Corridor Crew, an American production studio based in Los Angeles, known for creating pop-culture-related viral online short-form videos since 2010, has recently been in hot water for boldly proclaiming that they may have “changed animation forever”!
Corridor Crew recently posted a video titled ANIME ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, an animated episode that highlights what they were able to do with AI and other software programs in a short amount of time. Let’s be clear, the animation didn’t look great by normal standards, anyone can admit to that, however, what people were more focused on is the dystopian disruption something like this could create in the creative field. People across the internet were furious that Corridor Crew, an animation team, should have understood the labor that goes into making such animation, and the ramification of endorsing AI in such a way. It’s fear of how AI could rob people of their livelihood, destroying those who sacrificed hours of their craft to hone their skills.
Unfortunately, that is a sentiment most big businesses will not give a damm about. In fact, there’s nothing you can do to stop such a change from happening. I talked about this in my recent blog, where I highlighted the impact that AI will have in the creative space. Corridor Crew didn’t change animation forever, they were just the first to show the potential that I’m sure is already being explored by big corporations. In a follow-up video, ‘Did We Just Change Animation Forever?’ the team talked about the current trajectory of processing media with AI and how visual noise prevents the technology from creating a clean image free from stark artefacts. Their solution was to turn an image back into noise and process it that way using any number of auto-generated prompts and ideas. Many will argue that what they’re doing is basically creating a problem just to solve it, but in the long run, it could save many small indie studios, and big corps a lot of time, and more importantly a lot of money. And that’s what it is all about at the end of the day.
People need to stop depending on sentiments and morals when it comes to business and innovations, these people don’t care, and judging from the reaction to their video, it’s very much more split between those who think it’s cool and awesome, and people who see it as a sin against man. The only problem is the stealing of content. Since AI needs a lot of data to actually be useful, this will lead to so many people just feeding it copyrighted stuff in order to create something remotely adequate for use. Big corps may be able to find this stolen art and sue them to hell, but it’s the indie creators who will be consumed by the hellfire if there’s nothing done in time. That’s why I think it’s important to adapt quickly to adjust to the new age, rather than fight it and be left behind and made obsolete by a machine.
In the end, innovation has always disrupted a space, it is either you adapt to the change or be left behind. Just like Father time, innovation waits for no man and like Mother nature, it shows no mercy.
