- Akira Yoshida, Marveldunno, I've seen worse and some of the scenes if you asked me if it was AI or not I probably couldn't tell you. most egregious thing I saw was at the 27 second mark where the girl is inside the table.
At the current level of tech it feels like it would be a pretty dull full length Anime, and hard to squeeze all the bugs out but for something shorter like a commercial or FMVs for like a video game seems good enough.
0:19 - [same time] several bowls are just sloppified, e.g., having two bottoms
0:45 - last of the soup phases out the bottom of the bowl
Continuity errors with the smock. (Is there a logo on the pocket, or no? Does it have a pocket?)
("How Asians Pay for the Bill" … what a title)
0:29 - a water drop drops off the ice cube and falls to the next ice cube … inside the water?
The cards are never quite the same; sometime the contacts are misplaced, sometimes they're missing.
But things like the girl phasing in the table, the soup phasing through the bowl … these are things a human would never animate, because they've lived their entire life understanding the physics of soup. Or, like with the card … they'd get a reference.
But in particular, the cut of the bowl stack being spilled … that scene in particular makes no sense. The entire physics of it should feel wrong because they are wrong. In the same way that CGI animations and/or games get more realistic looking the closer they simulate physics, so too does animation: if a character drops a bowl (in a setting with gravity), then it must act so, and animators know this and render it as such. Yes, and AI will try to predict it, but it strikes me akin to trying to perform a computation in screen space that must be performed in 3D space.
The soup also feels wrong, and it only takes a second rewatch to determine why; the shot feels non-committal, because it is: are we ladling, are we pouring, is the soup phasing out the bottom?
The best animators out there, to me, reward you for watching harder. Small things that make sense in the context of what you're seeing, but aren't necessary. The more you look, the more detail there is to the scene. I'd offer Frieren as an example here. For example, in E21 (the episode where Frieren breaks the barrier during the test): the episode starts when Flamme brings Frieren before Serie; this occurs hundreds, if not more than a millennia, prior to the main events. We see Serie in a temple. Later, when Frieren breaks the barrier, we see Serie remark: "This is why I will never retire."; the same temple, but now the walls are worn with time. This is made somewhat apparent, as there's a fade to denote the passage of the time. (Less apparent is there is allegedly a one or two frame shot of Serie, whose barrier it is, overlaid in the spell Frieren casts to break it. It's visible if you watch it, but not really intelligible.) As another example, the timeskip in E1 has her visiting the same shop twice, and the aging of the shop keeper & shop is visible. It's not just the same shop, it's from the same angle, specifically so that we the viewer can understand it to be the same shop. It's not required for the plot, but it builds out a richer story. As a final example, E17, Fern comes in from the cold & touches Stark on the face ("You're a monster!", Stark screams.) Later, when Fern falls ill, Stark tries to wake Frieren, who is by this point notorious for sleeping too long. Stark wakes her by touching her face, to which Frieren responds, "You're a monster." (Honestly Frieren is one of those animes that's probably so littered with these things that I'm missing like 80% of them.) But good animations make detailed choices all the way down to that level: as far as the plot cares, Stark only needs to wake Frieren, but he wakes her in the particular way that makes sense for the character we've built.
But in AI pieces, the detail is just never there, because when it's "wall in background", there's so many walls, in so many backgrounds, all muddled up in the training data.
Frieren's earrings are actually somewhat similar to the smock comment: her earrings are visually consistent throughout the entire anime, not merely a few shots. (Again, this is an example that's rich in detail, too: chronologically earlier shots of Frieren notably lack the earrings, which is made possible to notice by their consistency & distinctiveness when they're present in the first place. We're probably to presume she acquires them at some yet unrevealed point, and the visual similarity to her teacher Flamme's jewelery also leaves the viewer to wonder if they're related. But it's that choice, that these two sets of accessories appear similar, that allows us to build that connection. It's also the sort of thing that leaves me wondering "how long were the writers planning?!")
(I'd also offer the soundtrack as something that I don't know that AI can ever reach. The song "Knife to the Throat" gives me chills if I play it in my mind. But it's harder to demonstrate detail and thematic elements in a musical piece, I think. An a musical example, I'd offer "Pink Pony Club": the opening notes to which are a musical allusion to "I Will Survive". The notes are chosen intentionally, as a specific reference (one thematically relevant to the song), to set a specific tone and setting for the song that is to come, and you need to know the reference and the history and context it exists in, to be able to appreciate it.)
AI hair often doesn't follow proper "form" and looks like overcomplicated, random tufts that can clash and overlap. It might not be obvious on a first glance, but you can learn to tell the difference pretty quickly.
I mean, has pay gone up in other fields where AI has taken over a lot of jobs?
In any case, I think the reason pay is awful in anime is the same reason as in gamedev: if people get into it for passion, the companies can pay less and still have employees.
Partially, but also outsourcing. First it was South Korea, then China, and now Vietnam and India.
