Will artificial intelligence replace motion designers?

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Petya,

Do you think it’s possible for artificial intelligence to COMPLETELY
replace motion designers. If so, how soon do you expect that to happen?

What a great question, thank you.

The short answer, is “No” 🙂

IMHO: Many of the suppliers out there suddenly offering A.I., has only removed “Machine Learning” from their product description, and suddenly replaced it with A.I. without adding “intelligence” to the product.
OK, that was harsh, but on point.

If you come from the point that A.I. is an actual being, will it ever have your understanding of creativity, aesthetics, functionality and messaging? (there is a likely to be a few more descriptive words to add to that list)
Of course it won’t, because just like humans, we, and the A.I. are all individuals.
But it will, much faster than a human, be able to learn your way of doing motion design, and replicate that look and feel.
Which by the way is only useful to the A.I. if someone can articulate what their desired end result is – therein you’ll find that understanding the needs of your client, often is more important than the execution of the job itself.

Have you ever tried to work as a supplier in a long chain where there is external PR, communications and marketing companies working with internal managers at large scale businesses? Often everybody has to make a change to your work, except, a month later, the Fortune 500 CEO gets to watch the “community version” of your work, and their final changes takes it back to be exactly like the first version you delivered…

Keep in mind that most, if not all A.I. today, is “trained” using source of information that is only available on-line. If you take a specific point, space, location, in time, you may feel the rain, see an angle that has never been photographed, whilst having the smell of spring in the air (any of those words can be replaced. but you get the meaning). The A.I. can not generate that feeling or knowledge if it does not have it. The same goes for empathy, love, hate, compassion, anger – the “Machine Learning mechanism” can explain it, but can not feel it.

When all that is said, A.I. is undoubtedly a game changer to our industry, any industry, and if left unchecked it can wreak havoc.

But on the positive side, anyone working in Motion Design today are already using A.I. to make better and faster results in their work.
One example is Adobe Sensei, which are already speeding up how work is done in Creative Cloud products such as After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and so forth.
(https://www.adobe.com/uk/sensei/creative-cloud-artificial-intelligence.html)
Except, once you read the fine print, you might come to the conclusion that Adobe, which has got one of the largest ever set of data points ever collected, that this data is what goes into their Machine Learning. Because Adobe Sensei can not accurately tell whether it is the cat, or the dog, that you the designer want to remove from the picture. But once you tell it, it will do it much faster and neater, than how you would have done it previously.

If you look at history, these tools will be a game-changer to the industry. And you either have to keep on up-skilling, or be left behind.

One good example is from back in the day when large corporate presentations was done on DIA slide projectors. Where the slides was expensive and time-consuming to make, and the projectors took time and loads of effort to program – that whole industry got replaced by PowerPoint and video projection.
Back then, executive human “A.I.” clients in pursuit of cost savings, allowed themselves to be guided by the Comic Sans font, low resolution over the top bar-charts and family photos to make up for professional photographs. Soon they found professional designers who could deliver the job, better. Whilst also getting the message across to an audience otherwise bewildered.

The role of a good Motion Designer will always be in demand, but whether they will ever again create and use a new key-frame, is the big question?

Just an opinion 😀

Atb
Mads

[Darren Ruddock]

I was about to post on this exact topic. I have been using After Effects for some time but would really like to push my skillset further.

The trouble is, I wondered if I would be wasting my time doing a course in After Effects if AI is gonna wipe motion artists out ( or the world lol).

Also, what would you suggest learning alongside After Effects? Which AI developments are worth putting the time in to learn???

Many thanks

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

Besides a filmmaker, I am also a computer engineer working on AI and various other software. Since ChatGPT and midjourney every other person is offering half baked AI products. In the near future, we will see many small plugins and tools like generative AI, predictive AI, Search AI for mundane tasks. They will get better by day.

However, for exact design to be created, as in the creators mind, AI has to start with 3D geometries. This is already happening, but very rudimentary yet. It would need quantum computing and large convolutional networks for that size of number crunching. And quantum is still in its early prototype phase. Another 10 years…

http://www.santanu.biz

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[Burt Hazard]

Hello. Unfortunately I’m going to have to be the downer here. 😒 I actually do think A.I. is going to replace a lot of the work done by graphic designers/motion designers. What I’ve seen of Open A.I.’s DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and the like is insanely impressive. Of course this is already in a long running discussion that “machines will never be able to…[fill in the blank].” The game of Go was considered to be too complicated for computers to understand then Alpha Go beat the world champion in a well publicized series of matches. I’ve heard people like Vladimir Chopine from Geek At Play studios say that he uses A.I. as a “starting point” (I think he uses Midjourney) for his artwork, but more and more I think it is the end point itself. If you can type in “a lemur surfing in the style of Monet” and the software can produce that as well as totally photo-realistic images, then I think any human designer has a run for their money.

Boris FX’s new version of Silhouette does use Stable Diffusion and right away it could be argued that it eliminates a Photoshop artist in a pipeline. Amazingly though, product head Marco Paolini did say that they are still working on having the software automatically do roto work, but I think it is just a matter of time.

[Finney Barndlow]

Sadly, I think that AI might replace motion designers but I don’t see it happening any time soon. I mean, yes, these tools are getting better and better. Still, most of them require, let’s call it, a human touch – mostly in the form of instructions and editing. The final products are sometimes impressive, I admit. But there’s more work to be done on AI tools before they can completely replace this profession.