Netflix Made An Anime Using AI Due To A 'Labor Shortage,' And Fans Are Pissed

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So what happens to Netflix when someone offers a service to generate our own shows by AI ?

https://www.twitch.tv/watchmef... [twitch.tv]

Then we'll be able to watch shit shows made by ourselves instead of shit shows made by Netflix. For anyone who thinks they're worth paying a subscription to. That wouldn't be me.

I don't see an issue with this, as long as the training dataset consists entirely of artwork that belongs to the studio in question and which has been licensed for that purpose.

I think some new law might be needed here in order to be fair to the artists, though. Currently, if I have an employee do something artistic, I own the results. But I think there needs to be some restrictions on that - restricting this to direct use only. For an employer to use it for the purposes of training an AI that may make the employee irrelevant, the law needs to be changed to require the artist to specifically sign over that right.

Paying someone a fee to do art is one thing. But using that same fee as a way to extract the methods of doing art is something else entirely.

This is, I believe, an ethical question that is already rampant in the machine-learning community and we need some new law sooner rather than later. Any machine learning that is used commercially needs to be trained only with data explicitly licensed for that use.

an strike and an union may help that happen!

The AI workers tend to go on strike by going in flames (especially nVidia crap). They use SLI for unions, that's why the eeevil manufacturers are making PCIe peer-to-peer instead.

I don't see it as being any different than how programmers are paid. You get paid by the hour for the work you produce. And the company you work for owns that completely at the end of the day. We need to stop thinking of artists as something different than any other type of employee. If you want to own the work you produce you pretty much have to go independant. But there's a lot of work that goes along with that.

Indeed, somewhere I heard that the white-collar workers are about to experience what the blue-collar workers have been for the last few decades - massive layoffs. And this time, since there is no place to shift, some society structural changes will inevitably follow, lets hope for wise leaders for a peaceful transformation.

Which is why we're starting to hear more and more about concepts like Universal Basic Income or Guaranteed Minimum Income being touted by economists and some billionaires. They see the writing on the wall and are trying to get ahead of the problem before mass layoffs have people breaking out the guillotines again.

Unfortunately short sighted thinking, our inability to satiate the greed of the already wealthy, and cultural norms which dictate certain people are "lesser" and don't deserve to be helped - while

Bill Gates was talking about taxing automation to fund UBI long before Andrew Yang cooked up the freedom dividend. Gates has been promoting the concept for over 5 years.

So giving people money to not work rubs people the wrong way in a "lizard brain" kind of way.

It's not the giving, it's the taking. Americans give money to a vast array of charities. Some charities are immensely profitable on the donation revenue. There are multiple companies that specialize in handling donations. Benevity is the one I use to donate thousands of dollars per year to be divided among a variety of charities that I've selected. Their entire business is based on collecting voluntary donations and routing them to whichever of the millions of non-profits the donor wants to send money to.

It seems only a matter of time before the smartest bots are cheaper than the bottom 1/3 of humans in terms of specific jobs, and there will be mass riots, probably triggered by an economic slump.

There's already roughly a half million homeless in the US. That's not a enough to form effective angry mobs (when spread about the US), but the writing is on the wall. [politico.com]

Some say it's mostly a substance abuse problem, but even before, heavy drinkers could find simple physical jobs in warehouses or factories that didn'

As a rule substance abuse is not the problem. Whatever drove them to take solace in substance abuse is the problem. As I understand it (my girlfriend worked in a homeless shelter for years) the majority of homeless addicts didn't have a substance abuse problem until after they became homeless. Once you've given up on getting back on your feet, why the heck *wouldn't* you turn to drugs? They're the only escape you can afford.

And it's not that different for non-homeless people: it's all but impossible to get ahead, especially if you start in the bottom 1/3 of the wealth distribution and don't have any special gifts (beauty, intelligence, athletic ability, etc.) that you can leverage for a better life.

