Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Will Take 90% of Artist Jobs on Animated Films In Just Three Years

What kind of backwards world has AI becoming animators and screenwriters while actual people slave away at jobs that slowly kill them?

How did we end up in a future where robots create the art and tell the stories while I still have to fold my own laundry?
- We all must have been proper asshats in a past life or something, because it's getting ridiculous even by dystopia standards.
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For companies that pump out crappy content maybe.

Yeah, but this is basically what the biggest studios will do, and they will be successful at it with certain audiences. It will become the Kraft cheese or Oscar Meyer hotdog of the movie industry: processed shit that is barely what it says it is on paper, but somehow highly consumable to millions.
Avant garde, indie, extreme low budget, etc will all find a surge, tho, since a lot of people will want "nicer", less processed movies.
This is all highly speculative, ofc.
- Yea.
  I think it's helpful to look out for the ways in which this sort of AI disruption won't actually be a disruption but instead a continuation of a trend and impetus that already exists.
  Spitting out crappy cookie cutter films that are optimised to sell tickets as cheaply as possible without giving a fuck about the industry ... that's so much of Hollywood. Why wouldn't they give it a shot with AI. Same with the music industry.
- I’m not sure this is true. IIRC the majority of frames in Across the Spider-Verse were AI generated, and that movie is hailed as the pinnacle of animation right now.
A lot of work in animation is drudgery. Sure, this probably won't replace your writers, storyboard artists, model developers, background designers, etc. But VFX, in betweeners, post processing? Just look at the progress in the last year.
I've been using DALLE 3 for the last couple of months to do character Illustrations for my tabletop campaign. Sure, a lot of the results aren't great, but it takes me 10 minutes of fiddling with prompts and 5 minutes tops of post-processing to get really good results that would take a professional artist hours, if not days. I've seen some pretty impressive forays into animation as well on the research side of things.
3 years is a really long time in this field. I won't be surprised if all a studio needs at that point is a handful of artists to design models, backgrounds, and key frames to flesh out a script, then another handful to refine and polish.
- Yes! AI subtools added to existing creative suites will be a huge part of the problem once they get good enough. What currently takes a varied team will be done by one artist, with AI filling in the gaps and adding the polish that the others would have covered.
  For example, that recent AI art scandal with Magic the Gathering was apparently due to the artist using Photoshop's generative fill to speed up the process, which is why Wizards denied it was AI art at first.
I think big companies will have a mix of both.
I think a big job for the remaining artists will be to tweak or improve what the ai makes and then iterate on it.
Crappy content still employs people.
Scripts? Yeah. I doubt AI is ever gonna crank out a good script.
Animation? Look where we are already with AI. You really think we are that far off from quality animation from prompts?
- As if the Hallmark Channel ever needed more than one script
- Scripts could happen, but you'd need a hell of a lot more training data than we have now though. There are like 700,000-800,000 movies and maybe a few thousand of those are reasonably popular. You could probably make something that reasonably graded scripts without someone having to read all of them.
  Animation is getting damn close. AI can generate the set completely and with the latest changes in image stability you can puppet ai art with generic actors. We're still lacking style though. One of the strong pulls in animation are the particulars of a shows art style. You can see one frame of the simpsons, southpark, futurama or bobs burgers and know what you're watching. it's still a little early to ask AI to make a full cohesive piece frame to frame

Read the article.

Machine learning and interpretative output are tools; just like the automobile, the spreadsheet and photoshop.

The introduction of new tools means there will be fewer people manually doing the things that machines can do more efficiently. The introduction of digital spreadsheets decimated the market for paper bookkeepers, but the need for accountants (people who could utilize the new tools) exploded.

I don’t know enough about modern animation production to speak authoritatively about this, but I’m imagining Katzenberg is talking about jobs like inbetweeners and other kinds of admittedly skilled labor that can be lazily farted out by machines. No QA for lazy productions, QA and varying levels of tweaks for high production value work, and all-by-hand for only the most rare auteur works. And most animated works are in that “lazy production” category. It’s gonna look like shit, everyone who cares will notice, but most of the people buying won’t care.

What this also means is that money will stop flowing to high-manual-effort works. The real creative, ground breaking stuff is going to come from either people utilizing the new tools in new ways, or old established artists who refuse to change (Miyazaki, Bill Plympton, Yuri Norstein & Francheska Yarbusova, etc).

