How AI is Changing the Animation Industry
How is AI (and other tools) changing the kids animation landscape in 2023?
New GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Dall-E are beginning to impact on creative communities - and creators are beginning to explore how developments in the Web3 space might be best leveraged to connect with young consumers. To explore the shape of this emerging space, Auger sat down with creators Shannon George and Andrew Kavanagh to discuss how those working in the animation industry are thinking about these new tools - the opportunities, the threats, and the things we need to keep in mind as we move forward.
How is new technology such as AI and Web3 changing the animation industry?
This interview transcript has been edited for clarity and length
Auger Insights: Everyone is talking about AI and Web3 at the moment, and to better understand how these new technologies are affecting kids' lives, particularly in the animation space, I'm having a chat today with Shannon George, Creative Director at Daily Madness Productions, and Andrew Cavanagh, founder of Kavaleer Productions. Do you mind just quickly introducing yourselves to me?
Shannon George: Hi, I'm Shannon George. I am the Creative Director at Daily Madness, which is a UK and Dublin-based animation studio. I am an American, but I've been based in Dublin for about 11 years now.
Andrew Kavanagh: My name is Andrew Kavanagh. I'm the founder of Kavaleer Productions, based here in Dublin, Ireland. We're 22 years in business. We're predominantly a 2D production house. We create our own IP, we co-produce internationally, and we also do service work.
Auger: I want to start off by focusing on generative AI. There's a massive conversation going on right now about AI's role in the creative spaces – crystallized best perhaps by the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike – and it looks like kids' animation is very much a part of this conversation, with new shows like PBS Kids, Lyla in the Loop launching next year, a show that will incorporate AI into its production and some of the content it talks about, and Mediawan's Kids and Family division looking to use the new technology in some of their programming.
So I want to start with the opportunities, if that's all right? As animation experts, from what you've seen about AI, do you think there's anything that could be helpful when it comes to producing quality cartoons for kids?
Lyla in the Loop - PBS Kids
SG: There are opportunities in animation to make it, to have it help us, hopefully. There's a bunch of stuff that I have warning bells going off in my head as well but, for instance, I was talking to a friend who has another friend in the UK who has been using some AI to help with ‘In-Betweening’ animation, and that sounds amazing to me because I think we all know in animation, we're always up against it.
Our animators, our crew, they're always under a lot of pressure to meet their quotas and to get it done. We don't get a lot of time to do these productions. So if we could utilize AI to do some of the less fun parts of the animation process, to do some of the in-betweening, and have our artists concentrate on the more important parts of animation then there's less stress and less pressure on our crews. When I heard that, I got quite excited about that. That could be a positive.
Auger: What is ‘In-Betweening’?
AK: I guess at the very basic level, animation is theater. Your actor needs to strike a pose and get into another pose and move from one mark to another on the stage, and animation is exactly the same. But if we're just relying on those key poses, those key moments, without thinking about what goes on in the transition, it looks really bad.
But if you put a bit of a flourish into it, you can be very Vincent Price about the whole thing. So in-betweening is a really important part of the process of animation. It's a little bit overlooked at times, but it's definitely something that, up until now, you can hit a button to do certain things, which are very smooth. But to put the acting in, I'd be very curious to see how AI can actually help us to do that.
Auger: Andrew, is there anything else, apart from in-betweening, maybe that you feel AI could jump into in the animation space and help out with here?
AK: It's a super interesting space to be watching at the moment, particularly coming from a traditional background. There is definitely going to be benefits. It's here with us now, you're going to have to roll with it. And I think when you start thinking about it primarily as a tool that's artist-assisted or producer-assisted, it can, at various junctures in the production process, take some of the drudgery out of it.
We only ever see the tip of the iceberg, which is the show or the film that you make. But all of the stuff that's going on below the water, that's hard work. And there are definitely areas within that where some of the pain can be taken out. And that can go from budgeting and scheduling right through to the rendering process. But certainly from a creative standpoint, I understand why people are a little bit jittery about it. But at the same time, can it create efficiencies? Can it speed up certain parts of the process that take hours and weeks to do? Absolutely it can.
