Millions of Anime Frames Copied for an AI

University researchers in Canada have just assembled 42 million keyframes for a newly released dataset, all of them extracted from anime and other cartoons, in the hope that they will serve as a guide for the future development of anime works created entirely with artificial intelligence (AI).

Through Gigazine, developers from the University of Alberta (Canada) have unveiled the Sakuga42M dataset, composed of 42 million keyframes taken exclusively from anime and cartoons. Sakuga42 is "the world's first large-scale cartoon dataset" and its creators hope to pioneer the enhancement of AI-generated videos, video-to-text understanding, and other use cases such as retrieving videos from text descriptions, and automatic editing, coloring, and collation.

Keyframes refer to drawings that convey meaning or trigger recognition. This is in contrast to "in-between" frames, which connect the keyframes to create the illusion of movement between them. While the developers of Sakuga42M cite helping animators as the main cause, this dataset has sparked controversy, given that AI-generated video is considered an existential crisis for many animators. In replies on Twitter, many said it was insulting and unethical. The size and potential of this new dataset may bestow enormous power on large companies, an outcome that ethical AI developers say should be avoided, lest it lead to the collapse of the anime industry.

Although Sakuga42M's GitHub also mentions an opt-out feature for creators, this may be unrealistic, given that even Midjourney had doubts about its app, a company valued at $10 billion. After collecting more than 100 million images from the internet, many of which belong to anime and manga creators, its founder and CEO, David Holz, admitted: "There is no record. We're looking into it. The challenge now is to figure out what the rules are and how to find out if a person is really the artist of a particular work or just putting his name on it."

Since Japan has limited influence over Canada, it is unclear what, if anything, can be done in response. There's likely to be not much interest either, as "Jujutsu Kaisen's" chief animation director Terumi Nishii called the Japanese government a "sellout" for its weak stance on AI. This came after OpenAI opened a new office in Japan, citing as attractive the government's "consistent approach of not aspiring to strict regulation of AI."

Source: Gigazine