It was only a few generations ago that a man working a 40-hour physical job could support a wife and children while buying a house (with 10 years rent being the recommended purchase price) . That was the entire point of creating a minimum wage - to ensure that *anyone* willing to contribute to society by working a full time job could make a decent living doing so, rather than having his desperation being exploited by profiteers.

Now we've got couples both working 60+ hour weeks just to rent a shithole apartment and keep food in their kids bellies, with no real hope of things ever getting better, and never being more than one kick in the teeth worth of bad luck away from being out on the streets.

It's hardly surprising that rates of depression, suicide, and substance abuse are climbing. As for homelessness - you get that unlucky kick in the teeth that puts you on the streets, and how are you supposed to get back on your feet when you've got no address, no bank account (you need an address), no shower to get cleaned up for a job interview, etc.? If you don't have a network of family and close friends to help you out you're pretty much screwed. And who the hell has time for maintaining those sorts of relationships?

It can be done, but it generally the sort of drive and ambition that few lucky enough to be born into the upper or even middle classes have ever even dreamed of exerting. And probably a good dose of luck along the way as well.

Some say it's mostly a substance abuse problem, but even before, heavy drinkers could find simple physical jobs in warehouses or factories that didn't require much thinking once the routine is memorized. Now most of such is automated.

It isn't quite yet, but it very soon will be. DHL has deployed the Stretch robot from Boston Dynamics to unload shipping containers with no human intervention once it is started up. It's not as fast as a human, but it can't be injured, doesn't care how hot it is in the container or the warehouse, and can work 24/7 as long as someone is around to set it up at each container and get it going.

Something nobody here on this forum wants to acknowledge because it's really really scary is the thought that the rate of job destruction is going to be much much greater than the rate of job creation. You would think site full of nerds would be neurotic enough to have the self-reflection needed to consider that possibility.

I have said that here for years. And it has started. The current wave of firings may not yet be it, but it is also possible many or most of these positions will not ever get filled again. I agree that many people here are currently using a head-in-the-sand denial strategy, usually claiming (falsely as your example nicely shows) that something like this has never happened before.

Taking into account that the current "jungle" of software is not sustainable with regard to technological debt raising and securit

I wanna thank you for this comment, it actually made me change my mind about this topic. And I'm stubborn as a mule.

The luddites were real people who faced mass unemployment with no prospects for new jobs. Their jobs were eliminated and it was years if not decades before new technologies came about to employ them. The industrial revolution happened so fast it destroyed more jobs then it created for a Time and it was a mass unemployment and social strife.

I don't think that's quite right.

Historically, new tech created more and better jobs than the jobs that it destroyed.

However, the people who lost those old jobs were generally worse off.

Traditionally, new tech means an individual worker can produce more value, meaning that there's more wealth to hire people to do new jobs (and those new jobs produce more value than before).

Of course, there's no guarantee that the same pattern will repeat in the future.

I agree, largely because most automation in the past was about reducing labor costs and automating simple tasks. Without brains, the machines don't do much but follow the same motions and spit out the same parts. To change anything, you have to redesign the machines or rework the programming.

Making computers that think and adapt to external conditions is a really hard problem that hasn't really been successfully tackled before, but we are closing in on that now. This industrial revolution is very differe

The problem is that the knitting machine freed you to do something else. The goal of these AIs is to be the car where the human was the horse. Since they can do anything more efficiently than humans, you might not need general intelligence AI to completely replace humans, you just break your process into small enough steps and have AIs learn every single one with a single human to supervise everything.

...automatic selling machines took our job as ticket sellers at metro stations! ...cars took our job as horse carriage drivers! ...etc.

Side-note: could anybody give me a definition of "art" for this case? Something created by a monkey can be "art"? Something created by nature can be "art"?

For many years artists convinced themselves that automation would replace everything, except them. Because nothing will beat the creativity of the human brain.