It's just a question of how we as the creators, as the producers, interact with this tool in order to work with it, and make our process a little bit more streamlined.
Auger: Could see how this technology changes the visual aesthetic of cartoons? If you look at some of the GenAI tools that are available right now, you kind of get that sketchy, kind-of-weird, janky look that you sometimes get from AI-created videos, which I've noticed some creators are leaning into as a new style. There's stuff like Meta's animation tool where they can bring to life kids' drawings , which is really interesting and potentially exciting. Is there anything like that, that when you look at this technology, you think: ‘oh, that's something that could evolve in interesting ways moving forward’?
AK: The aesthetics, I think, as you mentioned, there's definitely going to be ideas coming out of that space because of what it does, the way it corrals us in certain ways. Just looking at what MidJourney has done in its various versions over the last year, 18 months: it went from having the kind of nine-fingered hand and the weird kind of eye expressions and sort of dystopian look to it, to something that's very slick and very smooth.
From a creative standpoint, you have to kind of look for the errors in it, but it's also kind of gone a little bit samey, samey in many ways. When things start to get a bit samey, samey, for me anyway, I start to turn off it a bit. I start to get a bit bored with it. It looks too good, it's too slick, but it's kind of more or less the same thing all the time.
I kind of compare it to what happened 150 years ago when photography came in. Up until then, an illustrator’s primary job was working for the newspapers. There'd be a crime and they'd draw it and they'd do a little sketch. They were gone within 20 years because the photograph became more accessible, more readily available. At the same level, the portrait artists who were really skilled in doing these brilliant oil paintings on canvas, almost the photorealistic detail, had that whole world disrupted. Within that same time frame, you had galleries filling with Impressionism, with Cubism, with Dadaism, with all these different -isms that came out of that.
Would that have happened without photography landing on our doorstep in that way? I doubt it. Is AI going to do something similar for the way we as visual artists today interact with our medium? I think you're right. That can spark new ways of creating and new ways of representing.
That’s the job of the artist, ultimately.
Will AI help push creative development in the same way that the introduction of Photography might have done?
Auger: On the other side of this, obviously, you have the visual aesthetic, but then you have all the amazing writing that goes on in the creation process as well. Shannon, do you think AI is going to have an effect in that space at all?
SG: Oh, I definitely do think it will. I think that's why AI is with the [since concluded] WGA strike in the States right now. AI is one of the big negotiating points that they're having trouble reaching an agreement on. It's very similar to the strike that happened in 2007, and it was streaming then. Now it's AI that's the new technology that needs to be dealt with.
And I think it's right. I don't think there's any point in writers putting our heads in the sand about AI: it's here and it is going to impact our craft as well. But I think we can find ways to use it.
I've used Chat GPT to help me come up with a name of a character. I needed the name of an elf. So I asked ChatGPT and it came back with one, and I’m like: ‘all right, that's not a horrible name. I'll use it’. I didn't end up using it in the end, but it did get me thinking about stuff.
I think writers’ big fear is just being completely eliminated – having AI completely replace a script writer. Which is why, with the WGA strike, the minimum writer thing is a big part of what they're negotiating for. If there is no minimum writer in the room, there could exist in a few years a writer's room made completely of AI, and then one human who has to fix it all. That's not what we want.
So I do think certain protections have to be put into place, but at the same time let's see where it might be able to help us. Could ChatGPT (or whatever iteration it is in a few years’ time) help us come up with some pitches or something like that? When you're at episode 52, and you're just like: ‘Oh my goodness, we just need three more stories’. And you get by kind of drained by the end of that. So could this be a little back and forth tool that a writer might use, and then it goes to a human to actually write it? I don't think it's there yet but I do think it's coming.
I'll just be very interested to see what the WGA ends up agreeing to. We're four months into this strike, and it's going to be part of whatever the final agreement is. And I think the whole writer's world is waiting to see what it ends up being, because it will determine a lot for our writerly futures.
