Netflix used AI to create anime backgrounds, drawing criticism

The streaming service Netflix used AI to create backgrounds for the short anime The Dog & The Boy because of a labour shortage. This sparked a storm of criticism on social media.

Netflix アニメ・クリエイターズ・ベース×技術開発のrinna株式会社×WIT STUDIOによる共同プロジェクトアニメ『犬と少年』のショートムービー。

人手不足のアニメ業界を補助する実験的な取り組みとして、3分間の映像全カットの背景画に画像生成技術を活用！ pic.twitter.com/GYuWONSqlJ

— Netflix Japan | ネットフリックス (@NetflixJP) January 31, 2023

«As an experiment to help the anime industry facing a labour shortage, we used image-generation technology for the background illustrations in all three-minute videos», according to Netflix Japan’s Twitter.

Subscribers expressed anger at such a move. They said the company used AI to avoid paying artists.

Waking up to see Netflix has started using AI to replace its background artists and can’t even be bothered to credit the people guiding it beyond being called «Human», who even then can’t be bothered to fix it so it instead looks like garbage. https://t.co/R41cTO970j pic.twitter.com/JKN1HF2kLa

— Brian Harding | Commissions Open — Info 📌 (@BriHardGaming) February 1, 2023

According to пресс-релизу, the short film was created by specialists from Tokyo’s Netflix Anime Creators Base in collaboration with the AI company Rinna and the Japanese studio Wit Studio.

The trailer for The Dog & The Boy features picturesque backgrounds of cityscapes and mountain ranges.

At the end of the episode, a hand-drawn mock-up appears, with the designer listed as “artificial intelligence + human”. The next two scenes show algorithmically generated images, with mentions of Rinna engineers and AI developers from Osaka University.

In recent years demand for new anime productions has risen sharply, but the industry has long suffered from a staff shortage, with workers unwilling to accept poor working conditions and low pay.

In 2017, the illustrator Kazunori Mizuno, who worked on Naruto and Bleach, died while at work, reportedly from overwork.

According to The New York Times in 2021, wages for lower-ranked artists were only $200 a month, while higher-paid artists earned $1,400–$3,800 per month. At the same time, industry revenue reached a record $18.4 billion.

Earlier this month, a group of artists filed a class-action suit against the makers of image generators for training the algorithms on their works.

In December 2022, the author of a book created with the help of AI faced a wave of criticism and death threats.

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