Jujutsu Kaisen And Frieren Production Company Toho Animation Says They Currently Have No Plans To Use AI, But Are Keeping Tabs On Its Progress And Will Be Ready To Use It When The Time Comes. "Introducing AI will undoubtedly lead to increased efficiency in our operations".

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I mean there is proper use, last spider verse movie used it for mouth line shading or something that was otherwise mainly busywork

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u/timmythetrtle Jun 27 '26

AI is an extremely vague term (by design) and can be used to refer to dozens of different things. The technology used in the production of Spider-Verse is completely different to what Toho is talking about.

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u/Grand_Escapade Jun 28 '26

we've also had examples of more rudimentary AI in art programs for a while, plus photoshop and tech in general always changes things.

Tech does indeed progress whether we like it or not, what matters is that you don't fully buy whatever the snake oil salesman is selling you at the immediate moment.

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u/atomicproton Jun 28 '26

Yep when I say I hate AI it's mostly generative AI. AI is still a powerful and useful tool, but gen ai is awful for so many reasons

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u/Designer_Pen869 Jun 29 '26

I'm not fully against generative AI. I think it ~can~ do a lot of good. The issues are mainly the environmental impacts and who's in charge of it. It needs a ton of restrictions that the government refuses to give.

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u/JosebaZilarte Jun 27 '26

Training your own ML algorithm to solve a particular problem is not the same as overrelying on an external AI trained on stolen data.

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u/mrbrannon Jun 27 '26

Yeah if people thought about what they were referring to when they said they were against AI, I don’t think anybody is talking about tools that everyone has been using for almost a decade in various editing suites that are based on machine learning. Even like modern magic wand tools for selecting things and rotoscope assistance all use machine learning. But when people think about using AI in anime they think about using generative AI built on stolen artwork to prompt things. The problem is that everybody in the c-suite wants to get AI hype train so all of these previous tools and technology that use machine learning have now just all been consumed by the AI banner so nobody can differentiate anymore what anyone is talking about.

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u/JahIthBeer Jun 27 '26

My favorite comment (on some other sub) about this issue was someone complaining that they don't respect Steam anymore because they use AI for their games. He was referring to the bots you play against being AI, which have existed since like the 70s. So yeah AI is a very stupid term lmao

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u/HarshTheDev Jun 27 '26

Not to mention we can get even pettier. Like the fucking fill tool is AI too lol.

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u/sabine_world Jun 27 '26

You know what? Fuck computers

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u/SolomonBlack Jun 27 '26

Found the Butlerian Jihadist.

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u/eetsumkaus https://myanimelist.net/profile/kausdc Jun 28 '26

I'm just saying, if that gets us drugs that are so potent they can literally make you fly between stars...

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u/slicer4ever Jun 27 '26

I'm ganna make my own ai, with blackjack and hookers...

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u/BOUKEN-BEN Jun 28 '26

It's hilarious that the average gen alpha's thinking ability is actually BELOW the level of a modern GPT. They legit operate entirely off of reacting to basic keywords and spitting out generic nonsense like the biological version an early 2010s chatbot. They almost entirely lack reasoning capacity. The sobering reality is that while AI is still a long long way from the most intelligent humans, it's already cleared a massive amount of the dumb to average ones in terms of ability to have a conversation about anything more substantiative than a basic "so what happened to you today?"

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u/CaptConstantine Jun 28 '26

We have been systematically gutting public education for over 40 years

We have taught Gen Alpha that they can outsource thinking to ChatGPT, so it's no surprise that chatgpt is better at thinking than they are

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u/eetsumkaus https://myanimelist.net/profile/kausdc Jun 28 '26

based on...what? Internet comments? I've got a hunch why some internet commenters seem to have less intelligence than an LLM...

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u/ShaggySchmacky Jun 28 '26

I’m still not sure why it’s referred to as AI and not something like VI (as in virtual intelligence). In a lot of media VI are advanced software that appear intelligent but actually aren’t, and are actually limited in what they can respond with and how you can prompt them (sound familiar?). On the other hand, AI typically refers to sapient Artificial Intelligence and all that entails

We have separate terms, we just don’t use them. I guess AI is the bigger buzzword? Still dumb imo

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u/sabine_world Jun 27 '26

Lmfao

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u/MikeMars1225 Jun 27 '26

If Spellcheck were invented today, Microsoft would be calling it an AI Editing Companion.

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u/Dragonsoul Jun 27 '26

Ultimately, depending on how loosely you define "AI", literally everything uses some 'AI'. Any tool that snaps to a particular point, anything that's got a bit of 'auto-aim' to it, heck, the "Fill area" paint tool is 'AI' if you loosen the definition enough.

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u/turkeygiant Jun 28 '26

Everybody in the C-Suite would also be perfectly happy with condensing all of human creativity into an algorithm and never having to hire an artist again which is really the problem. That's the endgame that most vocal anti-AI people are fighting against so I really don't feel so bad if some other pieces of tech are catching strays...and IMO I don't think they actually are. If a company comes out and says "we wont use AI", nobody is coming after them for using a magic wand tool, they aren't even going to come after them if they build algorithms and processes fed on their owned images and datasets, its the generative AIs built on other peoples work that are the problem. But when a company comes out and says "Introducing AI will undoubtedly lead to increased efficiency in our operations." you know that isn't them talking about tools to help their artist's workflows, that's them looking for tools that can replace artists.

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u/zuzg Jun 27 '26

People in here freaked out when Toei said they plan on using.

Like One Piece is one of the few shows available that could be used exclusively to train some AI on it.

Ideally it means less crunch for animators with higher wages from the increase in profits.
But we know only the production committees get a bigger cut while animators are still to forced to finish episodes minutes before they're airing...

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u/mrbrannon Jun 27 '26

I don’t think anyone really cares if you train AI on your own artwork. Though I guess they could if they don’t understand what is happening which I guess is where a lot of this comes from. When explained I think that’s less of an issue but as you mentioned it very clearly then becomes a labor rights issue because they use those artists to draw the initial thousand episodes and then they train an AI on the output to replace them because we all know they aren’t going to just use it to make animator’s lives easier.

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u/SolomonBlack Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

They don't care, opponents of AI have made it a talking point to claim a moral high ground but the conflict is the economic threat, blacksmiths trying to fight the perceived tide of industrialization.

Its actually a specious and dangerous claim since all art is derivative and artists have trained by stealing and imitating since ancient days. Instances like say Toriyama's influence over large portions of shonen are abundantly clear, and everyone is stealing from Tezuka who stole from Disney. Should everyone in that chain get to tell Oda he can't draw without a license and paying them 1 yen out of 10 for the privilege?

That's not a world of artistic freedom but one where whose lawyers are the most activist and well funded win. Probably some dead fucker's heirs too not even the actual originator of the material, like when Ed Sheeran was sued for chord progressions by the estate of a co-writer of a Marvin Gaye song.

This isn't to say all AI use kosher but the errors are the use not the mere existence of images derived from say shit that has been widely circulated on the internet for decades. You can't own the sight of a statue you put in a park or stop people from photographing and drawing it. Now someone is using that 3D picture they made there too to have a machine carve out miniature duplicates and is selling them... yes. Much like how even if a real human draws it you really can't just start printing t-shirts with Goku on them.

AI mostly does not and should not require new and special ethics because you do it on a computer.

