Some of these are very obviously trained on webtoons and manga, probably pixiv as well. This is very clear due to seeing CG buildings and other misc artifacts. So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting. So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
While being very pro AI in terms of any kind of trademaking and copyright, it still make me wonder what will happen to all the people who provided us with entertainment and if the quality continue to increase or if we're going to start losing challenging styles because "it's too hard for ai" and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It doesn't feel the same as people being replaced with computer and machines, this feels like the end of a road.
It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or even a piece of legal text.
As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
Copyright is a very messy and divisive topic. How exactly can an artist claim ownership of a thought or an image? It is often difficult to ascertain whether a piece of art infringes on the copyright of another. There are grey areas like "fair use", which complicate this further. In many cases copyright is also abused by holders to censor art that they don't like for a myriad of unrelated reasons. And there's the argument that copyright stunts innovation. There are entire art movements and music genres that wouldn't exist if copyright was strictly enforced on art.
> Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
Art created by humans is not entirely original. Artists are inspired by each other, they follow trends and movements, and often tiptoe the line between copyright infringement and inspiration. Groundbreaking artists are rare, and if we consider that machines can create a practically infinite number of permutations based on their source data, it's not unthinkable that they could also create art that humans consider unique and novel, if nothing else because we're not able to trace the output to all of its source inputs. Then again, those human groundbreaking artists are also inspired by others in ways we often can't perceive. Art is never created in a vacuum. "Good artists copy; great artists steal", etc.
So I guess my point is: it doesn't make sense to apply copyright to art, but there's nothing stopping us from doing the same for machine-generated art, if we wanted to make our laws even more insane. And machine-generated art can also set trends and shape the space they're generated in.
The thing is that technology advances far more rapidly than laws do. AI is raising many questions that we'll have to answer eventually, but it will take a long time to get there. And on that path it's worth rethinking traditional laws like copyright, and considering whether we can implement a new framework that's fair towards creators without the drawbacks of the current system.
I don't think the Berne Convention on Copyright was meant as a complete list of things where humans have valuable input. Translators do shape the space in which they generate output. Their space isn't any single language bit rather the connecting space between languages.
Most translation work is simple just as the day-to-day of many creative professions is rather uncreative. But translating a book, comic or movie requires creative decisions on how to best convey the original meaning in the idioms and cultural context of a different language. The difference between a good and a bag translation can be stark
Makes me wonder if the generous copyright protections afforded to artists had not become so abhorrent (thanks, Disney) then this kind of thing might not have happened.
> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.
You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
>So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Is it? I have no knowledge of this product, but I recall Novel AI paid for a database of tagged Anime style images. Its not impossible for something similar to have happened here.
Audiences too. People loses interest fast for anything that something faceless can provide, whether the thing is machines or humans, or whether the act is drawing art or assembling iPhone.
I think the “paper rock cross blade” short films by Corridor is absolute great and can by all accounts be called art and if they make a 3rd they will probably use this model.
In terms of losing styles, that is already been happening for ages. Disney moved to xeroxing instead of inking, changed the style because inking was “too hard”. In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw a burst of cartoons with a flash animation style on TV because it was a lot easier and cheaper to animate in flash.
I find it interesting that you echo the concerns of people who defend artists’ copyright claims, while stating that you are very pro AI in terms of copyright.
It’s a very emotionally loaded space for many, meaning most comments I read lean to the extremes of either argument, so seeing a comment like yours that combines both makes me curious.
Would be interesting to hear a bit more about how you see the role of copyright in the AI space.
Not GP, though I agree with their views, and make my money from copyrighted work (writing novels).
The role of the artist has always been to provide excellent training data for future minds to educate themselves with.
This is why public libraries, free galleries, etc are so important.
Historically, art has been ‘best’ when the process of its creation has been heavily funded by a wealthy body (the church or state, for example).
‘Copyright’, as a legal idea, hasn’t existed for very long, relative to ‘subsidizing the creation of excellent training data’.
