After seeing how someone used Seedance 2.0 to improve a famously bad anime scene (check the post here), it got me thinking: if in the near future you can just feed a rough storyboard or even a CBR file to an AI and get a fully animated episode, what’s the point of the traditional animation pipeline?
Either the industry adopts these tools en masse, or we’ll have a situation where the “fan-made” AI version of a show drops online before the official one is even finished. And if studios do use AI, how will the final product be any different from the countless fan remasters flooding the web? Feels like the whole definition of “official” animation is about to get very blurry.
I think animators will get screwed, but the corporate structures that own IPs will get even wealthier as they can just hire a very small handful of people to come up with a story and then pump out animations “instantly.”
And then the shape of the industry itself will change. They might start developing massive numbers of IPs in parallel to find the most popular ones, for example.
If the stories themselves can be AI generated, the Black Mirror thing where they’re made up on demand for a specific person might happen.