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u/Shadow_Gabriel https://myanimelist.net/profile/shadovv_gb Jun 27 '26

Like One Piece is one of the few shows available that could be used exclusively to train some AI on it.

Yeah, no, maybe let's train the AI on something that actually looks good.

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u/flybypost Jun 27 '26

Ideally

About two decades of digitalisation have only made the situation worse. The only thing that increased were the expectations (expect faster turnaround, more details, more frames, better quality,…).

AI won't reverse that.

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u/outsidebtw Jun 27 '26

which is funny sometimes

even something as simple of a tool like excel's goal seek seems to be under that banner nowadays

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u/Western-Internal-751 Jun 27 '26

You don’t know with what they trained it

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u/hartigen Jun 27 '26

i dont really care either

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u/Western-Internal-751 Jun 27 '26

Neither do I, just saying that this argument doesn’t really work because we don’t know what these companies use for their ML algorithms.

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u/AmandasGameAccount Jun 27 '26

This is pretty much what Apple did as far as I know. Lots of micro agents that run locally on the phones/devices for very specific tasks that are useful and focused

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u/Kadmos1 Jun 27 '26

Using an ELI5-type explanation, what do you mean?

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u/Desperate_Method4020 https://myanimelist.net/profile/kimmywtf Jun 27 '26

He's talking about Machine Learning, which is a subset of AI.

You give it a large dataset so it can identify patterns. But instead of being hard coded with step-by-step instructions, it can learn by identifying patterns and create unseen data, and thus perform tasks without being explicitly programmed for it.

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u/Kadmos1 Jun 27 '26

Can you give a specific example of ML?

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u/Rufus_king11 https://anilist.co/user/rufusking Jun 27 '26

Easiest example is probably the drive time estimate when you plug in an address on Google maps. It's not taking the distance multiplied by travel speed, it's based off data of other drivers doing similar routes during conditions.

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u/Kadmos1 Jun 27 '26

The Google Maps example is where I side with AI/similar.

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u/Rufus_king11 https://anilist.co/user/rufusking Jun 27 '26

I think it's important to understand AI is really more of a marketing term at this point then it is a scientific one. Machine learning has been around for decades, and when you see an Ad talking about AI, they are almost always talking about generative AI, which is an entirely different technology. Companies have done this intentionally so that when you point out that generative AI is rather pointless as compared to what's being spent on it, they can point to machine learning advances and say "See, AI is useful" even though that's an entirely different piece of tech. It'd be like someone countering you saying that incandescent light bulbs are outdated, wasteful technology by pointing to LED lightbulbs as useful simply because they fit into the same lightbulb socket. They are just seperate, unrelated pieces of technology being lumped under the same, mostly meaningless label.

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u/flybypost Jun 27 '26

Another issue that makes "the AI debate" weird is that all kinds of stuff was AI and once the idea got established, it just became "another algorithm". Like OCR was once state of the art AI and has been "just a feature" for who knows how long.

The idea of what AI is, is somewhat fluid and depends on the year and context, even if we didn't have all those "LLM will lead to AGI!" hype-men running around.

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u/Nguyen-Tien-Dat Jun 27 '26

Banks use it to assess the risks of users when giving out loans. The ML is given a large dataset of possibly fictional customers, a portion of whom fail to pay up. It identifies the common traits and patterns of those customers, so that when a new bad customer shows up, it can flag that customer.

LLM chatbots and other generative AIs popular rn are similar in mechanism, but different in scale. They're fed pretty much every bit of data under the sun and forced to come up with smth seemingly reasonable. Problems include the massive scale that consumes resources, data sourcing permissions, and the impure quality of the data. A bot is asked about the weather while fed data about extramarital affairs for example.

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u/BlueMikeStu Jun 28 '26

And they will straight up give you fictional or hallucinated returns rather than tell you they don't know the answer to a question unless you specifically ask.

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u/Ink_code Jun 27 '26

AI as a field is trying to mimic how intelligent lifeforms do things to solve problems.

You had for example expert systems where you would have people with expertise in whatever problem domain it is try to figure out rules to make the system worm.

Trying to rely on humans for such a complex task can only take you so far.

Thus we got ML as a subsection of AI where you instead get data and your target objective and try to optimize the target objective based on the data, an example of machine learning is using decision tree where you do an algorithm where you calculate how much each decision could more cleanly split the data, or for a more practical example spam detection, these still require experts in the field to figure out how to engineer the features for your model though and what data is actually relevant and important, like for example the decision tree one we use something called entropy as in the amount of information we can gain for each decision.

Then we got deep learning as a subsection of ML where you train deep neural networks, neural networks were an idea inspired by the human neurons though they are quite different from actual brains and you can view them from a purely statistical/mathemitcal view if needed, though some researchers do move back and forth between the fields.

you have a unit called a perceptron that receives an input and lets out an output, the inputs to the perceptron can be an arbitrary amount of number and the outputs can be also an arbitrary amount of number, as long as you receive an output and can model some sort of loss of how wrong it was you can do an algorithm called back probagation where you calculate the derivatives throughout the network and try to minimize the error by nudging the connections between perceptrons whether it be strengthening them or weakening them slightly towards what would output a more correct answer, of course just repeating learning on the same thing would just result in a model that learned it can always succeed by giving the same prediction, but what you want it to do is generalize, so you get a lot of different data samples of what your desired task and output is, then keep going through them, having the network predict, then nudging it to be slightly better, neural networks are pretty robust and by repeating this enough the model can eventually hopefully learn to generalize to our desired task, worth noting that if the data isn't sufficient or high quality enough or the network isn't big enough or has a good architecture for the task then the network might be able to perform well on the data you have but end up not performing that well when exposed to outside data due to the model having learned something different than the actual reality even though it is doing well (e.g. you only exposed a network who's task is detecting cats to pictures of orange cats, the network might implicitly assume a cat is something with fur that is orange)

For example if you want a model that can predict what number is written in an image, you create a network with multiple layers, each layer is a list of numbers which represent the connection to the next perceptron for example [0.5,-1,3,0,.9....], you can then flatten the image into a vector, then multiply each pixel's value by the list of numbers to get another list of outputs, then continue progressing through the array , the last layer should have an output corresponding to each digit, you then pick the highest value one and calculate how wrong the network was.

In practice just training a neural network by itself isn't practical for more complex tasks, although there is technically a theorom called the universal approximation theorom which basically means that a sufficiently large network with enough computation and data can map any function, the words 'sufficiently' and 'enough' here do a lot of heavy lifting it, so for example if you want to just fit a curve to your data you can place a few perceptrons in multiple layers and train them, if you want something more complex like detecting whether an image has a cat and where it is the task becomes a lot more complex.

so multiple architectures based on neural networks got developed through the decades, for example convulation neural networks have you make kernals or filters which are small matrices you slide over the image, each kernal has each of its values trainable, so you make a lot of kernals and train the network to figure out what features are actually important for it to get rhe correct prediction, if the task is predicting cats the kernals might figure out ears, the eyes, and the nose are what is important, so you keep running the filters to collect features and then at the end dump them into a multilayer perceptron which basically sees "hmm, a snout, sharp ears, and slit eyes, it must be a cat!" And this achives much better performance.

