When Conan O’Brien joked while hosting the 2025 Oscars that “we did not use AI to make this show,” it was an obvious reference to the selective use of artificial intelligence in Oscar-nominated films like A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez.
But plenty of people in Hollywood are using AI for much more than altering actors' voices and stunt doubles’ faces — especially in animation.
“It's easier to replicate something that looks unreal than it is to replicate something that looks real,” said Alex Hirsch, the creator of Disney’s Gravity Falls. “Animation is unreal, therefore, it'll be easier to replicate something that approximates animation sooner than it is to replicate something that approximates live action.”
How AI is used in animation
One of the reasons AI may make in-roads into animation first is that currently, many live action films made with AI struggle to portray human characters convincingly — what’s known as “uncanny valley.” But if the main character is an animal, a cartoon person or an alien, it avoids this problem.
The process of greenlighting an animated movie or TV show is also intensely visual, and studio executives want to see a character or a world before approving a show, explained Ashley Cullins, who writes The Dealmakers column for The Ankler. Using AI to spitball character design, “ helps you get to proof of concept faster,” she said, speeding up a process that can be very labor, time and cost intensive.
Once there is a script, a producer could use AI could to replace a team of storyboard artists, who illustrate shots and create a blueprint for what will be filmed, with a single artist curating the output of an AI tool.
“I would never say that image generators are necessarily better than what my colleagues or I do,” said Sam Tung, a storyboard artist who serves on the AI task force and the negotiation committee for the Animation Guild. But, he added, “they're certainly faster and, at least right now, they look like they're cheaper.”
However, many animators lament how unoriginal many AI-generated images are.
"These things are only working because they went on the internet and they scraped all of our portfolios — every movie, every comic book, whatever. Like every image that any of us have ever created is what's used to power this stuff," Tung said.
Artists, writers and other entertainment groups have filed multiple AI-related lawsuits alleging copyright infringement that are working their way through the courts. And animators worry that by using AI for visual development and character design, animation studios will end up imitating existing characters rather than inventing something truly new.
"The point of art is a human communicating a feeling to another human, not an algorithm amassing a slurry of thoughts other humans have had before and reproducing a generic, predetermined outcome," Hirsch said.
AI and the Hollywood strikes
Because of the timing of when Open AI released Chat GPT in late 2022, concerns about AI became core to the writers and actors strikes in 2023. Animators, who were set to begin negotiating their own contract with the studios the next year, followed the strikes closely.
Screenwriters were concerned that they were going to be handed a script written by Chat GPT, and told to revise it, depriving them of a writing credit and earning them less money than if they’d written it completely themselves. They also worried studios would use AI to write scripts in their style.
Actors were more concerned by the potential of text-to-image AI generators like DALL-E and Midjourney. They worried studios could use their face and voice to place them in a scene they did not actually act out, without their consent and without compensation.
Ultimately, both the writers and the actors won key protections on AI. The Writers Guild of America’s contract prevents studios from forcing writers to use AI, ensures AI will not be considered the author of a script, and prevents writers’ previous work from being used to train AI.
SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, won the protection that a studio cannot use an AI generated image of performers’ faces or voices without permission and without compensating them, including after their death.
What the animators got
But, unlike the screenwriters union, the Animation Guild wasn’t able to prevent studios from insisting that an animator use AI. Instead, they won the assurance that producers will meet with animators to discuss the use of AI and possible alternatives. The contract also doesn't allow animators to opt out of letting AI models train themselves on their art, which is something the writers won.
Some animators were pretty disappointed with their union’s contract, which passed with 76% of members voting for it.
“I am absolutely aware of animation studios that have fired workers in visual development because they realize they can get way more visual development using Midjourney, for example, and then just have one or two artists curating the work,” Hirsch said, adding that the contract “does nothing” to prevent this.
Copyright protections?
For now, studios remain hesitant to use AI to create the final versions of animated films, because the U.S. Copyright Office has ruled that AI-generated material cannot be granted a copyright except “where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements.”
And if a studio doesn’t own the rights to an animated character, that could jeopardize their ability to profit off of their film through toy sales, for example, or could open them up to lawsuits by other artists alleging copyright theft.
To listen to the Imperfect Paradise episode, click below.
How AI Became a Hollywood Villain – Especially for Animators
Hollywood taught us to be afraid of a super powerful artificial intelligence that will one day conquer humanity. So not surprisingly, many screenwriters and actors are very skeptical of AI, and concerns about AI were central to the Hollywood labor strikes in 2023. But animators may actually be the most at risk of losing their jobs to AI.
In this episode, we’ll talk about why the first AI generated movies you will see will likely be animated, and what it means for the people who make them, and for everyone else in Hollywood.