I'm seeing this in my field heavily right now. I'm a software engineer, and using the AI tools, each senior engineer is essentially acting like an entire engineering team now. The tasks that would be delegated to junior engineers are being done faster and more cheaply by the AI, enabling me to focus more on the big picture architecture and actual business logic.
Who this is really hurting is anyone trying to break into the field right now, or was a recently laid off junior engineer.
- Who this is really hurting is anyone trying to break into the field right now, or was a recently laid off junior engineer.
  In the long term, this is going to impact the industry as a whole. Firing all your junior reps and making every job a managerial position that requires 15 years of experience means you're going to run out of qualified professionals inside a decade.
  The WGA Strikers had this complaint wrt "Mini-Rooms" for script writing. Parsing the script writing process from the production process and reducing the team to a single script editor means you lose all those junior talents who are supposed to matriculate into production and direction and senior writer positions over time. It represents the death of the industry, by way of films like "Rebel Moon" that are just vague jumbled composites of other movies.
  Using AI is akin to dosing your firm in a strong acid, dissolving the integrity of the thing you're supposed to be facilitating in hopes of making it lighter and faster.
if any of those names survive long enough to be relevant for all that. the lag on corporate adaptation of new tech is getting faster, but it's still going to be a number a years i think until we start to see any real saturation of this tech in that space. i doubt Miyazaki can wait that long...
- That’s a fair point. I was invoking those names as contemporary examples of that caliber of creator. I feel like we’re always going to have a rolling cadre of seasoned top tier talent with the clout to make “we’re doing it THIS WAY” choices. I like Masaaki Yuasa for the next generation of those folks (even if he never really makes anything else himself anymore and just and guides Science Saru).

I look forward to the movie in which Shrek has eight fingers on one hand and four on the other, two completely different and incompatible ears, and three rows of teeth while the title screen says "SHROOEOORSHWZECL"

You joke, but as a cgi animator I'm kind of worried. It is evolving so fast and has gotten many people I know out of their jobs (concept art, photography, illustration) and it seems like is just a matter of time for the techbros to perfect these tools for animation and video.
I'm really really hoping to be wrong.
- It's going to remove MOST people from most jobs. The focus isn't on maintaining jobs, but instead getting rid of capitalism, setting up a UBI, and public ownership of all AI productivity gains taxed at 100%.
  Then you say fuck your job and you animate what you want. IF, you still want to do that.
  You are NOT alone in this boat snd neither are artists. Truck drivers, pilots, data analysts, most finance sector jobs, most copy writers, and on and on. Many large corporate farms these days run on tractors that go by GPS and drive themselves...
  Bottom line, it's jobs that are in trouble, which is why capitalism can no longer be allowed to exist.
- seems like is just a matter of time for the techbros to perfect these tools
  Techbros don't understand art and they are never going to figure it out. These tools will be perfected by artists who choose to embrace them.
  Anyone who doesn't embrace it... yeah those people are in trouble. AI can already do this:
  Nobody is going to pay wardrobe, make up, set design, special effects (oh, and not to mention a child. Man are they a headache to work with on a photo set) to create something like that now hat it's possible to do it quickly and cheaply.
  The tech isn't there yet, but it will be soon. In particular when AI is combined with software like RenderMan which is the current state of the art in photorealistic computer generated graphics. Tom Cruise didn't fly a jet in Top Gun Mavericks - they rendered all of that in RenderMan.
And it still breaks a box office record

In three years, 90% of animated films are going to be generic crap churned out for a quick buck.

Very optimistic to think ten times more animated films will be good in just three years.
Unlike Frozen 3, Toy Story 5, Shrek 3, Kung Fu Panda 4 and live action Lion King we have today. So creative.
- Toy Story 5
  There's a Toy Story 5?? I haven't even seen the third one yet. Or any of the other ones you mentioned..

People still listen to Mr quibi?

I’m pretty sure Quibi didn’t even last three years so I’m not too confident in his predictions
- This guy has a pretty good mini-series about Quibi's failure https://youtu.be/kVJGTaE7Eio
  Basically they are Hollywood people who were all like: all the other Hollywood people we know, who we talked about it with, loved it (the producers, who would make content for it).
  But they never really checked whether the consumers - the people who would be actually paying for the service - even liked it enough to pay for it.
- Exactly

All the more reason to cancel streaming subscriptions.

Ghibli >> Disney

Getting closer to a world where people don't need to work and can just enjoy life.

Progress is good, but not without issues.

Nah, we're getting close to Elysium
- I believe this is the case in USA. EU still regularly stands to protect their citizens against corporations Europeans also have better understanding of the role of government and social policies. I'm not sure EU can win this fight but I'm pretty sure they will at least try.

Good.