Ascendance of a Bookworm anime studio acknowledges gen AI use in opening, promises to replace offending scenes with hand-drawn art - AUTOMATON WEST
automaton-media.com
Following backlash after the anime's premiere, Ascendance of a Bookworm production studio WIT addresses the generative AI usage allegations.

The fourth season of the Ascendance of a Bookworm anime, produced by WIT Studio, premiered on April 4 this year, though to an unexpectedly rocky start. The long-running series was faced with serious backlash after the reveal of the animated opening sequence, which viewers suspected featured AI-generated assets. In response to the criticism, WIT Studio posted an official announcement on April 10, in which it states that upon investigation into the opening’s production process, it confirmed that generative AI was involved. Consequently, the opening sequence recently published on YouTube has been removed from the platform. ……

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    The OP (Opening) is supposed to represent the best of the show, but sometimes it shows things not in the show or straight up misrepresents the show. The best example of this is Bradio’s Flyers from Death Parade, a macabre semi-anthology series about people competing in billiards games in a bar in Purgatory to determine which of them takes the elevator up and which one goes down. Or something like that. The show is very dark, but the OP is bright and cheerful.

    I think anime’s bigger sin is the use of CGI. It’s very obvious in many cases. I don’t hate it, I just think it’s slightly more offensive than OPs that misrepresent the show (therefore, I don’t care about AI in them if they’re pretty). I’ll skip an OP I don’t like. Like in The Promised Neverland any time they run down hallways. It’s so obvious and distracting. Lots of animes do it, though.

    The greatest sin in anime is the texture of clothing. This is most obvious in the Count of Monte Cristo anime due to the art style. Basically if a character is wearing a robe or some other clothing that has patterns on it, the patterns do not move with the person. The pattern is fixed, almost like there’s a layer of nothing but the pattern across the entire frame, and the outfit is just “transparent.” In fact, I think that is exactly how they do it. Almost how a lot of PlayStation games (Final Fantasy 7 and Resident Evil were notable for this), where you have a pre-rendered scene and the characters move across it within invisible walls which are supposed to, but do not always line up with what is drawn behind them.

    • loppy@fedia.io
      2·
      57 minutes ago

      The OP (Opening) is supposed to represent the best of the show

      Why would you think this? Commercially, the opening is pure advertisement for the show and for the music in the opening. Artistically, they can do whatever the hell they want.

      The greatest sin in anime is the texture of clothing. This is most obvious in the Count of Monte Cristo anime due to the art style. Basically if a character is wearing a robe or some other clothing that has patterns on it, the patterns do not move with the person. The pattern is fixed, almost like there’s a layer of nothing but the pattern across the entire frame, and the outfit is just "transparent.

      Almost no anime do this, what are you on about? It’s a deliberate choice of art style, nothing more. And either way, why would this be a “sin”?

    • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      The greatest sin in anime is the texture of clothing. This is most obvious in the Count of Monte Cristo anime due to the art style.

      Gankutsuo, if that’s the one you’re talking about, was also a very early (possibly the first) use of the technique. I can forgive a pioneering show for getting things wrong. Its successors aren’t always as easy to forgive.

      Much worse than messed-up clothing textures is the occasional show that puts a texture over the entire picture (the most blatant example I’ve ever seen used a watercolour paper type one, but damned if I can remember the name of the show), but binds it to the viewport rather than the background, so that when the camera pans or zooms, the texture moves with it and completely destroys the impression I think they were aiming for.