Here is what ChatGPT has to answer to your questions:

Art is a subjective concept, and what is considered art can vary widely across cultures and individuals. There is no universal definition of art that can determine whether something created by a monkey can be considered as such. However, some people might argue that for something to be considered art, it must reflect the intention, consciousness, and imagination of a human artist. In that case, it would be difficult to consider something created by a monk

What if my intent was to hand a monkey a paint brush so as to showcase the creativity (or lack of if you prefers) of the animal. Is the painting art, and whose art is it, mine or the monkey's?

I know I'll get push back from the art degree folks but I don't think you can define art at all. I think its strictly a you know it when you experience(see/hear/feel/..) it phenomena. What about "Fountain"? Is it art? The museum people seem to think so. Would it be art if someone not a famous painter had done it? Is

Something created by a monkey can be "art"?

Some monkeys produce artwork far better than so-called "modern art" already.

Art is both a process and the product of an attempt to encapsulate and transfer human experience through a medium. Great art succeeds in that attempt.

Something created by a monkey can be "art"?

Something created by nature can be "art"?

Nature as in randomized set of "stuff" we also refer to as "universe"? Nope.

In both cases it is just random, meaningless stuff we, value/meaning attaching creatures, might instinctively attach some meaning or value to - as is the practice of that lump of lard we carry around in our skulls and experience the world through. I.e. It is no more a work of art th

What is different about the human mind such that what it creates may be art, and what an animal creates is categorically not?

> The tweet drew instant criticism and outrage from commenters who felt that Netflix was using AI to avoid paying human artists.

Because animators have discovered that if they don't make enough money to buy groceries they have to find another way to live. There seems to be a corporate trend toward trying to use automation to solve labor shortages that are created by the corporations own unwillingness to pay a decent wage, and animation is an easy target because many animators are project hires not full time permanent hires. Animation, like other creative arts, tends to be populated with people who really want to do what they are doing. This also makes them an easier target for exploitation. An interesting twist to this is that the people writing the AI engines to do this are also passionate artists in their own right, and also fall into that category of easy to exploit project based hires.

Indeed. But eventually most get really tired of that "starving artist" situation and move to jobs they are a lot less enthusiastic doing but that at least pay the bills and offer some job security. I mean with the salaries quoted, even serving tables may make them more.

I understand the sad plight of a passionate artist being an amateur artist myself, but using bots to automate commercial art to shave money is probably inevitable. Welcome To The Future.

There seems to be a corporate trend toward trying to use automation to solve labor shortages that are created by the corporations own unwillingness to pay a decent wage

It's not a trend, a "corporations" is just placeholders for groups of people so that it defines how that group gets taxed. Groups of people want to make money and as much of it as they can - and this is a good thing because they make money when they produce something valuable. The cheaper a group of people can produce something of value, they more money they make. If you had to landscape your yard, you don't want to stop using technology and dig with your hands instead of shovels just to keep more people employed. If the output is identical or indistinguishable and requires less people and time, that can only be a good thing. An obsession with keeping 'jobs' over having efficiency only leads to a society that is worse off.

I used the term corporations in the interests of brevity, in my mind, when I use the term corporations I am referring to organizations that are owned by shareholders and as such are beholden to those shareholders. In current societies where business is driven by capitalist ideals these corporations produce whatever they produce, whether it be quality or junk, solely to drive dollars toward the other organizations that actually hold the stock, or act as proxy for those who do. As I age and learn more history

This is where the world is going. Get over it. Stop thinking throwing wooden shoes in the works will do anything.

If you start generating Anime with AI, you lose some of the quirky things that make Anime, Anime. We also have to be careful when companies say "labor shortage", especially in this field, you can't expect art to be produced at scale without talented artists so pay them fairly.

I am waiting for them trying to create hentai and porn that way. My prediction is it will fail spectacularly, because for these things to work there needs to be some shared deviancy between the people making it and the ones buying it. And deviancy is a complex thing far beyond any simplistic statistical model.