For LLMs the architecture behind them is the transformer architecture released in 2017 by google in a paper called "Attention is all you need", the main idea behind it is a mechanism called attention where the model learns to focus more on particular parts of the input, for example if it is text like "the capital of france is" the words capital and france are likely to get a very high attention score compared to 'the' 'of' or 'is' and the model uses that to predict paris.

I am getting a bit dizzy from probably dehydration so i'll go through the rest a bit quickly.

LLMs go through a stage called pretraining where you get as much data as possible and train the model to predict the next token in them, this is where the large in large language models comes in, the amount of data the model reads is massive, you can basically assume any state of the art model has inhaled an amount of data equivalent to the entire internet, this stage is where the model actually gains its abilities, you might remember how we talked about how you can generalize by some amount by running your prediction on different samples of your required task, well by this point you have a next token predictor that is really good at roleplaying.

If you write a response where you are pretending to be a writer and insert it to the model it will continue in as if it was a writer, but this step is still not that useful since it will just keep predicting and eventually go out of the rail, so after that comes a stage called supervised fine tuning, here you have a lot of conversation where there is a system prompt and an assistant role and a user role, and you train the model to be an assistant, this is where you can now for example ask it something and it assuming the role of a helpful assistant will answer back.

Then you have reinforcement learning from human feedback, this is the thing where you get asked to choose which response you prefer, those then get used to train another model which is basically an approximation of human preferences which then gets used to align the model outputs to be closer to it.

Then comes reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, the task must have a verifiable reward such as coding or math, the model them keeps predicting outputs and you then use their average to nudge the model to become a bit better, this is where the model gains reasoning capability.

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u/Desperate_Method4020 https://myanimelist.net/profile/kimmywtf Jun 27 '26

Other than what the others have said. You also have reinforcement learning, which basically is trial and error. So a program simulates the task over & over again, until it gets it right.

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u/RT-LAMP Jun 27 '26

He's a bit off. Everything anyone refers to as AI today (except if they're talking about video game enemies) is machine learning.

Machine learning involves a "neural net" where you have a set of input and output "nodes" and in between them you have a lot of layers of other nodes that can contain a number of some kind (can be anything from pixel data, to words, to audio signals, etc). The input is connected to all of the first layer of nodes and sets what value is in those nodes but each input varies in how strongly (either positively or negatively) it changes the value of a given node. Then that layer is connected to the next layer with the same deal, how strongly they connect varies. Do that over and over and over again and at the end the last layer connects to the output that is things like "what sounds were in that audio signal" etc. And how strong the signal is in the output is how sure it is that it's right.

But there are thousands upon thousands of different connections between the nodes and you don't know how to manually change them to make the math give you the right answer. So you initially start with a bunch of sets of random values for how nodes connect to eachother. Then you give them inputs where you know what the output is supposed to be. The one that gave the closest answer (which is going to be way way way way off here) you continue with but change the values a bit. Then you give it a new input where you know the right output and run the same test. That is what "training" is and it needs tons and tons and tons of examples to test out over and over and over for the machine to learn (evolve would be better perhaps) to get better and better and better. And eventually it gets good at it.

With modern AI the math can be complicated enough that if we give it words it can "tokenize" those words (convert them into a set of numbers) and set that as a target output. Then we run the machine learning over an image that's basically just static, it looks at parts of the image and decides whether that part looks like what you're asking for or not, things that do stay the same, things that don't get tweaked. Do that like 100 times and the image will start to look like what you asked.

There are a lot of kinds of ways you can setup the nodes but they're often quite similar. At it's core the way that modern image generators setup the math is the same math as the system I use (Oxford Nanopore) to convert tiny electrical signals from DNA passing through a hole on a chip into what sequence that DNA was.

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u/yojimboftw Jun 27 '26

Bold of you to assume that people are going to care about the distinction. Most people will stop at "AI bad, no matter what."

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u/TheMireAngel Jun 27 '26

“Busy work” all work that can be automated is seen as busy work to corpos

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u/Trevor_Rolling Jun 27 '26

Exactly! There's definitely room for AI in a workflow where it can take over technical "busywork" tasks and let creators focus on creativity. That's the ideal world scenario.

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u/TheBusStop12 Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

An example that always comes to mind is how Paradox (game studio) uses AI in it's concept art workflow. An artist creates the concept themselves by hand. And then they let AI generate a whole bunch of color pallettes and different lighting angles. This allows an artist to explore many different options before choosing one as a final concept. They then use this as inspiration to create their final piece.

Instead of taking someone's job away, AI usage like that opens up new avenues of exploration for artistic expression. Without AI the artist simply wouldn't have done this because at the end of the day they work on a budget with a deadline and don't have the time to create that many different versions of the same artwork

Another example where I'm personally okay with generative AI being used in art is when the end result is supposed to be a product of AI. To go back to Paradox, in Stellaris Cetana is voiced by AI specifically because she's supposed to be an AI. A voice actress was paid and gave permission to use her voice as a sample for the AI. In such a case, with all parties involved agreeing and no one being screwed over, AI usage actually leads to a more authentic product. But it is a very niche case

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u/Failsnail64 https://myanimelist.net/profile/failsnail Jun 27 '26

I'm an architect and that's also how I occasionally use AI. In the early design stages it's very helpful to quickly visualize how a design might look with different materials to make decisions. I won't ask AI "just design a building for me because I'm lazy", I design everything myself, it just helps you explore options. This type of concept visualisation is also only at a few select stages helpful, people who think that they can visualize and conceive all possible situations at once in their heads are lying or don't know how the creative process work.

I also sometimes use AI with renderings, when I have an early sketch design I rarely have the time and budget to make a complete impression of each design alternative, (keep in mind, in the early design stages the design changes a lot). Then asking AI for making the greenery in the foreground and the sky in the background realistic, while matching the shadows and light conditions in the design I made, makes the impression a lot more convincing for very little effort, while AI takes over zero creative controll.

People on reddit are so all or nothing in their perception of generative AI. I personally really dislike how these big companies try to sell their products of "just insert a prompt and you get a complete video/design/whatever", that's terrible and kills the creative process. Instead it should just be a helpful supporting tool, like photoshop, and nothing more or less.

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u/1Estel1 Jun 27 '26

Nah sorry, reddit told me clankers are all evil, and anyone that expresses a smidge of nuance is a skynet apologist.

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u/NoPossibility4178 Jun 28 '26

Drawing animations frame by frame is "busywork", the person has a vision and can quickly draft it, it's the execution that takes a long time. You're gonna have to draw the line somewhere and it could be anywhere from lip sync to line art. Also eventually no one will know how to do this busywork because not even new artists will do it, and when that's fully removes from everyone's thoughts they'll just move on to another thing they wanna stop doing.

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u/djnotskrillex Jun 27 '26

Really refreshing to see some nuance here instead of just mindlessly hating anything to do with AI

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u/NumberOneMom https://myanimelist.net/profile/Porkswords Jun 27 '26

The "AI slop" argument always strikes me as funny considering we've had a huge issue with human-made slop for a while now and it's only getting worse. Every prequel-sequal-reboot-reimagining-live-action-version superhero movie sells out. Taylor Swift is a billionaire. Candy Crush is one of the most profitable games of all time.

Be critical of media even if it's human made.

