docx/XN9YdiOwCoqJuexLdCpcakSln...
link's broke
https://dihulvhqvmoxyhkxovko.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/p...
From the paper:
> a variable-length training approach is adopted, with training durations ranging from 2 to 8 seconds. This strategy enables our model to generate 720p video clips with flexible lengths between 2 and 8 seconds.
I'd like to see it benched against FramePack which in my experience also handles 2d animation pretty well and doesn't suffer from the usual duration limitations of other models.
https://lllyasviel.github.io/frame_pack_gitpage
By uploading an image it requires to create an account --> why don't you make the statement more obvious and hide the form behind the login totally?
If you are interested in creating AI anime content, consider participating in the AniGen competition! https://komiko.app/anigen-competition
Tempting, but I'll need to hurry. Submission deadline is May 20th!
There are so many glitches even on the very first example. Arm of the shirt glitching, moving hair disappear and appear out of no where. Rest is just moving arm and clouds.
Is it able to render the same character in different scenes / from different angles? This is the main limitation of all image gen so far.
Failed for me with erroneous error every time with different accounts and different inputs.
What would be the copyright status for clips generated with such service? Would the copyright protect it?
Current stance:
https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
“It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements”.
If it isn’t covered (after all it’s the AI that drew all the pictures) then anyone using such service to produce a movie would be screwed - anyone could copy it or its characters).
I’m leaving out the problem of whether the service was trained on copyright material or not.
thinking of how pissed I'd be if I saw that awful in-betweening example in a show I liked.
I would like to see how the fight scenes in The Beginning After the End could improve from being passed through this tool.
In all seriousness I wonder where is this all headed? Are people long term going to be more forgiving of visual artifacts if it will mean that their favourite franchise gets another season? Or will generated imagery be shunned just like the not-so-subtle use of 3D models?
Source: https://www.japannihon.com/toei-animation-discusses-ai-use-i...
I think this is fine. The director will still make sure there's no visual artifacts. On the other hand indies will be able to create their own works, maybe with some warts, but better than nothing.
We're discussing the implications of this here when this has presented nothing novel in this medium/genre? I gave it a shot and it still has the same pitfalls for video genAI. Dealing with chains of dynamic actions is the biggest challenge, moreso with anime with its several fight scenes. No, it did not do good, and none of the non open-source models can do a good job of it for the most part either
I could see AI being used for douga in the future.
can i generate hentai
Inquisitive minds need to know!
But seriously, I had the same thought, considering the general lack of guardrails surrounding high-profile Chinese genAI models... Eventually, someone will know the answer... It's inevitable...
Says it's open source but I'm having trouble finding a link to weights and/or code?
Looks incredibly impressive btw. Not sure it's wise to call it `AniSora` but I don't really know.
https://huggingface.co/IndexTeam/Index-anisora
Thanks!
> This model has 1 file scanned as unsafe. testvl-pre76-top187-rec69.pth
Hm, perhaps I'll wait for this to get cleared up?
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> Not sure it's wise to call it `AniSora` but I don't really know.
Given that OpenAI call themselves "Open", I think it's great and hilarious that we're reusing their names.
There was OpenSora from around this time last year:
https://github.com/hpcaitech/Open-Sora
And there are a lot of other products calling themselves "Sora" as well.
It's also interesting to note that OpenAI recently redirected sora.com, which used to be its own domain, to sora.chatgpt.com.
> OpenAI recently redirected sora.com, which used to be its own domain, to sora.chatgpt.com.
Probably to share cookies.
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Wants a Google login.
Why? Who needs this? Who wants this? I still don't get why you would produce art with generation models instead of letting human artists do their thing. It's only funny as long as it's bad, but once it becomes better it's just creepy and most of all totally pointless.
Why is it pointless? People want anime. This technology allows more anime to exist. It's like you're saying "why do we need cast-iron moulds? Just let artisans do their craft."
People that don't like East Asian monopoly of anime style contents. Manga and anime style contents are sold at completely broken price/performance ratio while it continues to invasively permeate into cultures globally.
There are increasingly more reports of foreign scalpers stocking couples of $5 doujinshi in weekend cons and demanding receipts, and authors are moving to block them. That's like mafias genuinely smuggling charity home baked cookies. It shouldn't make sense. This astronomical gap in supply and demand, alone, should be enough to create incentives for people to even just mess up and ruin the market.
> There are increasingly more reports of foreign scalpers stocking couples of $5 doujinshi in weekend cons and demanding receipts, and authors are moving to block them.
I haven’t heard about this. Do you have a link to some more info about this?
