Small business owner replaces art teams with AI animators: 'Clients preferred the cost savings of AI animators to the human-made animations.'

Clients' preferences for cheap, low-quality AI animation are a sad reality that's sweeping the animation industry.

Have you ever taken time out of your day to watch strange AI-animated videos on TikTok? I must admit that I have a strange proclivity towards Italian Brain Rot videos, where characters like Trallalero Trallalla (a shark wearing Nike sneakers) and Ballerina Cappuccina (a ballet dancer with a cappuccino for a head) play out various scenes and scenarios. Last weekend, I watched a video where a coconut cheated on her mango husband with a cantaloupe. I probably shouldn't spend my precious moments on earth watching that, and yet I am!

None of these videos was edited by a legitimate video editor. They were all made by AI, and they all look pretty bad. Some of the characters have totally different bodily proportions in every "scene." The voice acting (if you can call it that, since no actors are involved in creating these videos) is inconsistent. There are only certain movements that the characters can do, and they look amateurish, even compared with mediocre hand-drawn animation from the 80s, like in Heavy Metal. And yet, once they come up on my feed, I can't look away. I know deep down that these videos are harbingers of the decline of internet culture as we know it, but I'm just as susceptible as anyone to getting sucked into mindless slop!

via Ion (Ivan) Sipilov

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A lot of people don't care if the animations they're watching were made with the power of human creativity. They like to see colors move around. The small business owner in this story discovered that he could make animations for nightclub and concert projections much more cheaply with AI than with the animators he had been outsourcing to, so he made the switch permanently following some labor disputes. His conscience is catching up to him, and he tries to seek some outside validation, to no avail.
Am I the bad guy for replacing our art team with AI?

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via Colin Lloyd

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