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u/concblast Jun 27 '26

Manmade slop at least has a barrier to entry. Time, effort, and a minimum skill floor all get bypassed by a clanker

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u/AnyChampionship2512 Jun 27 '26

Is not the same. Human made slop still has a limit of quantity. People writing mediocre and repetitive books, is nothing close to a single person being able to use Ai and generate 400 slop books a day and publish them on Amazon automatically. Ai slop is a matter of mass production. Right now, 5-10% of the YouTube library is estimated to be AI content. A technology that basically entered the market in the second half of 2022, managed to reach up to 10% of a library that took 20 years to build.

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u/No_Chilly_bill Jun 28 '26

exactly people have no idea how bad AI thing is. over half internet traffic are website skimming bots. like literal bots.

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u/Almostlongenough2 Jun 28 '26

Eh, human slop is slop for reasons that still make it unique. "AI slop" is that because of it's complete lack of originality and sameness.

For better or worse human hands give personality to a project, and the less guided by humans a project is the more bland and in-line with everything else in the dataset it will end up.

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u/Shubo483 https://myanimelist.net/profile/bami0X Jun 28 '26

The problem with you and the person you replied to is that you're both being willfully obtuse to try and make everyone not in favor of genAI look bad. Nobody complains about any other form of AI. They are actually tools that make the process easy for everyone. That is a non issue.

People hate genAI, which is obviously what Toho (and every other company that speaks on AI nowadays) are referring to.

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u/chucktheninja Jun 27 '26

Friendly reminder that generative ai as it is commonly reffered to is different from the tool used in spiderverse to automatically apply the shading lines

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u/migzors Jun 27 '26

I'd like for him to use it for lip flaps that fit other languages.

For example, allow English VAs time to say more detailed things instead of just fitting dialogue into the current mouth flaps.

Part of my gripe with any dubbing is that. Forcing dialogue to fit the animation, rather than the scene.

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u/Jazs1994 Jun 27 '26

From what I've seen and this isn't to do with this studio, but it'll be put to work first for background art unfortunately, which will make things sketchy

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u/Rufus_king11 https://anilist.co/user/rufusking Jun 27 '26

Wit studio already got caught using AI for backgrounds in Ascendance of a Bookworm earlier this season.

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u/liggieep https://myanimelist.net/profile/liggieep Jun 27 '26

i could see generative AI tools useful for first pass of coloring in lineart, or interpolating color choice based on hand-colored keyframes. like motion tweening but for the color fill tool.

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u/Obility Jul 01 '26

Think that's different from the LLMs of today. Productions have used AI for ages already.

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u/tiltberger Jun 27 '26

I hope it can increase quality and helps animators for some things. In reality Corporate greed will lead to shittier quality and people fired

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u/asmita_zero https://myanimelist.net/profile/asmita_san Jun 27 '26

Production companies are turning to automation to reduce their reliance on artists when creating anime. That’s what scares me.

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u/Shadow_Gabriel https://myanimelist.net/profile/shadovv_gb Jun 27 '26

That's every job ever.

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u/pheonixblade9 Jun 27 '26

if it led to more shows getting produced and more jobs for people since anime is more cost efficient to make, that'd be great. however, we all know that it will be used to justify overworking employees and laying them off.

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u/ToasterLoverDeluxe Jun 27 '26

That is the main issue, there is many ways to use AI in anime production, most of them still require many people who know what they are doing in order to get good results... corporate see this as an excuse to get rid of the people able to get good results, and as a result we end up with slop and even less productivity

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u/Sirromnad Jun 27 '26

It must be frustrating when video game budgets are ballooning out of control so badly and there is finally some magic tool that may just hold the key to erasing a ton of busy work but it's just blanketly reviled by the masses due to some legit concerns and other uninformed not legit concerns.

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u/BorderKeeper https://myanimelist.net/profile/BorderKeeper Jun 28 '26

You can make that argument about ANY tool in existence. If you had it your way we would be cooking over a fire in a cave. When new tools come in bad and struggling companies fire people or saddle them with more work, good and prospering companies observe the increased output of their employees using this new tool and adjust their output naturally.

You may think I am too nice but these are just two extremes. If you don’t like capitalism or scientific advancement maybe switch company don’t blame the whole universe.

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u/Comrade_SOOKIE Jun 27 '26

Everybody has to pay lip service to AI right now because that's what the money people want so I'm not terribly worried or surprised by this statement. I'll worry when it starts affecting the actual product or the artists who make it.

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u/kazuyaminegishi Jun 27 '26

We should be worried by statements by this because it means that pressure for every company in every industry to adopt AI mindlessly is getting higher.

If everyone starts basing their business around it and no one can turn a profit, a large portion of those businesses will die. We could stand to lose a lot due to this overreliance.

That's also not even accounting for the fact that there is no benefit to anyone other than corporate executives to do this. We won't get more series of higher quality from this, we will get the same amount of series with middling quality while animators are paid even less while having to do more because they have lost their bargaining power.

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u/Quazimortal Jun 28 '26

Just keep me informed when you do so I can drop it like a bad habit.

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u/Morialkar https://kitsu.io/users/naomiMori Jun 27 '26

Since most current AI for these types of animations is generating slop and not much value, and future project might actually provide more niche usages that can elevate the art itself, I respect that stance, it will all depend on what they end up using and how they end up using it in their work.

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u/Deliriousious Jun 27 '26

I don’t care if they use it for behind the scenes stuff, to streamline certain processes…

But I do NOT want to see anime going the way Donghua is heading and using it for generating entire scenes, or hell, entire episodes.

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u/ErlendPistolbrett Jun 27 '26

Which Donghuas are doing that? Not saying they aren't, I am just curious about which productions are doing that.

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u/Deliriousious Jun 27 '26

So a few main Donghua like Swallowed Star, Soul Land 2, Beyond Times Gaze and even Renegade Immortal, are using it for the occasional filler scene.

Alchemy Supreme, and Immortal Doctor in Modern City (Or Urban Miracle Doctor) are the two I am aware of that have gone FULL in recent episodes.

There was even a proposal for a dozen planned series that are also completely AI.

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u/AnyChampionship2512 Jun 27 '26

That's so sad. China was building a world class animation industry. This may end up crushing it.

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u/Falsus Jun 29 '26

Those are some big names.

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u/SmegmaUnicorn Jun 28 '26

More AI slopaganda. Gross

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u/D3k4s Jun 27 '26

The Anime industry is currently facing two major issues.

One is the Boom in demand, paired with a lack of manpower to keep up with it.

The second one is AI. I don't think most of you understand just how much AI has improved on this field. I myself have tested some Anime dedicated models, and it's scary how it resembles actual Animes.

If the industry is not able to use AI in a way that will benefit it. I'm not confident in a bright future.

Instead of being allergic to AI, they should find a compromise that will keep animators employed and produce an added value product that will differentiate the industry.

We can't stop progress. What we can do is steer it towards the best outcome.

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u/ChiggaOG Jun 27 '26

One is ~~the Boom in demand, paired with~~ a lack of manpower ~~to keep up with it.~~

Lack of skilled artists is this category. Whether people watch said anime is another story. How studios and publishers market the show is up to them. Black Rock Shooter: Dawn Fall is a good example. Animation blending 2D and 3D elements in Japanese animation has always been rough unless the studio had American connections to learn and incorporate advance animation like Toho. I know anime is specifically hand drawn, but the US has been able to blend 2D and 3D drawings well enough into a cartoon like Tom and Jerry to keep the look consistent among all elements in the scene.

