After the recent release of the short anime “The Dog and the Boy”, Netflix Japan has to deal with quite an amount of backlash on social media. In the three-minute film, Netflix uses AI to generate backgrounds. Let’s take a look at the viral discussion that followed immediately. The short anime, directed by Ryotaro Makihara, tells a touching story of a boy and his robotic dog who were separated by dramatic events. However, it’s not the storyline everyone is talking about since the movie gained huge attention after the announcement tweet from Netflix Japan. The company mentions in it, that they “used AI image generators for the background images to help the anime industry, which has a labor shortage.” (translated by Google) A still from the anime with the example of a final background. Image credit: Netflix Japan “Labor Shortage” – Netflix explains how and why they used AI „The Dog and The Boy“ is currently available to view on YouTube, we embedded it further down below. It also includes credits that show background images from the same scene at different stages of creation. Based on these illustrations, the process goes from a hand-drawn sketch via multiple AI generations to the final result, again revised by hand. The responsible Japanese AI software company Rinna didn’t state exactly which neural network was used for the backgrounds but similar image-to-image generations are possible, for example, in Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. The illustration of the image generation process in the end credits. Image...
Published By: CineD - Monday, 6 February, 2023