Corridor Digital & AI

The wonderful VFX team over at Corridor Digital is getting absolutely DOGPILED on for their video on using AI Art to make an anime. I cannot understate how important that video is - and we’re going to cover what they did and why it’s so important, don’t worry - but it has completely freaked people out. While some higher-level fears are warranted, most of the discourse is just in bad faith, and I can’t stand that.

I had creativity. I had ideas and vision for art and projects - but I couldn’t magically make up a lack of lifetime of grinding at a singular skill - nevertheless ALL the different skills I wanted.

I became obsessed with this Intersect idea for YEARS because it truly seemed more realistic that I would be able to download tons of info into my brain than to actually dedicate my life to mastering such crafts. That’s the debilitation my ADHD had on me. I graduated high school without sticking with a single individual skill or art, I dropped out of my original college major and spiraled through multiple academic and career paths before landing here - nearly flunking out of college despite graduating both high school and (later) college with honors.

AI art means so much to me because all of a sudden, out of nowhere, that Intersect concept is not so absurd. It feels tangible. The process of CLIP and diffusion with AI art, or large language models for text are… already so close to what the Intersect was… it allows people like me, bursting at the seams with creativity and artistic vision, but an inability to fully train mechanical skills in some area to finally, at long last, actually see their creative dreams through.

So while some of the higher-level fears about AI art are valid, when I see so many people leaping to dogpile on those who experiment with AI art, it FUCKING HURTS because it’s (typically) a bunch of gatekeepy illustrator-style artists both invalidating any art form that isn’t hand drawn AND shutting down tons of people like myself - often with ADHD or other limiting factors - and saying we shouldn’t be able to access these tools or that we’re frauds for trying to learn them… all in the same breath.

What the Corridor Crew team does is knock down those barriers with VFX and make them more accessible. They inspire artists and would be VFX artists to pick up the scary, not-often-taught tools and learn them to see their ideas come to life. They provide alternate perspectives on how to do things both to peek behind the curtain and to help inspire even more creative ideas.

So when they make a video like the AI Anime video, it’s not because “they couldn’t be bothered to pay animators” - of course not. That entire premise is absurd, because the entire video wouldn’t exist WITHOUT the tools they were covering. This wasn’t a “we wanted to make anime without paying animators” project, this was a “what if we took these new, bleeding edge tools, and used them to mash together completely different mediums, what would that look like?” Project. With their audience being mostly independent artists or small teams, the implication to them is just the same. If I, the shaky-handed, non-illustrator artist wants to make an anime, I’m not in a position to pay a freaking team of animators what they’re worth to make that happen. That’s… not remotely realistic. Instead, I’m going to leverage the tools available to me to try to bring my creative vision to life. Because art is not about the specific tools used, but the idea, the message, and the story involved.

Just because they didn’t hand-draw the frames, doesn’t mean their human touch isn’t there. Art isn’t this magical fancy land where every millimeter of visual space is perfectly hand-crafted with every ounce of deliberation and soul. Especially art for hire. More often decisions are made without you, shortcuts are taken, and you’re just trying to get the best out of what you’ve got.

Art produced with the help of AI isn’t copied unless someone chooses to do that. Copying and stealing for profit is a human choice that humans make. And they make it all the time, always have. Hell, Jazza posted a video last year showing his frustrations trying to hire “REAL ARTISTS” to draw his prompts, as most of them (more than he even identified himself) just stole art from other places to adapt to the commission. As someone who’s tried to hire out art repeatedly over the years, usually to zero avail, I feel the pain.

Companies that lay off their staff to replace with AI and create sub-par soulless work should not be supported and should have anger directed at them. Humans who choose to copy other artists and profit from stolen work or ideas should have anger directed at them - whether AI is involved or not. But everyone else? Things really need to be toned the hell down.

I get that people are generally scared for creative jobs - but it gets exhausting after a while. I’ve heard it on repeat with photography, digital art, autofocus, automated tools for rotoscoping and background removal, autotune (which isn’t automatic at all, by the way), using pre-built video effects and photoshop actions, using prebuilt computers instead of building it yourself. Hell, the argument gets so twisted that you’re shamed for not learning every skill and perfecting every task to do yourself that you’re shamed for hiring other people to do it for you - by the very people who are mad you’re not hiring them!

Plus, in many, many cases, jobs aren’t actually lost in the big picture. Simply shifted. I’ve heard the on-screen story many times in many fields, where specific tasks or types of jobs are automated away, but overall there are more jobs in the field than ever. Frequently, when you remove the tedium and the time-wasting parts of the artistic process, you’re more able to spend time truly following your creative ambitions and really making an impact. People are able to be more creative when they’re not overloaded with busywork.

This sentiment is echoed both in this individual career animator reacting to the Corridor videos, as well as the Corridor-hosted “animators react” video, wherein the animators share the hint of fear they feel, similar to when 3D animation started taking off with Toy Story. It doesn’t eliminate art jobs, historically it just keeps creating more.