University researchers in Canada have just collected 42 million keyframes for a newly published datasetall of them taken 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) released 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 improvement of AI-generated videosvideo-to-text understanding and other use cases such as video retrieval from text descriptions and automatic editing, colorization, and clustering.

Keyframes refer to drawings that convey meaning or trigger recognition. This contrasts with “in-between” frames, which connect 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, as AI-generated video is considered an existential crisis for many animators. In responses on Twitter, many called it insulting and unethical. The size and potential of this new data set could give huge power to big companies, an outcome that ethical AI developers “Anime Chain” say must be avoided, lest it lead to the collapse of the anime industry.

While Sakuga42M's GitHub also mentions an opt-out feature for creators, this may not be realistic given that even Midjourney, a company valued at $10 billion, had doubts about its app. After collecting over 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 are studying this. The challenge now is to find out what the rules are and how to find out if a person is actually the artist of a specific work or just gives their name.».

Given that Japan has limited influence over Canada, it is unclear what, if anything, can be done in response. There probably won't be much interest either, as "Jujutsu Kaisen" chief animation director Terumi Nishii has called the Japanese government a "sellout" for its weak stance on AI. This comes after OpenAI opened a new office in Japan, citing as appealing the government’s “consistent approach of not aiming for strict regulation of AI.”

Source: Gigazine