Drawing on AI

What if making cartoons becomes 90% cheaper?

- 

remained: Toonstar artists were having to scramble to create all of the necessary drawings.

Put simply, AI still hadn’t advanced far enough to do the heavy lifting of image creation.

A more powerful breed of AI that could generate text and images in response to short prompts — generative AI — arrived in 2022. OpenAI, for instance, rolled out ChatGPT and DALL-E, which let people generate photorealistic images simply by describing what they wanted to see.

Toonstar used open source AI infrastructure to build its own image generator. Attanasio and Huang named it Ink & Pixel, a riff on a Disney department where a battalion of inkers and painters prepared cels, transparent sheets on which images were drawn or painted and then photographed.

"I get emotional because it was like, 'Wow, it really works," Attanasio said when asked to recall his reaction when Ink & Pixel began to come together.

Just then, however, a virulent backlash against generative Al swept through Hollywood. Creative workers viewed the technology as a threat to their very existence. More than 170,000 actors and writers spent much of 2023 on strike, in part to demand AI protections from studios.

Another reason they instantly abhorred the technology: OpenAI and other tech companies train their software with data scraped from the internet, often without compensating creators. (The practice has resulted in lawsuits from authors and news companies, among others.