Auger: It feels like a very big shift could potentially happen. And there are quite big implications based on the end of these strikes, whether that's for the images that are appearing on screen or the writers that are producing it. I am curious to see what agreements are set because it has taken a long time and it feels like both sides are very much trying to figure out what the shape of the future of the industry is going to be. So it feels like very big decisions are being made right now, which are going to have repercussions for quite a long time.
SG: I'm not sure if you've heard about this, but just last week there was a big copyright case that was decided in the States, where (I don't remember the exact wording of it) there has to be a human creator involved in something in order for it to be copyrighted. So something created purely by or through AI, per this ruling in the States, can't be copyrighted.
That's something that impacts the studios as well. It isn't just the writers and the artists, it’s studios and and distributors and everyone. They need those kinds of protections too. I thought that ruling was very interesting and it got a lot of headlines in the WGA Twitter feeds that I follow. Because that felt like a win.
Auger: It's a big decision. And I think if that hadn't fallen down, I think it would have really changed a lot of things.
So we've gone through some of the opportunities when it comes to AI and this kind of GenAI technology – now, what worries do you have about this space for the industry as a whole, or for the kids who are going to be consuming this content at the end of the day?
SG: One of my things is that AI is learning and scraping all this stuff. And this is from stuff that's been created by other people. So if AI is creating something in writing or some design or something – that didn't come out of nothing, someone created that, or someone has created the various pieces of data that are informing what AI is learning. And I think that needs to be explored as to a compensation model . Because, in many cases, that could be copyrighted material. So [AI tools] can't just take it. It's a bit of plagiarizing for lack of a better word.
Another thing is like how food gets labeled GMO or non-GMO: do we need content to be labeled AI or not AI? I do think perhaps parents, dealing with media for children, that they might want to know that. I, as a consumer or as a writer and an artist, I might want to know that. Might I be more interested to watch a show that I know was made by humans rather than AI? It’s the same way I might not want to eat genetically modified food, for instance, you know?
I think those were two things that I read about this week that encapsulated my worries and stated, not a solution for how to fix it, but something we need to deal with.
Auger: Andrew, what about you? What worries do you have?
AK: I'd echo what Shannon was saying there. For a number of years now we've had the algorithm, the boogeyman that's been steering all of our destinies in the creative professions. That has so much power, in terms of what we get to see in the first place and what remains on air.
This piece of code, which is like the all seeing eye, coupled with AI coming at us – many in the creative profession are very jittery about it. And we’re being pushed the idea that this will revolutionize the way we work and make everything so much easier and more iterative. Which it can do, but not at the expense of the human elements, which need to be present as well.
I think the strike is not just affecting the writers, it's affecting the actors, the voice actors, the musicians, you know, everybody. We can all be clones, we can give our image rights away and you can appear in a movie a hundred years after your death. It's not a good place for creatives to be in.
And so many creatives are often at that lower end of the socioeconomic wedge, and what's going to encourage them to persist with their professions? Where are we going to get the next geniuses of their arts? If they're all eliminated on day one. And I think the strike is really crystallizing this.
Creatives are striking across the industry in 2023 - and AI is a part of this conversation
I think that this is the time we as creatives need to get entrenched in order to make sure that certain parameters, certain regulations, are put in place that protect and enshrine not just the people who are already in the industry, but anybody who's even thinking about going into the industry.
Auger: Do you think this problem is exacerbated or magnified by the fact that we're talking about kids' media specifically in this conversation? A lot of the things you've been talking about apply across the board, whether it's the ethics, the transparency, the human decision-making. Is there anything about it being kids' media that makes it a trickier conversation or adds anything in any way, in your opinions?
AK: If I can jump in here, kids are the biggest critics on the planet. They consume more media than, than we do. Just look at any 10-year-old and the amount of books they get through in a year compared to an adult, who brings a paperback to the beach or, you know, reads a non-fiction or a how-to. They are taking a lot in.