If ‘excellent training data for educating minds’ genuinely becomes a bottleneck for AI (though I’d argue it’s always a bottleneck for humanity!), funding its creation seems a no-brainer for an AI company, though they may balk at the messiness of that process.
I would strongly prefer that my taxes paid for this subsidization, so that the training data could be freely accessed by human minds or other types of mind.
Copyright isn’t anything more than a paywall, in my opinion. Art isn’t for revenue generation - it’s for catalyzing revenue generation.
I think many artists will see that if they publish anything original then AI companies will immediately use it as training data without regards to copyright.
The result will be less original art. They will simply stop creating it or publishing it.
IMO music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
AI will do the same for illustration.
It won’t do the same for _art_ in the “contemporary art” sense, as great art is mostly beyond the abilities of AI models. That’s probably an AGI complete task. That’s the good news.
I’m kinda sad about it. The abilities of the models are impressive, but they rely on harvesting the collective efforts of so many talented and hardworking artists, who are facing a double whammy: their own work is being dubiously used to put them out of a job.
Sometimes I feel like the tech community had an opportunity to create a wonderful future powered by technology. And what we decided to do instead was enshittify the world with ads, undermine the legal system, and extract value from people’s work without their permission.
Back in the day real hackers used to gather online to “stick it to the man”. They despised the greed and exploitation of Wall Street. And now we have become torch bearers for the very same greed.
I don't think future tense is appropriate here as it's been few years since appearance of open weights image models. We're already transitioning into the gap phase between Napster to Vocaloid.
It is a fluke visual training sets are far less amenable to sabotage than textual ones. Not that I suggest engaging in such a horrible, terrible, very bad manners, do I?
Literally the first proper anime series (not including movies or like DBZ) that I ever watched. Still fondly remember it and still salty about how the director killed it. It would be the greatest gift of a lifetime if anyone ever either finished the series or rebooted and completed it.
1. Haruhi is based on light novels, so has to actually perform to get a release. Japanese market is upside down, the anime often goes to free to air to support a manga release where the real money is made (I have no idea how this works economically this is just how its explained to me) as there isn't any more manga or light novels to release, the likelihood of another season is low. It was sort of always a passion project.
The studio being firebombed probably does not factor much into it. Kyoani and Kadokawa have beef, but Kadokawa can easily contract it to another studio to do. They just don't want to because of 1.
Also don't forget to watch Disappearance after the 2 seasons.
> a variable-length training approach is adopted, with training durations ranging from 2 to 8 seconds. This strategy enables our model to generate 720p
video clips with flexible lengths between 2 and 8 seconds.
I'd like to see it benched against FramePack which in my experience also handles 2d animation pretty well and doesn't suffer from the usual duration limitations of other models.
I tested this out with a promotional illustration from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The model works quite well, but there are some temporal artifacts w.r.t. the animation of the hair as the head turns:
I would like to see how the fight scenes in The Beginning After the End could improve from being passed through this tool.
In all seriousness I wonder where is this all headed? Are people long term going to be more forgiving of visual artifacts if it will mean that their favourite franchise gets another season? Or will generated imagery be shunned just like the not-so-subtle use of 3D models?
We're discussing the implications of this here when this has presented nothing novel in this medium/genre? I gave it a shot and it still has the same pitfalls for video genAI. Dealing with chains of dynamic actions is the biggest challenge, moreso with anime with its several fight scenes. No, it did not do good, and none of the non open-source models can do a good job of it for the most part either
“It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements”.
If it isn’t covered (after all it’s the AI that drew all the pictures) then anyone using such service to produce a movie would be screwed - anyone could copy it or its characters).
I’m leaving out the problem of whether the service was trained on copyright material or not.
There are so many glitches even on the very first example. Arm of the shirt glitching, moving hair disappear and appear out of no where. Rest is just moving arm and clouds.
