Netflix's short film The Dog and The Boy is another experiment in generative artificial intelligence. All the background images were created by Japan's Stable Diffusion, and the characters were created by human artists.
The company commented that the goal of the project is to "help the anime industry, which is experiencing a labor shortage," but the industry believes that it will only worsen the situation with workers' rights.
“A lot of artists are scared, and rightfully so,” says illustrator Zakuga Mignon, who started the hashtag #SupportHumanArtists, which trended in December and gained particular attention after the Netflix experiment.
But this film doesn’t just pose a threat to artists in general. It croatia number data targets background artists: a group of animators who are particularly vulnerable to automation and downsizing. For those who would like to bring attention to their work, it’s a worrying trend and a reminder of how automated tools can impact roles within the profession.
“We are proud to be a part of such an exciting project that we hope will contribute to elevating, improving, and bringing more flexibility to the creative process for anime in the future,” said Taiki Sakurai, Netflix’s lead anime producer, declining to answer specific questions about the film.
But the industry fears that this flexibility will allow fewer resources to be devoted to working with the background, which could degrade the final product.
“Background artists are a very important part of the production process, one of the highly skilled stages of production,” said Elena Alteman, who is part of The Platform Lab research group at Concordia University and studies the history of labor in the animation industry.
She says that backgrounds are often as important as characters, setting the tone for the work. Sometimes they even compensate for the lack of detail and complexity when the number of frames for the animation has been reduced to save money.