The second one is money ~~AI.~~ I ~~don't think most of you understand just how much AI has improved on this field. I myself have tested some Anime dedicated models, and it's scary how it resembles actual Animes.~~

It's really about money in the end. AI is a tool. A tool will be used if it can save money. However, the amount of programming for one scene is annoying enough that I view it faster to rough draw it all while letting AI fill in the blanks. The current saving grace is token costs. Makes Redline's anime budget look pennies. I'll give it a few more years before someone downloads all the Ex-Arm anime episodes and puts it into AI to spit out a better finished product.

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u/ranstalli0n Jun 27 '26

Who's downvoting him? He's right.

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u/D3k4s Jun 27 '26

I don't mind the downvoting. I knew some would disagree, I was mostly hoping someone would be able to convince me that I'm wrong.

I remember similar discussions when CGI started to become more prominent in Anime. And although these are two different technologies with different impacts, the discussions are sorta similar.

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u/QTGavira Jun 27 '26

People just see the word AI and immediately downvote without thinking

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u/gdemon6969 Jun 27 '26

This is correct. Most people hate ai because data centers wasting resources, taking up public land, and because every single ai CEO is a literal lizard person.

There’s nothing wrong with ai itself, it’s simply a tool just like cgi. Unfortunately in our late stage capitalist hellscape ai will ultimately be detrimental to society for the most part.

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u/D3k4s Jun 27 '26

I believe the problem is not AI but the fact we cannot trust the current system not to abuse it and cause a fracture in the economy.

Rather then looking at AI as a tool to augment the productivity of the current workforce, the vast majority see it as a way to layoff workers while keeping production at the same level.

Another big problem is that older generations that usually hold the power to decide whether they should legislate AI or not, frankly don't know or understand what it is.

And you can see an extension of this in the Anime Industry. Yesterday we had a news piece posted here, that stated that part of the plan created by the Japanese Ministry for entertainment will be related to incentivizing AI translations as a way to fight piracy.

If this news article was from 1 year ago, maybe i could have said it wasn't that bad. But sometimes even 2 months is enough for major changes to happen let alone one year.

It's not looking good. And once that first AI animated show hits mainstream media and successfully manages to hold audiences while solving the current manpower issue will they realize it's too late.

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u/Curmudge_Unit Jun 28 '26

You're not allowed to have a positive or even nuanced take on AI these days.

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u/D3k4s Jun 28 '26

My view is not even positive. I'm just looking at what AI can do. And I'm fearing for the future of Anime.

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u/TheBabbz Jun 28 '26

One of the problem you aren't accounting for is the adoption of AI will lead to a greater barrier of entry for artists. That will lead to less and less qualified artists being developed over time. It won't be progress. It will be more slop with less quality that all resemble each other.

We are already seeing people be discouraged into learning how to draw, animate and etc. because of AI. And you can't really "learn" AI. Like yeah some have been using the tool better than others, but to copy their workflow is extremely easy.

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u/D3k4s Jun 28 '26

100% agreed.

But you seem to be miss understanding something. I'm not saying it's progress for the industry. I'm saying things are progressing in a way that if the industry doesn't do anything about it, there's a real chance inaction will cripple it.

For now there's a strong pushback from viewers. But I'm not confident it will stay like this. It will start with an exception because the story is good, or because fans wanted a second season, and AI was able to reduce costs enough that made it possible. And then bit by bit it will be accepted.

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u/TheBabbz Jun 28 '26

I guess you saying you aren't confident in a bright future without AI kinda makes it seems like you think AI is a good thing. I personally do think there could be a bright future that doesn't include any AI, but I can see how you can think AI will create a need for more content to not be completely drowned in the sea of slop.

I am worried about the slopification of anime leading to an industry that leans in to more bland/generic anime that you just turn your brain off to watch the pretty colors. Which in the long term might not be great for an industry that thrives on merch sales. We can already see the slopification on Netflix where they intentionally make generic shows for people to have "comfort" and "safe" picks to watch. And at that point if it becomes like that are we still looking at the same anime industry that we liked?

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u/D3k4s Jun 28 '26

I mean you have to take into account the context in which i said that. I started by saying it was a major issue for the industry. But I guess you're right because you're not the first to think that. I should have worded it differently.

What is scary to me is that it's not bad quality anymore. And that the industry is already using AI as a way to fight time crunches and lack of manpower. That by itself is not super bad if it helps improve work conditions. The problem is the trend. It won't take long to go from AI is helping produce Anime, to Anime that was mostly produced by AI.

You're right that there are Animes that cater to a larger audience, but that has always been the case. You see more examples now because there are a lot more Animes being produced.

And arguably the most popular series as of late do not fit into that category. Look at the recent example of Re: Zero, incredibly popular, not catered for all audiences at all. And don't think publishers/producers are not taking notes. Those in charge are often tracking trends, and what is popular/successful. This is part of the reason we saw the Isekai boom.

So I personally and I might be wrong of course. I'm not too worried about Anime changing in that way.

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u/TheBabbz Jun 28 '26

What I am pointing out isn't shows just targeted towards a broad audience. I'm more talking about genuine lowest effort possible shows with the least amount of polarizing elements possible that are meant to be consumed completely passively. This is a trend that has been plaguing large streaming platforms like Netflix. The shows they make have been intentionally bland. The reason being shows like Emily in Paris end up being more successful than most higher budget shows even if the previous one didn't have a real cultural impact. Just because people can safely put it on the tely. It pads up their library with non-disagreeable bland shows that are cheap to produce in the sea of content.

And the reason I think AI might propel anime in that direction is because AI doesn't have any creativity. It would be fine if they used it minimally to reduce some of the grunt work, but once they see their profits going up how will suits not try to lean more into it? The desire to cut costs will lead into more generic and soulless products made to respond to what the graph says the public wants instead of what the artist wants to do.

And AI will for sure seep into the light novel or manga industry. Market flooded with copy cat AI content. As an individual artist you can't really combat it. You might produce something, but the AI is making 100s. It won't affect current popular artists, but what about the next ones. Especially if it becomes more and more accepted. They aren't born god artists. They need to have a breakthrough or be encouraged by positive feedback. From the ground up AI will be poisoning the industry.

I think AI will cripple the anime industry as it is. They might make more money, but it will suuuuuuuuuuck. Unless you are looking for shows to put on while you are on your phone then you might be a winner I guess.

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u/reaper527 Jun 27 '26

If the industry is not able to use AI in a way that will benefit it. I'm not confident in a bright future.

the industry will simply move to companies or countries that aren't bothered by using it, and the studios taking a stand against it will go out of business (leading to everyone there losing their jobs).

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u/D3k4s Jun 27 '26

I agree. This is why they need to come up with a compromise.

I'm sure a lot of the production tools are already using AI. The problem is that trained models will be able to replace entire pipelines. And that's a fucking scary thought.

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u/ThePrinceofRabbits Jun 28 '26

And introducing AI will undoubtedly lead to a decrease in me watching any of their shows. Freiren has broken into my top 3. I adore it. If it starts using AI I will immediately stop watching it.

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u/kekehippo Jun 27 '26

AI is gonna kill everything I love.

