CNN
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Digital technology could have led to the decline of hand-drawn animation, but it still required a large group of creatives and technicians to feed the process. Some people are afraid of that now Artificial intelligence (AI) can push even more human touches out of equations.
However, in Africa, animation experts see AI as a way to unlock new creative possibilities, making projects easier to get off the ground.
Stuart Forrest, CEO of BAFTA and CEO of South Africa-based Triggerfish Animation Studio, is one of them. “Africa has a very unique position around the world,” he told CNN. “Of the 1.4 billion people living on the continent, there are enough people who are actually active in the animation industry.”
Given the limited number of professional animators, Forrest believes that by integrating AI, some creatives have a route to bringing their projects to life for the first time. “It’s really exciting for the continent.”
Evele Okoye, an award-winning Nigerian filmmaker who is lovingly known as the “mother of African animation,” also sees many benefits.
“We now have the opportunity to tell a story without waiting for someone to give us USD 20 million,” she told CNN at the Cannes Film Festival in May, hosting a masterclass with AI with Pavilion Africans animation.
The African animation sector was valued at $13.3 billion in a 2023 report, but Forest said historically there is a lack of funding for African animation projects. “There is a general rule that African stories don’t generate income. But African stories created are very low budgets, and yes, they don’t generate income.
Soon, he would turn a project into a feature film that cost $100-20 million to run, costing $50,000 on AI and only need two or three creatives.
“You’ll see a flood of this story that you’ve never heard before from a country where no one invested,” he added.
“In the end, the arena between Hollywood and Kinshasa (D-Republic of the Congo) is leveled in terms of storytelling quality.”
There are many unresolved questions. One: What might AI do to the job market?
Opinions differ. “You’re going to empower those who work for you,” Okoi said. “You’re not going to replace them. You’re going to make their work easier.”
But it assumes you have a job in the first place. AI is already taking on many mediocre and repetitive tasks. This is a task that may be performed by entry-level staff and trainees.
“If those jobs become outdated, then at some point the industry becomes a bit elitist… you don’t have the same entry window as you are now,” argued Masilafenjoman, a junior research fellow at the South African Cultural Observatory and a co-author of a recent report on its impact on the creative industry in South Africa.
“In an economy like South Africa, especially in creative and cultural industries, it’s harmful because there are already many issues across job security,” she added.
Triggerfish does not use AI-generated art, but employees have used Github Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant, to help generate code for the past few years, significantly speeding it up.
He admitted, “AI may remove some roles first, but it will enable others.” Meanwhile, Njomane pointed out that AI creates opportunities for independent studios to play a bigger role in content creation.
Ethical and legal discussions
The impact of Most reservations regarding the integration of AI in the creative industry, particularly generative AI, involve ethics and law.
There is a continuous eerie surrounding where and how some AI companies obtain the dataset used to train algorithms that generate images. AI companies have been hit by dozens of lawsuits, primarily based on copyright infringement. Last month, Midjourney was sued by Disney and Universal. He argued that the generator AI company trained models with intellectual property and generated images in violation of copyright law.
In July, the European Union proposed new rules that enforce public summaries of content used by companies to train algorithms. In January, the US Copyright Office concluded that the output of the generated AI could be copyrighted, but only the input prompts did not meet the criteria if humans contributed to “sufficient expressive elements.” The African Union is at several paces behind the formation of concrete policies, but this issue has highlighted the 2024 AI Strategy Report.
Creatives who do not have copyright to their works have few routes to making money. Okoye believes that for this reason, African animators should avoid web browser-based generation AI and instead use AI in localized workflows.
Okoye uses the software Comfyui and supplies drawings of this character to various poses. “As soon as you connect this model to a local workflow, you tell the character exactly what you want to do so that you can train an AI model based on your character, and you do that,” she explained. “You just need to get back what you gave it – and it’s your intellectual property.”
Forest says Triggerfish is about to develop an ethical “AI-assisted pipeline,” but he can still find sympathy for the algorithm.
“If we had to be cruelly honest with ourselves, we were inspired by Disney, Pixar,” he said. “I think art is always assimilating. I mean, Raphael was assimilating Michelangelo and Leonardo. It was always looking at what people were doing and saying, “How can I get my perspective on this?”
“If humans do that, it’s acceptable. But the question is how much acceptance is when it’s done on a machine. In the end, I think the controversy will disappear.”
You can creatively control your data input Other benefits: That is, it helps to eliminate bias.
The racial bias in AIS is well documented, from facial recognition techniques to recording much higher error rates among people with darker skin than darker skin to large-scale linguistic models that perpetuate negative stereotypes for African-American English speakers. This “techno racism” extends to generative AI. Artist Stephanie Dinkins has created an AI exhibition that cannot accurately portray black women.
Okoye says some AIs produced common or inaccurate images when they were encouraged to create African characters. “The only solution is to go locally, create characters and train your own models,” she repeated.
Regarding the reason for the lack of AIS, Forest said, “Most existing content in Africa, especially in animation, is much less for (AI) to understand.”
Njomane pointed out that AIS performs better in English and other Western languages, adding that it often generates general images of Africa. “It doesn’t even have (Africans) in mind or even consult them at all. That’s a big problem.”
Okoye outlined a dream scenario where development funds or Angel Investors back the studio to create diverse African characters and culturally specific assets for training AI models. This will generate a library of accurate, free and accessible images. This can serve as the foundation for building animators to claim copyright.
Amidst the boom in African animation, studios are trying to replicate the success of series like “Iwájú”, so animators will need all the tools they can get. And “miracles” – Nigerians The projects streamed on Disney+ and HBO Max respectively show an international appetite for afro-centric storytelling.
Despite the ongoing ethical twists, Okoye remains optimistic. But those who once worked as typesetters with colleagues also understand people’s concerns as people worried about their careers with the arrival of personal computers.
“It comes from the offenders (exist) to those who are training AI models – how beautiful it is,” she said.
“What a wonderful time to be alive.”
