What’s likelier is that ML-based tooling becomes a key part of the animation workflow. Used to generate assets, animations, backdrops, characters, etc, which are then combined by an animator/editor. The examples he cites in the article all fit this mold - the anime character generator he cites in the article uses separate models to generate the character then rig it from facial data.
After working in the self-driving car industry, I’m really skeptical of any claim that rapid advances in one modality or task mean we’re “just 3 years away” from all related tasks being done via ML models. Alexnet et al completely revolutionized perception in self driving cars - between 2014-2017 it was really common to hear predictions that we’d have end to end models driving our cars perfectly in “less than 5 years”. That reality never arrived because ML just wasn’t capable of handling more complex tasks the way it could with object detection. Lots of articles similar to this one talking about what we were going to do with all of the out of work truckers and Uber drivers.
And yeah obviously generative art is a different beast than autonomous driving. And I’ve seen examples from WIP text2video models. But I just want to caution that tons of progress in image and text doesn’t necessarily mean we’re just a year or two away from all related tasks being conquered.