It's not like anime animators didn't use tools to make their life easier. AI generated backgrounds, and I'll bet later even much more are just another tool. Who cares who creates the whole project, as long as the result is entertaining. If the 'fans' weren't told the backgrounds were (partially) AI generated they wouldn't have complained at all. More and more jobs will gradually be replaced by AI, just like a lot of factory jobs have been replaced with robots and machines. We're already too late to actually properly handle how to deal with large groups of unemployed people because of AI/robots are already capable of doing their jobs, and the group will only grow, not shrink. We really need to think about a society with a basic income were everybody can enjoy a decent life.

They don't want to deal with artists or writers, they want content, stamped out like laundry detergent.

Netflix Made an Anime Using AI ...

This is an attempt to entertain and mollify young future Skynets.

> In the end it will just be bots watching bots

this is when crypto will really take off... bot micropayments to other bots

While there is some good anime, I kind of agree with you for the most part. If you look at some of the anime out there, it's pretty evident that it is just thrown together with the most limited amount of work possible. Quite often there's only one thing moving on screen at any one time. Often when someone needs to talk, the scene remains completely still while only the character's mouth moves. Or even the action scenes have the character is a non-moving pose while the background moves behind them instead of actually showing them running.

It's the animation equivalent of the old Batman TV show where they rotate the camera to make it look like they are going up the side of a building or just add in Cartoon BAM! BOOF! effects rather than having a well coreographed fight scene.

There are of course exceptions to the rule. There is some anime that is quite amazing. But the vast majority of it is just shovelware type content.

The same can be said about pretty much any "blockbuster" movie in the past decade or two. Instead of trying to create a compelling story and interesting characters, just complete the checkbox spreadsheet to make sure you somehow included every target demographics, add some spectacular CGI explosions and you're done with the movie. Interesting script? Character arcs? Not in the checkbox spreadsheets, but we made sure that every single target demographic is somehow taken care of, whether that makes sense in the context of the movie or not.

Don't forget throwing a dart at lists of top 10 films from decades ago and saying "just reboot that" as the amount of creative thought put into starting a new project.

Let's reboot Jaws, but with more zombies!!

And make the shark an AI controlled robot. AIs are currently very much en vogue.

And that's yet another pet-peeve of mine. Reboots.

Invariably, they suck. They have no chance to do anything but that. Because what does get rebooted? The duds and trash? The Killer Tomatoes and the Plan 9s? No. What gets rebooted are the smash hits. The absolutely awesome movies that everyone has fond memories of. The all-time classics that still gather people in front of TVs whenever they get shown.

Your movie is competing with one of the BEST movies of all times. Now how do you think it will fare compared

It's kind of different, though. The blockbusters are expensive to produce.

And yet the quality is somehow roughly the same...

One should think that they are of better quality if they cost more.

In terms of production value, they are better. You might not like the script or acting, but that's different.

Oh boy, let's replace interesting and compelling content and people who can act with scenic pictures.

If I want that, I watch my relatives' home videos.

Just some spreadsheet analysis is all. What brings in the big profits: Explosions? Yes. Quality writing: No. Great cinematography? Maybe, but just put a camera in a helicopter and fly around New Zealand for awhile.

The whole point of rotating the cameras so it "looked" like they climbed up the side of a building was because this was funny, not because it was cheap. The anime equivalent would be Stan the salesman from Monkey Island, whose plaid suit textures remained static even when he moved. Of course, that also was done because it was funny...

Often when someone needs to talk, the scene remains completely still while only the character's mouth moves.

At least they're building that as part of the anime. When we were kids we had to watch syncro vox on Clutch Cargo [youtube.com].

While there is some good anime

Speaking of which, since the fansubs seam to have died, I am having a really hard time finding more good anime. Any places to find good anime? (I don't mean places to download, but places that one can actually find out about good anime without 99% of the noise)

The decay of civilization is most evident in the popularity of cartoons among adult males.

You are only generalizing based on US cartoons. Japanese anime is heads and shoulders above that. What you did is like generalizing all novels after reading some children books.

Japanese anime, which is the topic of this article, spans all kinds of topics and maturity levels as general movies/TV shows. The only difference between an general anime movie and a general Hollywood film is just that one is drawn while the other was acted.