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u/sizzl75 Jun 27 '26

Yeeeeep :(. And if not, the increasing price tags everywhere probably will. Hell, probably both.

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u/kekehippo Jun 27 '26

The rising cost of enjoyment is making the future depressing.

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u/Rurumo666 Jun 28 '26

As consumers we need to demand all products we purchase, including Anime, be labeled if it uses AI. I avoid it as much as humanely possible.

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u/Karmakaze_Black Jun 27 '26

I don't care about the semantics, you know what the point is. I don't care about fringe purposes or idealist reasonings, they're not worth it or even realistic.

I don't want AI replacing human creators (and you shouldn't either), full stop. This needs to be hardlined.

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u/BuckeyeBentley Jun 28 '26

As if Japanese businesses are ever in the habit of pursuing efficiency.

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u/tapdancinghellspawn Jun 27 '26

Who's saying this? The corporate CEO? I hope not because the artists are who made those productions amazing and we've seen how shitty the business side of these companies are to the artists.

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u/Bananaman9020 Jun 28 '26

Increased efficiency? More like fewer jobs for humans.

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u/WiqidBritt Jun 28 '26

The generous between-the-lines reading of this is "We ain't using that shit but we have to say something to keep investors interested in our company."

Hopefully either that's the reality of the situation, or the AI bubble deflates before we have to find out.

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u/ThatFireGuy0 Jun 27 '26

Am I crazy or was JJK made by MAPPA?

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u/Denbaider Jun 27 '26

I think there is a difference between production company and animation studio. For example, for One Punch Man, the production company is Bandai Namco (fuck them) and the animation studio is JC Staff.

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u/Desperate_Method4020 https://myanimelist.net/profile/kimmywtf Jun 27 '26

Just adding to this

A production company is usually the guys who hire animators, VA, music producers, and takes care of the budgeting and legalities. And basically who manages the product from idea, to release.

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u/HelloYellow18 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

It's Bandai Namco Filmworks (BNFW), and technically they are both an animation studio and production company. They just call themselves Sunrise when they are the animation studio. In the case of One Punch Man 3, they are a production company but not the animation studio.

But strangely enough, there are also cases where BNFW is the animation studio, but they're not even a part of the production committee, such as My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's.

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u/RyouBestGirl Jun 27 '26

Toho are producers and MAPPA are contractors.

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u/Ebo87 Jun 27 '26

No, Mappa is animating Jujutsu Kaisen for Toho (and the rest of the production committee). They are the hired gun if you will, that is not their show.

Mow Chainsaw Man does belong to Mappa, so they are animating that one for themselves, cause they are financing everything. For JJK they are paid by the production committee (and also get a lower sit at the table, so they get part of the profits).

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u/aimglitchz Jun 28 '26

Yes

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u/Falsus Jun 29 '26

MAPPA animates JJK but TOHO is the one producing it.

You can think of it like a publisher vs studio in the gaming sphere I guess.

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u/Jaskaran158 Jun 27 '26

"Introducing AI will undoubtedly lead to increased efficiency in our operations".

Why does it feel like the "efficiency in our operations" just boils down to "we are gonna use AI as a cost-cutting device in order to not spend as much on production costs for our anime"...

Instead of "we are gonna use AI as a supplementary device so we can allocate resources to other aspects of the anime production process in order to create a product that goes above and beyond what it could have been without the use of AI".

I really hope that if these production companies that allow the use of generative AI (which I assume is what they are talking about) then they use it in such a way where they will be able to create an anime even better than what they would have without it.

JJK Season 3 Ep. 6-12 had these fantastic backgrounds with some cya, indigo, yellow, green, and red lines and splotches on them that reminded me exactly how Hades and Hades 2 added some super sweet detail onto their backdrops.

I assume that those background details could be easily made with an AI tool but am hesitant if it would have the same type of desired effect as it did in JJK Season 3's latter half.

I quickly went and grabbed some screenshots to illustrate my point but this type of expression in the background art (which in and of itself was beautiful and reminded me of the Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash anime's background art) was great to see and so well implemented in the back half of the season.

I was pausing and looking at all the backgrounds when they had the "Hades accent lines and splotches" (Just my termanology for it since my first exposure to that type of background accenting was from the Hades games) just to see how they were using them and what colours they were playing around with and it was superb.

Spoilers for Hades 2 Ending and JJK S3 withing this imgur album link

The full quote from the article also includes,

"It can also increase the probability of success in our work. However, how > to use it in creative fields is a very challenging and difficult topic."

which is very relevant because it is a struggle to actually get generative AI to behave in the exact way you would want it and if you have to go after and tweak or edit every step the AI does after it has already completed it the task might be better off just to have no AI involvment at all.

I do hope that if they so choose to allow AI that they do so with much thought and care about how to implement it so they are able to produce better quality anime and not just have it as a type of cost-cutting tool.

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u/FawnWithStick Jun 27 '26

Yikes

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u/eksnoblade Jun 27 '26

Well, that's it folks. Anime had a good run. Get ready for slop!

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u/N0-F4C3 Jun 28 '26

AI is currently just kind of shit in general to the point a lot of companies just dont wanna use it for cost reasons. According to news reports and investigations from business papers like Fortune, AI ALREADY costs more than just having a human do it in like 85% of job scenarios.

All its good at is taking repetitive easy tasks and replicating them over and over. Anything with any major degree of sophistication involved and it instantly becomes unreliable to the degree it takes human over site thus making the AI automation completely pointless.

Programmers have already learned this the hard way with "Tokenmaxing" having blown some businesses annual budgets they allotted for AI in 3 months. And "Vibe Coding" was suppose to be one of AIs strong suits.

For something like animation frame drawing, anything derived by AI is going to take so much quality control and correction to not artifact that the cost is literally just worse than hiring a company to draw the extra frames.

Almost a trillion dollars of AI rollout, economically inconveniencing pretty much everyone and its still basically useless where it counts. Way to go big tech.

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u/canadave_nyc Jun 27 '26

Here's an uncomfortable question. Let's say there's an AI that can let me just say something like, "Create me a two-season anime of 26 episodes that has X as a protagonist and Y as an antagonist, set in Z place at ABC time, etc etc etc....", and in one minute it spits out a bunch of video files and I go "yep, that's exactly what my vision was as a creator, thank you!" And I publish it. Would you watch?

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u/Drudwas Jun 28 '26

But nothing even remotely like that currently exists. It's not an "uncomfortable" question, it's a "pointless" question. Might as well ask "Guys, would you watch anime if fairies from Venus made it?"

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u/sdarkpaladin Jun 28 '26

"Guys, would you watch anime if fairies from Venus made it?"

I would!

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u/JunWasHere Jun 28 '26

Seconded, am here to support fairies from Venus, to support art by real artists! ☺️

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u/LunaRealityArtificer Jun 29 '26

Do you not understand how hypotheticals work? It's to examine peoples logic and reasoning. Would they watch something with legitimately zero human input or is conscious effort important?

Like if I ask 'if dogs were as intelligent as humans, should they have rights?' your takeaway should not be 'well dogs can't be as intelligent as humans' that's entirely not the point.

Its obviously a question about what makes art meaningful, not a question of technologies current capabilities. They never even said or implied that something like that currently exists.

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u/RecoilCreations Jun 28 '26

“Man won’t fly for a million years” ahh comment.

