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Comment by proc0 | Hacker News Reader

How much of this is AI automating? That drawing of the car design, the storyboarding... isn't generative AI aiming to do away with most of it?

I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.

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The point of storyboarding is to determine what you want to make. I guess you can consider it part of the "prompt."

Not something that can be automated away assuming you still have preferences at all.

Of course, but then you're outsourcing it to the vision of the AI model. I'm just wondering how much of this gap is being overlooked. There is definitely some control being lost but we still don't know how much or how much it's really worth. Will we just get the same types of films with AI over and over? I think it's early but there are some clues by seeing how much work was put into "traditional" workflows that have control over every single detail.

> is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it?

How could it not be? Even if AI spews out a bunch of stuff that humans end up tweaking this limits future human creative output to modifications of whatever AI has already been trained on. It can only lead to a homogenization of art as AI regurgitates past works over and over again, only to be further distilled as new models are trained on little else but it's own slop or variations on it.

What makes animation interesting are the creative decisions. Character design. Prop design. Background design. Story. The more companies choose to use AI instead of letting artists make those creative choices, the more derivative and less interesting animation will become.

That's right. The pushback on this is how art went digital but we can clearly see the leap from traditional media to digital is a lot smaller in comparison to the AI leap that is automating almost every aspect of it aside from an initial idea.

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