And Japanese anime actually care more about a compelling character arc and telling an interesting and captivating story than ensuring every race and gender is properly represented.

I dunno about you, but I prefer that.

You make it sound like representation is somehow interfering with quality.

In general, casting a minority in a role shouldn't have any significant impact on the role - not unless you rewrite the role to be some sort of bullshit stereotype. *Especially* for stuff set in the future or alternate universes, where racism not being a thing is completely plausible.

You really think Terminator would have been a worse movie if instead of a big white man trying to kill a white woman it had been an big Asian man trying

I agree, it should not matter if you cast a minority into a role. The casting for a role should be determined by whatever person will fit that role best. Would Terminator have been the same movie (quality-wise) if the terminator had been a black woman and her enemy an Asian trans-man? Likely. Provided that they are credible in their roles. If that Terminator had been a heavily obese black woman and Kyle Reese a lanky girly-boy... erh... not so much.

But that would have been less due to them being black and t

While I agree that it's stupid to target animation as the phenomenon he bemoans can be seen in all media, Anime is far from immune from being unimaginative crap.

Oh look, a teenage boy got hit by a truck and some god decided to help him out and put him in a fantasy world with some stupid overblown power and a bunch of girls to fawn over him... In fact, that entire sentence is probably the title of a show.

They have good shows and movies to be sure, but they have a *lot* of crap too.

But they balance it out with the anime sub-genre of the teenage girl who got hit by a truck and some god decided to help her out and induct her into the Super Power Schoolgirl Theme Squad with comedic mascot!

Yeah the octopus porn cartoons sticking tentacles up girls twats is so head and shoulders above anything in North America.

_Some_ anime is heads and shoulders above it. I used to really like anime, and I still like good anime. The initial draw was that it was "different". However over time you realize that just like the rest of the world, 99% of everything is crap. And yes, there is soooo much crap anime out there. Maybe you might think only the good anime gets popular outside of Japan, but no, some really stupid stuff gets very popular.

that is because Anime(tion) is a style. A film may be anime, or live-action, or CG. Nothing about the style has any impact on story, direction, or technical-skill.

And this is different from the crap that Hollywood cranks out in what way exactly?

Well, we don't have anime characters telling us how to vote, so that's a plus.

Wow, it's been a few decades since I've seen the 'cartoons are for little kids' sentiment.

You may have a point about popular media, however it pretty broadly applies to both drawn and live action content. However this isn't really a new phenomenon.

The decay of civilization is most evident in the popularity of cartoons among adult males.

This notion that "animation / graphic novels are for children" is largely based on marketing / moral codes from the mid-20th century. Go watch Grave of the Fireflies and tell me that its storytelling or subject matter are childish.

I mean, don't get me wrong, if you're living in your parent's basement and jerking off to Sailor Moon, yeah, that's definitely a problem--but that does not indict an entire artform.

between that and superhero films there is a definite trend of escapism. almost like reality is too shitty to deal with sometimes.

The decay of civilization is most evident in the popularity of cartoons among adult males. The animation and stories in anime are easily replicated by computers because they are all literally all the same.

That's sort of an artifact of the Japanese anime industry itself (and the manga industry that feeds into it). It's almost literally an echo chamber. Competition is cutthroat, so if something is commercially successful, then all the other creators and studios are pressured to do something that's similar. You can see some trends change over time; for example, in the 1980s it was mecha anime and now it's more demons and magic. But the industry as a whole kinda follows the herd, and honest creativity seems to b

The decay of civilization is most evident in the popularity of cartoons among adult males.

Personally I think the decay of civilization is most evident by golf. I mean who hits a little white ball away and then goes and chases it. Clearly that's an example of decay of civilization because I don't like it. How dare these INHUMAN nonpeople engage in such an activity. Amirite? I mean that's childish.

Yes I am mocking you. The real decay in civilisation is idiots who get upset about the fact that other people can dare to enjoy something at some arbitrary age.