I imagine it has more to do with whether or not the file appears to have executable python code in it, as a .pth file is usually just a a pickled python object and these can be manipulated to load arbitrary python code when loaded.
This is not the first time I've heard of checkpoints being used to distribute malware. In fact, I've heard this was a popular vector from shady international groups.
I wouldn't expect this from Bilibili's Index Team, though, given how high profile they are. It's probably(?) a false positive. Though I wouldn't use it personally, just to be safe.
The safetensors format should be used by everyone. Raw pth files and pickle files should be shunned and abandoned by the industry. It's a bad format.
But seriously, I had the same thought, considering the general lack of guardrails surrounding high-profile Chinese genAI models... Eventually, someone will know the answer... It's inevitable...
I know there is a huge market for those excited for infinite anime music videos and all things anime.
This is great for an abundance of content and everyone will become anime artists now.
Japan is truly is embracing AI and there will be new jobs for everyone thanks to the boom AI is creating as well as Jevons paradox which will create huge demand.
I don't know, I used to like some anime and mangas when I was 14 in the mid 90's.
Nowadays it seems everyone is interested by "anime style" of content but all I see is terrible in term of quality. It seems quantity increased so much in the last 30 years it only made quality stuff more invisible and we are inundated with animelike trash.
This is absolutely correct. The quality has nosedived so hard in the first three months of 2025 that there wasn't anything worth watching whatsoever even if you were in the target demographic.
Not that different. Bilibili is a big, above-board video streaming service; they definitely have distribution rights to a large collection of anime content. (They also have YouTube-style user uploads where proper licensing is less likely.)
It's the equivalent of Crunchyroll putting out a video generation model. If the rightsholders disagree with this usage, it'll come up during the negotiations for new releases.
OpenAI doesn't have an existing business based on licensing Studio Ghibli content, so the only option Studio Ghibli has to stop them is to sue them and hope that OpenAI is found to have infringed their copyright.
Bilibili does have an existing business based on licensing Studio Ghibli content, so Studio Ghibli can threaten to refuse to sell them distribution rights for future releases, even without a lawsuit.
then tell me what chinnese government stance on this matters, because I can tell that Meta doing is illegal but I cant say the same with chinnese company doing it on mainland china
Why? Who needs this? Who wants this? I still don't get why you would produce art with generation models instead of letting human artists do their thing. It's only funny as long as it's bad, but once it becomes better it's just creepy and most of all totally pointless.
Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting. So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
While being very pro AI in terms of any kind of trademaking and copyright, it still make me wonder what will happen to all the people who provided us with entertainment and if the quality continue to increase or if we're going to start losing challenging styles because "it's too hard for ai" and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It doesn't feel the same as people being replaced with computer and machines, this feels like the end of a road.
As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
The output of her translations had no copyright. Language developed independently of translators.
The output of artists has copyright. Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
This means a book can be in public domain for the original text, because it's very old, but not the translation because it's newer.
For example Julius Caesar's "Gallic War" in the original latin is clearly not subject to copyright, but a recent English translation will be.
Copyright is a very messy and divisive topic. How exactly can an artist claim ownership of a thought or an image? It is often difficult to ascertain whether a piece of art infringes on the copyright of another. There are grey areas like "fair use", which complicate this further. In many cases copyright is also abused by holders to censor art that they don't like for a myriad of unrelated reasons. And there's the argument that copyright stunts innovation. There are entire art movements and music genres that wouldn't exist if copyright was strictly enforced on art.
> Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
Art created by humans is not entirely original. Artists are inspired by each other, they follow trends and movements, and often tiptoe the line between copyright infringement and inspiration. Groundbreaking artists are rare, and if we consider that machines can create a practically infinite number of permutations based on their source data, it's not unthinkable that they could also create art that humans consider unique and novel, if nothing else because we're not able to trace the output to all of its source inputs. Then again, those human groundbreaking artists are also inspired by others in ways we often can't perceive. Art is never created in a vacuum. "Good artists copy; great artists steal", etc.