And, similarly, with what they're watching on TV and what they're watching on streamers, they will move on very quickly if they don't like it. You'll never see anybody change the channel as quickly as a kid if something isn't hitting the mark for them straight away.
We have to remember that's our core audience, the world's biggest critics. And if it is not top-level in terms of writing, in terms of comedy, in terms of performance, in terms of music, they're gone. You live and die by the sword in this profession: it must be the best show you've ever seen, because kids want the best and they deserve the best, right?
So we can't abdicate responsibility for that creative mission to AI or to some sort of a piece of code. There has to be a human piece in that process because kids will sniff it out otherwise.
Auger: Having run so many focus groups with kids, it’s true they really don't pull their punches if they don't like something! Shannon, what do you think about the kind of impact of GenAI, specifically in the kids' media space?
SG: I think Andrew summed it up very well. Kids are brutal when it comes to content. And also I think that, while everything that we've been talking about does apply across the board, because what we do, we do for kids, it does matter a bit more. They're younger, many of them can't advocate for themselves, their little brains work differently than ours. They consume content, like Andrew was saying, differently than we do.
Just by the very nature that we make content for kids means that it’s much more important that we figure out all of this AI stuff.
Auger: Something else that media types have been thinking a lot about recently is the growth of Web3 and its role in media.
Animation has been a part of the NFT space, in particular, for a long time, but we're now starting to see Web3 become more explicitly child-facing. For instance, Time Studios is drawing inspiration from NFTs for new kids’ series, and MIMO Studios has created a preschool program with explicit goals to extend into the Web3 space via NFTs and things like that.
What do you both think about this? Does Web3 have a role to play in the development of animation moving forward?
AK: I might walk the plank on this one. I'll take the hit!
Web1 was a surprise to me. That'll give you some indication of my age.
It's right that we're a little cautious of Web3 and what that means, what the implications of that are. But it's coming and it's here and it's going to affect everybody. The digital natives of today are already in that: the way they work in communities and Roblox and Minecraft and so on. They're versed in how this is going to work for them. And animation can be – and should be – a major part of that.
For me, as a producer, I'm really just thinking that kids are my audience. Kids are my consumers. If they're already in that space then I need to learn. I need to get on that train and I need to move along with it to understand how they're interacting with each other and how they're going to be engaging with these things that are going to be touching everybody's lives in a very short space of time.
So that's my responsibility as somebody involved in the business of animation: to try and see and create opportunities. And maybe there's something that we can add as creatives that hasn't been thought about by the technologists…
Time Studios and Nelvana have teamed up to develop a range of shows based on NFTS - such as Pablo Stanley’s ‘Robotos’
SG: We probably all need to be a bit more versed in it. AI is getting much of the hoopla right now, but Web3 is right there parallel with it or just behind it. It's here to stay. And it's just going to keep going from there.
So how can we utilize it and find ways for it to help us rather than fighting against it? I don't think fighting against any of these things that we're discussing is going to get us anywhere, you know. So it's about finding ways to work with it in order to make better content and do more things in our fields.
Auger: If I could read you one quote, this is from the President of Mediawan, Kids and Family Julien Borde. “Animation has everything to face the challenges of the future because animation has been about transmedia and franchise building from the very beginning of its history.” It positions animation as this kind of vanguard media format that – if we're taking that position – has always been chasing down the next big technological trend. Do we feel like animation, if we take that quote at face value, has this ability to engage with a lot of these new tech trends in an interesting way?
AK: The one thing that's always denied us as animators is an iterative way of producing content, a quick way of producing content that enables us to do what somebody could do with a puppet or, you know, put a camera on them and they just talk. For us, it's always been longer, harder and more expensive. So I think there's definitely opportunity there.
Kids are using this all the time. You know, they're interacting with avatars on Snapchat – this is their world, they're used to seeing animation happening in real time. We as producers need to recognise that and see how that helps us to access new channels, because it's that sort of clashing of worlds between gaming and traditional animation that's been happening and being done through the likes of Unreal Engine over the last couple of years. We've seen more and more of that coming through.
