D'oh! TV Animation Meets AI With Unease, Opportunity
Faster, cheaper: New tools in the market put artists in a state of ambivalence. Plus: My exclusive news on CBS ratings
Elaine Low reports on TV from L.A. She recently interviewed WME digital strategy head Chris Jacquemin about Hollywood’s cautious embrace of AI and wrote about the rise of executive coaching in the entertainment industry.
It’s April 1. But this edition is not some elaborate April Fool’s prank — I’m coming to you a day late this week with a report on AI in TV animation that, by intention, follows my colleague Erik Barmack’s Reel AI column yesterday about the “horrifying boiling point” that has arrived with Open AI’s new image generator. While Erik dives into the blatant animation IP theft presently underway through OpenAI, I am examining today a different part of the AI wars: How machine learning is already remaking TV — and what some artists and startups are doing about it, both in embracing the tech and protecting human workers’ primacy in the process.
BUT! Before we dig into all that, I’ve got some good news to share about live action on the small screen. I have new data shared exclusively with The Ankler this morning: So far, in the 2024-2025 TV season, no fewer than 10 CBS series have notched audiences of 10 million or more viewers across the linear Tiffany net and Paramount+ in the live+35 window: Watson, Tracker, Matlock, Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, Elsbeth, Ghosts, Fire Country, FBI, NCIS and Blue Bloods. Eight out of 10 of those shows are procedurals — Ghosts and Georgie & Mandy are comedies — and four of them air on CBS Thursdays (NBC’s onetime Must-See TV stronghold). And viewership within those 35-day periods ranges from 18.7 million for Watson to 10 million for Blue Bloods. It’s elementary, my dear: this is nothing to sneeze at.
There’s a lot more to learn from this resurgence of the procedural — and if you’ll be at NAB in Las Vegas this weekend, come see my panel with Fire Country and Sheriff Country co-creators Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, as well as CBS Studios content strategy and drama development head Bryan Seabury and CBS Entertainment’s EVP, scripted Yelena Chak as part of The Ankler’s Business of Entertainment track at the show. Register here.
Now on to today’s main event. If you were even mildly online last week, you saw the Studio Ghibli-fied images created by OpenAI’s latest version of ChatGPT, which Erik went deep on yesterday. Beloved characters, movie trailers, and even old memes were everywhere in newly AI-animated form: tired Ben Affleck, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills lady yells at cat, you name it.
For all the worry about AI impinging on the realm of live-action scripted TV and film, AI is coming even faster for animation, a craft already highly digitized and software-enabled. The Animation Guild (IATSE Local 839, also known as TAG, represents more than 6,000 workers) grappled with this during its contract negotiations with the studios last year, resulting in some new guardrails around the new technology when it inked a deal last November.
Sam Altman, you might want to pay close attention here.
“The studios can’t require one of our artists to use AI in a way that would lead to another union member losing work,” says director, storyboard artist and Animation Guild president Jeanette Moreno King, a TV vet who has worked on series including Futurama and The Simpsons. “As they’re staffing up, they have to reveal to potential employees that they’re going to be using these tools, so that it can’t be something that’s sprung on them in the middle of production.”
Like the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA in the wake of their 2023 strikes, TAG was criticized for not going far enough with its demands around AI. “It went as far as we could take it, because we can’t tell a studio across the board not to use it,” says Moreno King. And like the WGA, TAG is also supposed to meet with the studios every quarter to discuss the use of AI (though the first of those meetings hasn’t been scheduled yet).
Drop in to X or Bluesky and the cry among creatives to place a wholesale ban on AI is loud. But some artists are quietly toying with the tech, while others are more publicly talking about how they’ve incorporated it into their work. See: Amazon Prime Video’s AI-powered episode of House of David, or the Russo Brothers’ use of AI voice modulation in The Electric State. The Russos are even developing AI tools in house as a way to control costs and support artists’ work (even if the brothers’ super-pricey Citadel is in hospice after the sudden departure of Amazon MGM Studios head Jen Salke).
In other words, AI’s future in animation is Hollywood’s big jump ball. As more TV production is being outsourced, AI could send more animated series beyond American shores, where tech regulation is looser. Conversely, there’ve been interesting recent case studies that show the potential of AI to be an artist’s assistant rather than job killer.
In this week’s Series Business, I’ll tell you about:
Why the big TV studios like Warner Bros. TV are keeping mum about their use of and view on generative AI in animation
TV animation artists’ increasing curiosity about AI tools: “How could I use this?”
Why animated series pros can’t wait to try Ember, the new tools from Toon Boom Animation, and the “insane” workarounds it promises
Which Netflix animated epic cost $9 million to $11 million per episode — and the implications of it being made in half the time with AI
How new genres in TV animation are “way more demanding” on creators and much more expensive, and why that could lead to wider use of AI
One of the leading new ethical AI models trained on “fully licensed and clean data”
How eliminating the most tedious tasks of animation could create a generation of workers lacking core artistic skills
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