>Powered by the enhanced Wan2.1-14B foundation model for superior stability.
Wan2.1 is great. Does this mean anisora is also 16fps?
So we can finally remake Akame Ga kill?
I am super conflicted about this kind of AI. I want artists to create the next amazing season of Solo Leveling, but I dont want to wait 1 year for it.
You could argue that those tools in the hands of skilled craftsman will create amazing things faster, but we all know what will happen is absolute flood of AI slop in every entertainment category.
There has always been slop in animation. Some of it quite successful. "Why does this anime have fewer frames than the manga it's based on" has been a reoccurring topic over the years.
South Park looks like MS-Paint drawings hastily animated by someone without access to Adobe Animate. It still manages to be a good and beloved show because it shines in other ways
The world of entertainment is big enough for both Studio Ghibli productions and South Park to exist. AI slop will find its niche too. It will consume some animation jobs just as all the automaton and tooling coming before has, but I'm of the strong belief there will still be a market for good handmade art
Bullshit, it failed to build but took my credits.
I welcome this.
I know there is a huge market for those excited for infinite anime music videos and all things anime.
This is great for an abundance of content and everyone will become anime artists now.
Japan is truly is embracing AI and there will be new jobs for everyone thanks to the boom AI is creating as well as Jevons paradox which will create huge demand.
Even better if this open source.
I don't know, I used to like some anime and mangas when I was 14 in the mid 90's.
Nowadays it seems everyone is interested by "anime style" of content but all I see is terrible in term of quality. It seems quantity increased so much in the last 30 years it only made quality stuff more invisible and we are inundated with animelike trash.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean good things aren’t being made today. In fact, plenty of recent shows are better (in every regard: pacing, animation quality, character development, themes, …) than most popular stuff we had in the 90s. Heck, they’re better than many live action shows today. Quality from the 90s era looks skewed in the West, because we had such limited access that what even crossed the barrier were outliers in their own right.
YouTube channels like Mother’s Basement help picking out something to watch. Geoff has routinely pointed how he literally watches anime for a living and it’s still hard to watch everything worthy he finds.
Video titles are pretty self-explanatory. If you want to find something to watch, fire up one of “The BEST Anime of [season] [year]” and you’ll get plenty of recommendations, nicely ordered and with some short explanation of what it is about and why it’s noteworthy.
https://youtube.com/@mothersbasement/
The percentage of anime I like is low and has always been low. I find a new anime I like comes along about every three years (I have to dig for it though.) In general, I care about the writing and story more than the visuals. So with a great increase in the amount of anime a single writer can create, shouldn't this allow for more well-written sloppy-visuals anime to exist? I'm excited to see.
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Not my experience - as someone generally not interested in anime I only tend to be aware of the cream of the crop.
And in fact we seem to have a once of a decade alignment of talent (starting in 2023 with Season 1) with Frieren.
This is absolutely correct. The quality has nosedived so hard in the first three months of 2025 that there wasn't anything worth watching whatsoever even if you were in the target demographic.
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This is great for an abundance of content and everyone will become anime artists now.
I don't think they'd be artists, but AI-prompters, although you're right that there will be a huge flood of content.
I might be missing something, but it feels weird that it’s named after Sora?
sora is the japanese word for sky, and it's not that uncommon a name.
Sure, but this is literally named after OpenAI’s Sora: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10255
So was this trained on existing anime? Ain't no way the corpus was licensed legally.
The right to train models on copyrighted data has yet to be determined.
China doesn't know what you're talking about.
Nothing special about China. Meta used libgen too, and not even seed.
Maybe they bought a Crunchyroll subscription. It's how a lot of people get trained on anime.
Not like chatgtp and sora which as all we all known are fully trained in public licensed content free of copyright.
Exactly, that's why they aren't able to replicate the Studio Ghibli style.
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There are very few models out there that are not trained on data protected by copyright. So nothing new for the past 3 years
"animated video generation model presented by Bilibili."
You understand that china has "different" view on copyright,license etc right??
Not that different. Bilibili is a big, above-board video streaming service; they definitely have distribution rights to a large collection of anime content. (They also have YouTube-style user uploads where proper licensing is less likely.)
It's the equivalent of Crunchyroll putting out a video generation model. If the rightsholders disagree with this usage, it'll come up during the negotiations for new releases.
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Do you think all that all the big guys just asked people while training their models?
Really? We've all seen the stories on how Meta sourced book content from Anna's Archive and still you try to claim things are different in China?
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China doesn't care about silly licenses.
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I always find it amusing that these LLM/AI generated software using copywrite material has the irony to copywrite its own system.