The problem is not labor, or no-labor, or cheap labor, or lack thereof.

It's the need to work to survive. This is a scam. We've survived better on less work per head centuries, millennia ago. With all the mechanisation and automation in place, you'd expect that by now we shouldn't have to work more than 1 hour per day or so, on average, to cover everyone's needs. Yet we're still required to work 8+ just to survive. Not thrive. Survive.

Take this out of the equation, and then I'll buy all of your "produce noth

We've survived better on less work per head centuries, millennia ago.

I'd be willing to bet that the 40 hour work week (35 in some parts of Europe, IIRC) enjoyed by the majority of western people today involves far more leisure than enjoyed by any generation prior to the 20th century (for individuals that were not part of the 1%).

The most common life people had centuries and millennia ago was dying during childbirth or in the first few years of life;

Not useful mixing them like that. In excess of 90% of births go smoothly by very nature, then and now. In roughly 5-8% we have complications which typically can be survived with knowledge alone (which was available back then, too), e.g. turning of the baby etc. About 1-2% are heavy complications which can't be survived without modern medicine (placenta in the way etc). So, no, modern medicine didn't bring along significant improvement of survival of birth rates.

As for child deaths... yes, that's true. But t

Some studies of hunter gatherer societies have found evidence that they work less than we do.

https://www.rewild.com/in-dept... [rewild.com]

Thanks very much for the link to the study--it's appreciated, (unlike the other guy, who attempts to answer my suggestion with "use your brain" and hyperbole). The main takeaway I have from that link is this:

Others have criticized Lee’s study for its narrow definition of “work.” If you include the other necessary tasks that Lee’s numbers do not include, such as food preparation, cooking, cleaning, and making, cleaning, and preparing utensils, tools, and so on, then the estimates rise to 44.5 hours per week for men and 40.1 hours per week for women, estimates that seem far less shocking when compared to modern industrial work schedules.

You can argue we still do "cleaning" and "food preparation" (though I daresay both are far less work for the modern westerner, a significant percentage of which 'outsource' that task to someone else who prepares their food on a multiple time per week basis, and even when they cook their own spend much le

is it for a lifestyle further beyond "well, we didn't die today?"

I don't see any reason to think so. They would fill those other hours with leisure activities, just as we do. Talking, making music and art, playing games, playing with children, and so on. Unless you define quality of life as iPhones, Netflix, and world travel, they could have a pretty high quality of life too on a day to day basis. Life expectancy, medical care, and such would be a different issue.

How about if you just use your brain instead? We've invented agriculture, then various levels of mechnisation, electrification, computerisation, automation, and now finally AI; each of these because it brought, for itself, huge leaps in efficiency. And we still work effectively our complete wake time just to survive?

The 8 hour work week was based on the assumption that the other parent is staying at home and taking care of kids, household and running errands, while the first parent invest

How about if you just use your brain instead?

Ah, yes, this is certainly one of the main indicators of a good, honest debate.

And we still work effectively our complete wake time just to survive?

We do? That's news to me. Even at the poverty level in most western civilizations, more than basic needs are being met--and on the mean, that 40 hours a week is far more than food and basic shelter. The average American family (so, YMMV if you're not American) probably has at least two cars, more living space than they actually need, eats out at restaurants several times per week, goes on vacation at least once a year, etc.

Ah, yes, this is certainly one of the main indicators of a good, honest debate.

Asking that someone use their power of reasoning instead of regurgitating is an indicator of a debate at least just about as honest as someone crying "[Citation needed]" when confronted with points of view that don't fit his or her narrative.

Case in point: your point is full of factoids, which, while true, do little to no justice to the situation at hand. Let's address them one by one.

We do? That's news to me. Even at the poverty level in most western civilizations, more than basic needs are being met--and on the mean, that 40 hours a week is far more than food and basic shelter.

Depends on what your "basic needs" are. Food and basic shelter isn't basic needs for living, they're basic needs for surviva

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