So I think Julian Borde is right in that regard, in saying that as animators, you know, we've always had to think in a bit of a 360 way, because it's been a long time since an idea for a TV show was just sold as a TV show, right? I mean, it's obviously the most important bit, but at the same time, you still have to have thought about the consumer products and all of the different sort of ancillary bits, because even if you're not pitching it directly to an audience, when you get into those business conversations down the line you better have an answer. And I think this is no different: it's like, ‘how do you monetise in the Metaverse?’ All of these new questions that we’re likely to be asked, you know, we need to think it out, and we need to have conversations, and we need to talk to people and get an understanding of it.
Auger: To finish off the conversation, I just want to take a little step back. We’ve talked about how new technology like Gen AI and Web3 might shape animations, how they're made, how they're written, how kids are kind of engaging and consuming with them. What role do you think these animations could play in helping people – young people, particularly – understand these new developments?
SG: If you take my 10-year-old niece or Andrew's 10-year-old son, AI is just going to be a part of their lives, so I do think it's part of our responsibility as creators of kids media to make them aware of what AI is for them. And I think that’s good about Lyla in the Loop – that's the new series that's going to actually discuss AI as a thing to make young children aware of it and aware of the dangers, for lack of a better word, or the pitfalls. Because a kid might think that they're talking to a human, but they're actually talking to an AI, you know, and how are they supposed to know the difference? So I do think we have a responsibility through what we create to actually let kids know what AI is, not unlike – and I'll let Andrew talk about it – but not unlike what Andrew's company Kavaleer and Andrew created with the show, Alva’s World, what it did for social media and the internet.
Alva’s World - Kavaleer Productions
AK: I'm not going to let Shannon get away with downplaying her role in Alva’s World, as well. We previously worked together as a development duo and Shannon was instrumental in the development of the show and also wrote some of the script – so just to give you a shout out there, Shannon!
I mean, I won't go into the whole story of that, but it had come from a place of concern for me as a parent who had not grown up with social media. It hadn't been part of my development, and trying to figure out how to come up with stories where I could engage with my kids on the notions behind what was going on with social – the wizard behind the curtain – of who was pulling the strings and so on and so forth, but also the way people interacted with each other in a different way online than they do in the real world.
But when we actually produced the show, it was during COVID so it was even more in the crucible because everything was online. Kids were at home, they were studying online, they were doing school via Zoom. And then we had these location tracking apps coming in and, you know, data was important and had to be shared in different ways in order for us to travel in the world, to move around in the world. So it was a very interesting time and I think since then everything's been accelerated.
So Alva caught a moment in what was happening in the development of how children and technology interface, and it's been on an exponentially kind of fast track since then. I think COVID as well interrupted the socialisation or social development of children in such a way that when we started to see these avatars – as Shannon mentioned – we started to see these things popping up. Of course these avatars have biases: they're owned by private companies and they're created by them and the data (wherever they're getting it) is coloured in a certain way by the data set that it's mining from. So it's going to have biases.
So we do need to educate, and not just educate – I think we need to be part of a dialogue with our kids. It's a weird time where our children are talking to these AI avatars. The conversations they're having with avatars are believable conversations and feel human. But they're not! And this is happening at a time when their brains are developing and maybe not able to make those clear distinctions about what is real or what is not real. So that's a very, very dystopian kind of thing, which worries the hell out of me.
But, at the same time, as I developed that show I realised that there was an awful lot of benefits – with a couple of drops in there that were also toxic. But we really have to understand that we're going to have to go along with the kids, and go on their journey. We have to be part of that. And I think the best way of doing that is through stories. We're a story driven species, you know, and if we can find the right stories to intersect into that – in the way I tried to do with Alva's World – then we have some hope of keeping pace with how our kids are engaging with technology and the potential threats and risks in there.
Auger: One of the things that I find so troubling, I guess, about some of the AI art (in particular) is the potential inherent biases that are built into them. For instance, in the past, if you've looked at things like comparing male and female images generated by GenAI tools, female images are much more likely to be sexualized. There are racial components as well. If you put certain prompts into tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, you see things focused on one ethnicity that you don't necessarily see with another. And so you have these issues baked in.
