Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI
Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI
www.dw.com
Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI – DW – 05/20/2025
22 comments
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Japan's Copyright Act, amended in 2019, is largely interpreted as allowing the use of copyrighted materials to train AI tools — without the consent of the copyright holder. The law, specifically more permissive than those in the EU or the US, aims to attract AI investors to the Asian country.
It's actually strange that Japan allows this because that country normally has very strict copyright laws compared to the EU and the United States.
Charlie Fink, former Disney producer and current adjunct professor of cinematic AI at Chapman University, feels that the use of the rapidly developing tech will "lead to a new golden age of Hollywood," one that would be "highly democratized, because an individual could make a film for a few thousand dollars," he told DW
If Fink is right in what he says, in the future, I think there will be a debate about whether AI is a good thing or a bad thing. Because if AI makes cinema a movement like free software and/or open source, it's a win-win, right?
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As long as the AI is also Free Software or Open Source.
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sounds like japan might be desperate for the lack of anime workers.
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Much of the animation takes place outside Japan these days. If you watch enough recent anime end credits, you'll see a lot of what look like romanized Vietnamese names. And there was a scandal . . . about a year ago now? . . . when some material for an anime then in production was found on the server of a North Korean studio (probably because a Chinese studio to which the anime had been outsourced then outsourced it further without paying attention to little things like international treaties). And I don't think the teams remaining in Japan have any shortage of recruits.
This issue, as with any business, is "can AI produce more for cheaper at an acceptable quality?" If it does make real inroads, it'll be the outsourcing studios doing the less-important scenes that get replaced first.
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The whole "they need to get permission!" thing makes no sense. When I watch an MKBHD video I don't need to get his permission to learn from him. I don't need his permission to learn from his style. I don't need permission from an artist to learn from their art style, their brush stroke technique, their colour science. I just look at it, watch it, read about it, and I learn. I can then use what I learned to make new stuff and there is nothing that they can, or should be able, to do about it.
The same applies for AI. AI isn't recreating the material that it is trained from - it's "learning" from it. It doesn't take the Mona Lisa as training material and then output the Mona Lisa.
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Spot on.
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It does recreate the training material. There's literally loads of examples of it spitting out a degraded copy of an original piece of art with specific enough terms.
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But that is already the fault of the person who gave those instructions to the AI.
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But You don’t know what it was trained on, so you can’t say that with any certainty. If it was, why would it make a degraded copy? If it was trained on the real thing, shouldn’t it replicate the real thing perfectly?
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22 comments