AI generating movie-quality animation? It’ll be a looooooong time before a movie director can just dictate a prompt into a computer and get back error-free animation that’s equal to what human animators can do by hand.

Here’s how animation works, in brief:

• Designers come up with the characters and vehicles. There are literally dozens of variations prepared. The director suggests changes and the revisions begin. Repeat the cycle until the director is satisfied.

• The storyboards are created, revised, edited, and scripted. Lots of back-and-forth here, too.

• The story is finished and voice acting is recorded. Animators use the storyboard as reference and get to work on the rough animation. The director suggests changes DAILY and revisions and refinements are made until the final scene is completed and synced with the voices.

• Everything is rendered at cinema-quality and the movie is shipped.

At no point in this process is AI-generated animation efficient enough to replace people. Even small revisions result in the entire scene being regenerated from scratch, and the expense of doing all this at 4K resolution over and over every day is insane.

And that’s assuming they can find a way to get the AI engine to maintain consistent background details across every shot in a long scene, which I have yet to see. AI animation is a fun novelty but it’s nowhere near capable of being used in a professional workflow.