Toei Animation's (Dragon Ball, One Piece, Sailor Moon, Mononoke) VISION 2030 [0] is interesting if you want to deep dive into how the industry is thinking medium-to-long terms
> has pay gone up in other fields where AI has taken over a lot of job
Depends on the industry [1]
[0] - https://corp.toei-anim.co.jp/en/ir/main/00/teaserItems1/0112...
[1] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/ai-impacts-in-bls-employme...
I don't think this tech is quite "full length movie" watchable yet (maybe other uses), but seems only a matter of time where it would be "good enough" for common use.
So my verdict is that AI-only anime is still not there yet (although it would be cool to have a world where one dedicated and talented artist could make a high quality anime). But at the same time, anime studios will probably start incorporating AI into their workflow, getting high-quality-looking scenes for very cheap.
Does this come off as wildly tone deaf to anybody else? "We love your product and what you do, but could we get it without associating with or paying you in any way?"
> ...Smaller and faster means more financially feasible so we can give better wages for artists and enable a new industry to thrive in the US.
I've been in Asia this week, speaking to artists and creators. The traditional systems do create challenges, but this just sounds like a U.S. AI-based company giving itself carte blanche to steal the cultural output of another country, wrap it up in and U.S. style business, and eventually push existing artists or long standing studios out of the space.
No, I don't think I want a smaller team of artists and animation professionals doing art and animation. That feels like a very sloppy outlook to me.
[Edit: While I'm sure the process is interesting for some, the introduction especially just leaves me wondering who thought this writing sounded good? Maybe the target market for this is AI investors or people who aren't actually interested in the artistic part of things, and that's why I find it such a turn-off.
E.g. "We could license good music," implying their music is bad? Maybe it would be less jarring if they didn't specifically call out the importance of writing?]
Like Japan with cars, electronics, etc?
That said, AI is pretty good for creating goofy stuff that otherwise won't sell to the mainstream audiences. My recent favourite AI anime is Chemical Cooker Ryo.
Oh well back to making 'I got isekaid to a medival time period with a cheat skill and harem'
Family Guy's Korea team famously did this early on. So did some major animes like Trigun (surprisingly early).
With Genshin Impact / Honkai Star Rail, I think the trend of "anime in 3D" is only intensifying anyway, and that's totally aside from your mentioned use case of just making it easier to automate shots and transitions to perfect fidelity without AI artifacting.
The aha moment was when people made ones over the Pam Bondi DOW over 50k meme but the recent World Cup ones have been very amusing too
Staff writers are not respected and treated as less than in Hollywood.
Yet the classics of any given medium have emotionally resonating entertainment medium have unique or paradigm-shifting results on audiences, and the medium itself (novel, comic book, TV show, miniseries, film, video game) has influence, but ultimately, it's the writing that is the single most important element of an entertainment IP's value.
An entertainment product that makes you feel emotions beyond boredom is doing its job. True crime/horror bring emotions of fear, mystery, and danger. Sci-Fi/Fantasy bring wonder, curiosity, and discovery, with genre-specific forms of each of those emotions. Mysteries and thrillers bring, well, mysteries and thrills.
So a slice of life AI anime, if it can properly portray from its writing a sense of growing mutual trust, awkwardness of growing up, combined with hope for a better tomorrow, it will have done its job as an entertainment product.
I'm procrastinating working on a fantasy novel which I started in 2012 and need to finish it. It has to hold up in today's neon flashing lights tiktok world as a book. But then there's no reason I couldn't use AI tools to direct adaptations of the source material to an anime or manga or TV show or web series.
Do I wish I could hire and pay and create an anime with a dedicated studio of practitioners who are pros and passionate about the medium beyond my wildest dreams? Sure! Is that likely to happen in 100 million lifetimes? Nope! So if I want to have my IP appear as an anime or TV show, my only realistic option with my one life on earth would be to try to do a similar process to how this animation studio works.
Bravo for them for advancing the medium for this, to find what works and what doesn't. Maybe some day if I will just finish my actual novel and get it eviscerated, after I've figured out how much it will take to pay Michael Kramer and Kate Reading to do an audiobook for it, I can find wild business success such that I could commission an anime series for the IP as my creative vision directs, and have humans do the interesting parts, and let the AIs do the boring inbetweens and tedium work.
But until then, I'll be keeping an eye on aventos to see where they go with this potential.
The whole "AI is trash at writing (my job), but for the audio/visual stuff (their job) it's a great cost-saver!" thing is just...beneath contempt.
Goes to show human review doesn't amount to anything if the reviewer is blind to the flaws they're supposed to catch, whether they're going over video gens or a self-aggrandizing puff piece.
Closest I can think of is destroying the village to save it, and I think that's very much the territory we're in here.
I really am getting to a point with this stuff that all I can say is "OK".
I don't think people will ever be fans of aventos or the media it throws out to the world. Calling the people looking to enjoy something you made "consumers" might be one thing to change, but fundementally you've stripped away everything interesting about yourselves as artists. I have no argument that will be convincing to you, but I just can't imagine anyone caring too deeply. I hope you enjoy doing this for your own sake and good luck with whatever.