Andrew, you were talking at the beginning of our conversation about where all of this AI content could go - the dystopian idea that there could be a robot and an algorithm guiding everything – but actually in these tools we see some very human elements: a lot of the awful biases that people share online, shrouded in anonymity. And maybe we need to raise awareness that these tools aren't as free from the human touch as perhaps you might assume at the beginning?
Image from EPIC’s ad campaign
AK: There's actually this ad campaign on in Ireland at the moment for Epic, which is the Museum of Emigration. And Ireland, for better or for worse, has exported more people than nearly any other country. We had the famine 150 years ago, and more than half the population – a lot of people – went to the US, Australia, UK, everywhere else. And when they went there, they were kind of an underclass. And so they were represented in a subhuman way, through illustration and through comics and cartoons. And when they put ‘show me an Irishman’ into AI (and they didn't say which AI it was) it gave a very polished-looking image of that exact bias. It was this guy with red hair and a sort of pugnacious jaw, his fists up and a snarl on his face. What it did was encapsulate what people thought when they were conditioned by bias. And the AI is conditioned by exactly the same biases.
So this ancient kind of prejudice, which is like something melting out of the permafrost, has just gone straight into the AI: this subhuman sort of representation of a class of people or a nation of people. But I think it's really, really important that there's some level of curation going on. That there's some level of human interaction so that these biases don't get through. Because, as Shannon said, impressionable minds are going to type in ‘show me an Irish person’, ‘show me a black person or a person of color’, somebody from a different world than I'm from. And it's going to spit out that same bias. And that is a worrying thing.
Auger: We've talked a lot about so many different things – AI, Web3, bias, tech, animation. We're not going to be able to put a definitive solution around this today – there's no nice pretty bow we can tie onto it. But I do appreciate you both sitting down with me to try and tackle some of these issues, particularly when some of these things are barely present in the animated space right now. They're kind of just now creeping into our conversations. So I massively, massively appreciate you both sharing your thoughts.
Before we go, though, I want to hear what's happening with both of your studios. Shannon, should we start with you? What's happening with Daily Madness?
SG: We are currently in the middle of production on our series called Goat Girl. That's something that was co-created and it's being co-showrun by myself and Kristina Yee. We're making that for Warner Discovery, EMEA and Kika. We will be pitching in a couple weeks at Cartoon Forum, a new series called Fluff and Fury. We have a preschool series called Ray of Sunshine, and I believe the second batch of episodes will be airing before the end of the year on RTE. That's what we have going on right now!
Goat Girl - Daily Madness Productions
Auger: Fluff and Fury, what a great name! I love that. Andrew, what about you with Kavaleer? What's going on there?
AK: Yeah, at Kavaleer, we're in the middle of season three of Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese with Watch Next Media and Cloudco Entertainment. That's been an amazing journey for us over the last five years, working with great partners. And you can see the show just about anywhere, I think, at this point.
We've got another production in-house that I can't talk about. But, you know, ask me in a year and I'll be singing it from the rooftops. And we're currently moving some properties off the development slate into production. But we've also brought in two people on the development team. Alan Keane, who's the Emmy nominated writer associated with Gumball and OddBods and other shows like that. And Geraldine Weber, who's coming to us from Brown Bag, who's worked as a producer on a lot of their recent productions. So we have a great little unit going on at the moment. We've skipped Cartoon Forum this year to focus on our slate. So we should start launching the first of those new properties. I want to say February of next year, at Kidscreen, but don't quote me on it!
Auger: Brilliant. I'm not going to be sending you emails saying, hang on a second, where was the slate? It's January. What's going on, Andrew? Thank you both so much. I massively appreciate it. It's been a lovely, lovely chat with you both.
SG: Thank you.
AK: Thank you, Sam.
Enjoy what you’ve read here today?
Why not sign up for our newsletter - and make sure you never miss our on any of our articles and interviews!
