Chris Miller, writer and producer of the animated Spider-Man “Spider-Verse” trilogy, shut down rumors that his team used creative artificial intelligence as part of production for the series' next installment, “Spider-Verse.” Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.”
“'Beyond the Spider-Verse' does not and never will have creative AI. One of the main goals of the films is to create new visual styles never seen in a studio CG film, generalizing the work of other artists. Don't steal plagiarism average,” Miller posted on social media in a shot at what is commonly being done. called “AI”.
The social media buzz surrounding GAI comes as backlash against the nascent technology has grown among both Hollywood activists and pop culture. This has been especially true since the WGA and SAG-AFTRA attacks last year, where writers and actors spoke out against algorithms that are potentially replacing their artistry.
But creative AI, which creates words and images with minimal human input based on human-generated tasks used to train software, is just one form of technology. Other machine learning tools have been adapted by Hollywood animation productions as a way to help animators, not make them obsolete.
Such machine learning technology has been used in 2018's “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and its 2023 sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” which hand-drawn comic book characters. Attempts were made to replicate the style. Finding new ways to express this style through color and design in a CGI animated film. It involves copying the ink lines on the characters, which is an important part of comic book line art.
But adding these ink lines to each frame of the film and adjusting them to fit the characters would have been too slow and tedious for animators to do on their own, so Sony Pictures ImageWorks developed a machine learning program. Adjust the ink lines from frame to frame and move along the letters. This allowed the animators to focus on the expressions, movements and other important aspects of Spider-Man Miles Morales and other “Spider-Verse” characters without spending hours fine-tuning those details.
This machine learning technology, designed to free animators from the menial work that would add up to weeks if not months of work in the animation process, is not the same as creative AI. It is still based on the work done by the animators on the project with their supervision. This is in contrast to creative AI, which can pull images, video and words from media outside of the project it's working on and create something without much human input.
The future of machine learning, GAI and other new forms of technology is expected to be a big part of contract talks between Hollywood studios and The Animation Guild, which recently formed a task force to ask its members. To hear input on how artificial intelligence is used. Projects they have worked on or developed.
This will help the union develop its proposals on how to regulate the use of AI in Hollywood animation. The Animation Guild's negotiating committee is still in the process of drafting a formal set of demands and is expected to begin negotiating a contract sometime in August.
“Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” is currently in production, but has no set release date. It was previously slated for a March 2024 release, but was pulled from Sony's schedule last year during the Hollywood writers' and actors' strike.