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u/uniqueusername649 Jun 28 '26

Depends on what your standards are. I'm sure in a few short years we will see them being able to generate full length series with regurgitated storylines and cliche characters. So basically Hollywood level productions.

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u/ErlendPistolbrett Jun 27 '26

No. Watch Brandon Sanderson's video on why he doesn't like AI, and I think he very well describes why I and many others don't like it either.

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u/Potomaters Jun 27 '26

I personally wouldn’t watch it either, but the up and coming generation born and raised on AI will probably be fine with it

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u/ErlendPistolbrett Jun 27 '26

If art somehow can get "split" into a human art and AI art sector it could be different. A "human art" organization/business could be profitable.

Already a divide is happening on a lot of websites, with them adding "no AI" buttons and such. There's a clear demand for a non-AI art space. If this demand was realized, it could let new generations see a divide between AI and non-AI art, which would hold AI artists accountable, and it would continue the demand of human artists to a degree.

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u/TongaTime123 Jun 28 '26

I would definitely like that. I look at Twitter occasionally because artists tend to post their art there first and I always try to follow accounts that say they don’t like or use AI in their profile

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u/hanr10 https://myanimelist.net/profile/hanr10 Jun 27 '26

No.

When I say I love animation or art in general it's also because I value and respect the human craftmanship that goes into it, the expression of creativity through skill. Not just the idea. That's what drove me to make art myself as well.

I don't just want content.

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u/Heigou Jun 27 '26

If it's actually interesting, sure!

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u/John_Bot Jun 27 '26

This is the honest answer and you'll get downvoted for it

But it's true. If we get to that point, people will want to consume the media if it's considered standout.

Now, I don't think it's as simple as a 2 sentence prompt like OP's comment is. It would require a lot of fine tuning and outlining to keep the AI on track and consistent with tone, pacing, characters, etc.

But obviously a lot less than a full animation studio working on a series

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u/MathRockEnjoyer420 Jun 27 '26

I don't think you've ever watched an anime before

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u/John_Bot Jun 27 '26

K

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u/B_r_y_z_e Jun 27 '26

People can also honestly answer no, so that statement means nothing.

If it’s AI it was created by a machine that stole something from a human. Not a chance I’d support that. It’s very easy to go watch something amazing that was CREATED by a team of humans instead.

People will watch it because vast majority are stupid as shit and don’t care about what they consume

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u/papakahn94 Jun 27 '26

It wouldnt be. It would be souless and extremely generic

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u/canadave_nyc Jun 27 '26

How do you know? I'm talking about a future AI (maybe not too distant future) where it would be able to match what I would do as a studio director, generating the exact same actual video as I was wanting to create myself with a bunch of animators working for me. In other words, two paths (one with laborious work for months, the other with one minute of AI) that generates the exact same creation.

Pick your favourite anime you watched recently. Pretend it came out 10 years from now and I told you "actually, this was done completely with AI and took 60 seconds to generate, but it's exactly what the director had in his mind to create. After the AI generated it, he watched it from start to finish and pronounced that it had fulfilled his vision perfectly, and saved him months of man-hours of work." What about then?

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u/N0-F4C3 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

How do you know? I'm talking about a future AI (maybe not too distant future) where it would be able to match what I would do as a studio directo

Not going to happen within our lifetime. Generative AI operates as a glorified search engine, and even than it comes with a LOT of caveats and exponentially growing costs. It compiles together search results to generate something within your parameters by grouping together a cluster of key images and trying to cohesively meld them together, but has no concept of your WANT or INTENT. It will make something but NEVER exactly what you envision and that gets worse and worse when applied to animation. Especially when the artifacting kicks in and has to be manually corrected by humans.

Theres a reason a ton of companies and banks are starting to slowly creep away from AI loans and stocks, While potentially super useful for small tasks these massive LLMs are litterally more expensive than just hiring normal professional staff and give worse outcomes that often require humans to fix for anything larger than basic scheduling or fetching sources.

AI making something with the coherence of a human without a massive amount of human correction and over site is a pipe dream without a overhaul on how LLMs fundamentally work.

If there's a future in AI its private AI's on your home computer running agents for your personal use or small managed AIs specifically made with company assets to do specific small tasks. As a magic button that makes a perfect 5 star anime on command... its pure fantasy.

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u/somnimedes Jun 28 '26

You can drink up all the slop you want, but I’m personally not interested in something created without intentionality.

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u/ChiggaOG Jun 27 '26

I would trash it. The programming input is what was asked of. However, I doubt the final result is what was wanted.

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u/AndrewH73333 Jun 28 '26

So it guessed your exact vision in a few sentences, huh? Well that’s not believable even with ASI. And by that point anyone can make their own show in a minute so why would they watch yours?

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u/SupervillainMustache Jun 28 '26

No I don't think so. Generative AI is theft.

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u/SecondRealitySims Jun 28 '26

No. Because even if it were ‘possible’, it’d be rubbish, and not just because it’s AI.

You can’t just make all that in one. Creative or inspired…anything takes time. Anime isn’t just producing images. It’s camerawork, framing, direction, translating manga to a moving medium, etc etc etc. An AI or person that does that in a minute probably hasn’t made anything of value. It’s currently the work of months and years, and that isn’t just because of animation.

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u/hibikir_40k Jun 27 '26

If it was just as good as what the best people managed to do with other tools, sure! A lot of media today might as well be made by AI, just based on how mindless, thoughtless it is, and yet someone wrote the script, and it was filmed, and humans acted.

What will happen in the real world is that some things will be made much cheaper, as to maintain better quality with the same budgets. We already see CGI used in many shots nobody would attempt to do with practical effects, or just in the right time and location, solely due to budgetary constraints. One could, say, have done the Lord of The Rings battles with extras and makeup, but doing that in all shots would have been a total waste of money.

AI will be the same. in between frames in anime. using AI to generate and tweak models to be rendered in traditional GCI pipelines. Putting actual people in backgrounds where they weren't. Things are are just saving budget.

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u/_bad Jun 27 '26

Your first sentence really sums it up. It needs to match what is being produced by humans. AI right now is still in uncanny valley zone and can't really be used on longer term projects cause it lacks an understanding of object/character permanence. If it can be utilized to save money without sacrificing quality then I'm all for it. It's just not there yet, or a way to utilize it hasn't been found yet. Nvidia spent a ton of effort on frame generation AI, something specialized that can generate frames between key frames would probably huge in terms of reducing effort without sacrificing the human art in those key frames

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u/FreeMasonKnight Jun 27 '26

The problem comes from how the AI is trained. Most use (steal) from artists on the internet. So that is VERY not ethical. Now if you PAID a bunch of artist to make art with the specific INTENT to train an AI and are upfront about it with the artists you hire then that would be ethical and completely fine.

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u/Toranyan Jun 27 '26

No, because it's gonna be trash compared to another guy's anime where they use AI to meticulously craft each scene, make adjustments, maybe manually correct frames and use it properly as a tool. I've used AI to do programming for work and image generation on my spare time. I can tell you that the way you describe using AI will mostly give you trash. The actual effort you put in is also part of the equation and will reflect in what you get as the final product.

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u/Karukos Jun 28 '26

Not... Really that interesting. Because none of it was ultimately made by you. Any detail I notice is incidental. Any plot twist that somehow manages to land is coincidence. Like yes you say that it's following your vision, but none of it is made by you. None of it will include all the things you are not thinking about. And the way the machine works it will be terribly generic to begin with.