So I guess my point is: it doesn't make sense to apply copyright to art, but there's nothing stopping us from doing the same for machine-generated art, if we wanted to make our laws even more insane. And machine-generated art can also set trends and shape the space they're generated in.
The thing is that technology advances far more rapidly than laws do. AI is raising many questions that we'll have to answer eventually, but it will take a long time to get there. And on that path it's worth rethinking traditional laws like copyright, and considering whether we can implement a new framework that's fair towards creators without the drawbacks of the current system.
Also in case of graphic and voice artists unique style looks more valuable than output itself, but style isn't protected by copyright.
Most translation work is simple just as the day-to-day of many creative professions is rather uncreative. But translating a book, comic or movie requires creative decisions on how to best convey the original meaning in the idioms and cultural context of a different language. The difference between a good and a bag translation can be stark
She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.
You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
Is it? I have no knowledge of this product, but I recall Novel AI paid for a database of tagged Anime style images. Its not impossible for something similar to have happened here.
With AI tools artists will be able to push further, doing things that AI can't do yet.
In terms of losing styles, that is already been happening for ages. Disney moved to xeroxing instead of inking, changed the style because inking was “too hard”. In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw a burst of cartoons with a flash animation style on TV because it was a lot easier and cheaper to animate in flash.
10 years ago: "real real text cannot be generated like stock phrases, so writing will be nearly forever powered by human writers."
It’s a very emotionally loaded space for many, meaning most comments I read lean to the extremes of either argument, so seeing a comment like yours that combines both makes me curious.
Would be interesting to hear a bit more about how you see the role of copyright in the AI space.
The role of the artist has always been to provide excellent training data for future minds to educate themselves with.
This is why public libraries, free galleries, etc are so important.
Historically, art has been ‘best’ when the process of its creation has been heavily funded by a wealthy body (the church or state, for example).
‘Copyright’, as a legal idea, hasn’t existed for very long, relative to ‘subsidizing the creation of excellent training data’.
If ‘excellent training data for educating minds’ genuinely becomes a bottleneck for AI (though I’d argue it’s always a bottleneck for humanity!), funding its creation seems a no-brainer for an AI company, though they may balk at the messiness of that process.
I would strongly prefer that my taxes paid for this subsidization, so that the training data could be freely accessed by human minds or other types of mind.
Copyright isn’t anything more than a paywall, in my opinion. Art isn’t for revenue generation - it’s for catalyzing revenue generation.
The result will be less original art. They will simply stop creating it or publishing it.
IMO music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
AI will do the same for illustration.
It won’t do the same for _art_ in the “contemporary art” sense, as great art is mostly beyond the abilities of AI models. That’s probably an AGI complete task. That’s the good news.
I’m kinda sad about it. The abilities of the models are impressive, but they rely on harvesting the collective efforts of so many talented and hardworking artists, who are facing a double whammy: their own work is being dubiously used to put them out of a job.
Sometimes I feel like the tech community had an opportunity to create a wonderful future powered by technology. And what we decided to do instead was enshittify the world with ads, undermine the legal system, and extract value from people’s work without their permission.
Back in the day real hackers used to gather online to “stick it to the man”. They despised the greed and exploitation of Wall Street. And now we have become torch bearers for the very same greed.
1. Haruhi is based on light novels, so has to actually perform to get a release. Japanese market is upside down, the anime often goes to free to air to support a manga release where the real money is made (I have no idea how this works economically this is just how its explained to me) as there isn't any more manga or light novels to release, the likelihood of another season is low. It was sort of always a passion project.
2. The studio was firebombed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Animation_arson_attack
3. Season 2 was critically panned, but I dunno I thought it was pretty genius.
My suggestion, watch both series, then read the english translation of the novels.
Also don't forget to watch Disappearance after the 2 seasons.
