Netflix slammed for using AI artwork in anime instead of paying an animator

Netflix is facing backlash for using AI-generated artwork in its anime The Dog & The Boy rather than paying human artists. The controversy comes at a time when the art community is concerned about the rise of AI putting their jobs at risk, besides the contentious issue of copyright theft by AI image generators.

Netflix’s justification for using artificial intelligence to paint the backgrounds in The Dog & The Boy – that there is a shortage of labour in the anime industry – did not go down well on social media. The controversy snowballed when Netflix Japan shared a tweet announcing “As an experimental effort to help the anime industry, which has a labour shortage, we used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts!”
The post drew criticism on the microblogging platform and sparked a conversation about labour theft and fair wages. “I know a ton of animators looking for work if you guys are struggling to find them (are you looking very hard?)” asked one commenter.

“You could help end the shortage by paying them more,” another person remarked.
“Isn’t that great, going from underpaying animators to not paying them at all,” one Twitter user wrote.

A report in Mashable noted that a human would draw the rough outline of the image, which was then put through an AI art generator several times. The resulting image was finally revised by hand before being used in the anime.

The Dog & The Boy did not credit the human artist, instead crediting its background designer as "AI (+Human)."

The anime was created in collaboration with WIT Studio and AI art company Rinna Inc.