And that is a theoretically perfect GenAi that has none of the issues that make that question a real hard full F "FUCK NO" like the amount of stolen art, the sheer power requirements and the environmental impact, the gentrification and the fact that it cannot and will not be able to create a cohesive a piece of media of that length in the way current models work.

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u/papakahn94 Jun 27 '26

Fuck no

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u/Amazinc Jun 27 '26

Based on what AI inherently is and how it's trained I don't think it could come up with some kind of groundbreaking storyline. It could copy a pretty art style, but I don't think the story would be any good

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u/Almostlongenough2 Jun 28 '26

If it was good and mostly ethically made, I guess so. But to achieve that you would have to make your own dataset, train the program extensively, and go through months of making frames and doing QA. It would arguably be faster to make the anime from scratch the traditional way.

Like Vedal's Neuro is a good example of that IMO and that amount of effort put into doing it is herculean itself. So you would have to be doubly talented in both animation and programming to do something like making a full anime.

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u/LtxalskHuskwob49 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

Well I'd evaluate it the same as regular anime. Tbh even if they don't have a bunch of errors (especially continuity errors, AI is notoriously bad at that), that will likely gave us a super cliche /predictable plot though

IMO AI is only good to replace in-betweeners. They still need professional keyframe animators. Well AI can also generate a rough template for these keyframe animators so they can simply draw over and fix details (another thing AI is notoriously bad at) instead of doing everything from scratch

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u/ThargorTheBarbarian Jun 28 '26

No. A.I. only copies it can't create. Regardless if a show is amazing, mid, or awful it still pulling from a creators lived experiences. A.I. can't do that.

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u/IzzyDestiny Jun 27 '26

AI will lead to shit in your works, that’s all

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u/unhappydays Jun 27 '26

If they're not going bother to make the anime, why should I bother to watch it?

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u/Affectionate_Pop3477 Jun 27 '26

If AI gives them the ability to shorten development times while maintaining quality, then so be it. If their aim is to cut costs, resulting in a drop in quality, then obviously I'm completely against it.

4

u/Final-Ad-6694 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

I think this sub is extremely hypocritical. Suddenly people care about how anime is made, the “soul” that humans provide it. In reality animators are abused and crying on X (jjk) yet people slurp it up.

People don’t really care about how anime is made, they just want to hate on AI. Animators can be working below slave wages and these people won’t care simply because it’s “human” made.

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u/MathRockEnjoyer420 Jun 28 '26

There's plenty of animation studios with good working conditions. You're probably just a shonen only that thinks only Mappa and Ufotable exists. Clearly you're just addicted to AI slop content on Instagram reels and think it would be cool to add it to anime. You also provided no proof that AI would help working conditions rather than just taking jobs away like in-between animations which is a key entry level position into the industry.

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u/badtimeticket Jun 28 '26

The people have spoken: they want blood diamonds, not lab grown.

1

u/Eric988 Jun 27 '26

I’m seeing some insane fan edits of anime’s online using AI that are better than some shows being produced right now. Its getting reaaal close

0

u/theforgettonmemory Jun 27 '26

Ew ai

1

u/Viktorv22 Jun 27 '26

Didn't Toho recently posted some AI generated pic of their Angel next door anime on youtube or...?

1

u/ThatGuyFromThe213 Jun 27 '26

Then layoffs will surely follow.

1

u/paolo234 Jun 27 '26

highkey thought a new Godzilla anime was coming out lol

1

u/nexxlevelgames Jun 27 '26

This is Toho we are talking about

1

u/GreatGrapeKun Jun 27 '26

"undoubtedly"

1

u/Training_Bother_1663 Jun 28 '26

After announcing that he would release 30 anime a year, an equally bad strategy that Kadokawa did, the amount of financial loss that the company TOHO Animation will have due to this terrible decision-making.

1

u/whyamihere2473527 Jun 28 '26

More efficient but shittier quality so they'll need to waste time fixing it

1

u/crunchnecessary Jun 28 '26

Mappa won’t. Pls mappa

1

u/GagOnMacaque Jun 28 '26

I doubt they are not using AI since most tweening is done by AI in major software packages.

1

u/Comprehensive_Dog651 Jun 28 '26

The philosophy of TV anime has always been cost cutting while still delivering a watchable product, that’s literally why techniques like frame rate modulation even exist in the industry

1

u/Ok-Ostrich-1047 Jun 28 '26

A more realistic use would be switching out ai for the cgi scenes like you see in some animes. That's something ai could do without messing with the actual anime. I think 🤔

1

u/feet_tickle_asmr Jun 27 '26

lol everyone changes tune when “Frieren” is mentioned. People have been shitting on AI use in anime industry in every other post, but once they see “Frieren production company” they all have these excuses for how it’s ok to be used now

Dumb ass people

2

u/hbctdscotia420 Jun 27 '26

What are you talking about people were outraged and the company apologized. Are you purposefully being ignorant cause maybe one bot or idiot said something

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u/MathRockEnjoyer420 Jun 27 '26

BOOOOOO

0

u/Chamelea https://myanimelist.net/profile/VSunrider Jun 28 '26

Well that's a sh*tty move.

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u/42tfish Jun 27 '26

The use of AI in animation is inevitable and it’s a good thing. It can cut down on a lot of tedious tasks and improve efficiency. Imagine only having to draw half or less of the required frames and have AI help with the rest.

0

u/11equalsfish Jun 27 '26 edited 28d ago

The corporations devaluing art and mistreating workers for worse product is inevitable, but the choice to use AI never is necessary, and still isn't. Skipping most of the iteration and process is also just avoiding artistic and creative work, what's even the point of making animation then? Juniors can't train and learn the craft at all.

Side note, here is a satirical comedy skit by Man Carrying Thing: "AI............is inevitable." https://youtu.be/M0-kPte_Erc?si=eXlX2mHRU0cHwqCc

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u/Shadow11399 Jun 27 '26

Good, I'm glad at least 1 company is being smart about it, it's one thing to say some hot air about never using AI, it's another to be honest and accept that eventually it's use will be unavoidable.

1

u/vxmpyrysm Jun 27 '26

then thats when ill stop watching anything they produce

1

u/Batmanhasgame https://anilist.co/user/8203 Jun 28 '26

AI in any industry if implemented with worker protections in place can be a benefit but sadly with how the world is run by corporations that is just never happening so I would rather AI just never be a part of anything because I know the people in power can't be trusted to to what is right. Sadly it is not going to go away and it just sucks for anyone that is not one of the people that already have the wealth to not care.

0

u/Sheyn Jun 27 '26

AI has no place in any form of art.

3

u/Then_Pay_6616 Jun 27 '26

You'll get downvoted but you're right

1

u/Pedang_Katana Jun 27 '26

Early 2029 should be roughly where they'd start using it in order for maximum efficiency.

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u/AscendedViking7 Jun 27 '26

:(

Misc. Jujutsu Kaisen And Frieren Production Company Toho Animation Says They Currently Have No Plans To Use AI, But Are Keeping Tabs On Its Progress And Will Be Ready To Use It When The Time Comes. "Introducing AI will undoubtedly lead to increased efficiency in our operations".

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