The IP is likely doa anyway as it's on indefinite hiatus
> a variable-length training approach is adopted, with training durations ranging from 2 to 8 seconds. This strategy enables our model to generate 720p video clips with flexible lengths between 2 and 8 seconds.
I'd like to see it benched against FramePack which in my experience also handles 2d animation pretty well and doesn't suffer from the usual duration limitations of other models.
https://lllyasviel.github.io/frame_pack_gitpage
https://goto.isaac.sh/neon-anisora
Prompt: The giant head turns to face the two people sitting.
Oh, there is a docs page with more examples:
https://pwz4yo5eenw.feishu.cn/docx/XN9YdiOwCoqJuexLdCpcakSln...
In all seriousness I wonder where is this all headed? Are people long term going to be more forgiving of visual artifacts if it will mean that their favourite franchise gets another season? Or will generated imagery be shunned just like the not-so-subtle use of 3D models?
Current stance:
https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
“It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements”.
If it isn’t covered (after all it’s the AI that drew all the pictures) then anyone using such service to produce a movie would be screwed - anyone could copy it or its characters).
I’m leaving out the problem of whether the service was trained on copyright material or not.
Looks incredibly impressive btw. Not sure it's wise to call it `AniSora` but I don't really know.
> This model has 1 file scanned as unsafe. testvl-pre76-top187-rec69.pth
Hm, perhaps I'll wait for this to get cleared up?
https://huggingface.co/Disty0/Index-anisora-5B-diffusers
For the record, the dev branch of SD.Next (https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext) already supports it.
I wouldn't expect this from Bilibili's Index Team, though, given how high profile they are. It's probably(?) a false positive. Though I wouldn't use it personally, just to be safe.
The safetensors format should be used by everyone. Raw pth files and pickle files should be shunned and abandoned by the industry. It's a bad format.
Given that OpenAI call themselves "Open", I think it's great and hilarious that we're reusing their names.
There was OpenSora from around this time last year:
https://github.com/hpcaitech/Open-Sora
And there are a lot of other products calling themselves "Sora" as well.
It's also interesting to note that OpenAI recently redirected sora.com, which used to be its own domain, to sora.chatgpt.com.
Probably to share cookies.
We need cross-domain cookies. Google took them away so they could further entrench their analytics and ads platform. Abuse of monopoly power.
We use first-party cookies for session management.
We use APIs and signed tokens (JWT) to federate across domains without leaking user data.
The ones hurt by the death of third-party cookies are ad tech parasites who refused to innovate imho...
But seriously, I had the same thought, considering the general lack of guardrails surrounding high-profile Chinese genAI models... Eventually, someone will know the answer... It's inevitable...
I know there is a huge market for those excited for infinite anime music videos and all things anime.
This is great for an abundance of content and everyone will become anime artists now.
Japan is truly is embracing AI and there will be new jobs for everyone thanks to the boom AI is creating as well as Jevons paradox which will create huge demand.
Even better if this open source.
Nowadays it seems everyone is interested by "anime style" of content but all I see is terrible in term of quality. It seems quantity increased so much in the last 30 years it only made quality stuff more invisible and we are inundated with animelike trash.
I don't think they'd be artists, but AI-prompters, although you're right that there will be a huge flood of content.
Wan2.1 is great. Does this mean anisora is also 16fps?
You understand that china has "different" view on copyright,license etc right??
It's the equivalent of Crunchyroll putting out a video generation model. If the rightsholders disagree with this usage, it'll come up during the negotiations for new releases.
how can you prove then??? its literally the same way OpenAI use Ghibli material and they can't do anything about it
Bilibili does have an existing business based on licensing Studio Ghibli content, so Studio Ghibli can threaten to refuse to sell them distribution rights for future releases, even without a lawsuit.
then tell me what chinnese government stance on this matters, because I can tell that Meta doing is illegal but I cant say the same with chinnese company doing it on mainland china