If you managed to read any of my contributions to our old newsletter ‘Espinof File’, it is possible that you found more than one recommendation to the Corridor Crew YouTube channel. This is led by members of the Corridor Digital studio, which has been around for thirteen years exhibiting talent and teaching the ins and outs of an audiovisual discipline as complex as visual effects.
Well, after a very long season dazzling with their projects —really, take a look at their work because it’s fantastic— Sam, Niko and company have gone viral again thanks to a project that has brought a huge halo under its arm. of controversy. This is none other than ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’; an animated short film created with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
Animation within the reach of —almost— any pocket
With this experiment, whose results are amazing to say the least, the team at Corridor Digital has put on the table what it believes is the “democratization of animation”; a tremendously expensive technique in economic terms and that is not within the reach of any creative. Also, in my opinion, with the short in question he has shown that AI is still just another tool that is of little use without a good dose of talent behind it.
As you can see in the video that presides over these lines, the development of this production has combined the real image recordingits reinterpretation through stable diffusion —not without a complex problem solving process to give stability to the material—, the generation of scenarios through Unreal Engine and the final edition in Davinci Resolvesoftware that, by the way, is free.
As it could not be less, the viralization of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ and its making of It has generated responses of all kinds on social networks. In addition to the obligatory celebrations and praise —more than deserved, everything must be said—, the negative comments They have not been kept waiting. To give some examples, we find tweets like those of MonorchidGuyin which the following can be read.
“You’re talking about stealing work for AI tools and then you encourage doing it by not just making a short film using it, but making a tutorial on how to do it. This isn’t VFX, this isn’t animating, this is using art-stealing AI from the people”.
From my point of view, it is possible that MonorchidGuy is alluding to the moment in which the team uses the anime ‘Vampire Hunter D’ for style references with which to train the AIignoring that the character design is created by themselves – the costumes are real in the recordings – and that the setting is extracted from a pack marketed on the Unreal platform.
Seriously are no alarm bells going off for anyone else listening to this pic.twitter.com/b8QX8BjS5n
— Girly 🏳️⚧️ Aeon ||COMMS OPEN|| (@MissPenenko) February 26, 2023
The main source of the controversy is around the association of the use of AIs with “stealing” material from third parties. In order to “educate” artificial intelligence and to provide us with the expected results, it must be fed with multiple reference works that it will later replicate in one way or another; a process very similar to that of human artistic learning but with a gigantic —and thorny— legal loophole around the concept of authorship.
It is tremendously understandable that this amazing —but still imperfect— demonstration is heating up the debate on the use of Artificial Intelligence in creative processes —the mythical animator Ralph Bakshi he has limited himself to giving his opinion with a cryptic “No comment”—. We are at the dawn of a new technological era that we still need to understand, assimilate and, of course, regulate; what is clear is that, from now on, nothing will ever be what it was.
🔴 THE FUTURE OF ANIMATION?
WOW! The people at Corridor Digital are the team that is most innovating in the use of AI to evolve their audiovisual production processes.
And they just did a proof of concept that anticipates what “animate” will be like in the near future.
🧵1/4 pic.twitter.com/OiTMP3WjE4
— Carlos Santana (@DotCSV) February 26, 2023
Carlos Santana, a popularizer on artificial intelligence, considers that ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ could be “a proof of concept that anticipates what will animate in the near future”. It’s still too early to tell if he’s right, but something tells me that a possible scenario would have the big animated studios designing their own references with which to feed AIs as stable diffusion, recording reference actors on green screens and automating a process of animation that is as expensive in economic terms as it is laborious after refining it enough by taking advantage of its means. Only time will clear us of doubts.