People are pissed at Netflix after the streaming giant relied on AI-generated artwork to paint backgrounds of a newly released anime.
In a tweet, Netflix Japan said that the project, a short called the Dog & The Boy, utilized AI software due to labor shortages in the anime industry.
“As an experimental effort to help the anime industry, which has a labor shortage, we used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts!” the streaming platform wrote in a tweet.
The tweet sparked instant outrage from commenters who believed that Netflix was using AI to dodge paying human artists. This has been a central tension since image-generation AI skyrocketed last year. Many artists say these tools as unethical—due to being trained on masses of human-made art scraped from the internet— and will further cut costs and devalue workers. Netflix Japan claimed that AI was used to fill a labor gap.
The short film was created by Netflix Anime Creators Base—a Tokyo-based hub the company created to strengthen its anime output with new tools and methods—in collaboration with Rinna Inc., an AI-generated artwork company, and production company WIT Studio, which produced the first three seasons of Attack on Titan.
