This AI Can Automatically Animate New Flintstones Cartoons

https://gizmodo.com/this-ai-can-automatically-animate-new-flintstones-carto-1825236308

The Flintstones, a cartoon about life in the Stone Age, has just surpassed The Jetsons, a cartoon about life in the distant future, when it comes to technological innovation. Researchers have successfully trained artificial intelligence to generate new clips of the prehistoric animated series based on nothing but random text descriptions of what’s happening in a scene.

A team of researchers from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, trained an AI by feeding it over 25,000 three-second clips of the cartoon, which hasn’t seen any new episodes in over 50 years. Most AI experiments as of late have involved generating freaky images based on what was learned, but this time the researchers included detailed descriptions and annotations of what appeared, and what was happening, in every clip the AI ingested.

As a result, the new Flintstones animations generated by the Allen Institute’s AI aren’t just random collages of chopped up cartoons. Instead, the researchers are able to feed the AI a very specific description of a scene, and it outputs a short clip featuring the characters, props, and locations specified—most of the time.

The quality of the animations that are generated is awful at best; no one’s going to be fooled into thinking these are the Hanna-Barbera originals. But seeing an AI generate a cartoon, featuring iconic characters, all by itself, is a fascinating sneak peek at how some films and TV shows might be made one day.

There will always be a strong case for using real directors, actors, and other talented craftspeople to make movies and shows the traditional way—lots of artists still paint with brushes, right? But when it comes to churning out entertainment for kids who are far less discerning about what’s flashing across their eyeballs, there’s little doubt that AI-generated cartoons are an inevitability. And before you start with the “back in my day” complaints, let’s not pretend that The Flintstones cartoons were masterpieces of animation.​

 

Yabba dabba doo, but I think it has a long way to go. Here's the associated video:

 

The computer didn't "animate" anything very impressive. The most basic movements like "walking" and "Talking" were the only movement. If they had told the computer: "Fred walks down the stairs and picks up a bowling ball and rolls it at a bird. " Now that would have been impressive. It felt like computer "Colorform stickers" where all it it did was learn the names of a few props and slapped them in the scene, or knew "Talking" meant to insert "lips moving" frames. Try to give it "Wiley Coyote creeps in on tippy toes and glances warily around before spinning like a ballerina and lobbing the cannon ball like a big league pitcher." That I'd like to see. Long way to go, boys.

 

It's a living.

 

I think it's a proof-of-concept more than anything else. I think there will be a day when AI is basically emulating older cartoon shows to produce new content.

 

I agree. An advantage of using a show like The Flintstones for this is that it's limited animation would likely make it easier to generate new scenes since you wouldn't have to generate an entire character, just the pieces that would be put together (just like with the original Flintstones animation).

A related issue is with voice acting. To me, one of the things that made the original Flintstones is the voice acting. Although other actors have voiced Fred, no one has ever been as good or right as the original, Alan Reed. To me, one of the biggest obstacles with computer animation of an older series is getting the computers to generate voices that sound like the originals. To me, having a Flintstones cartoon with Fred sounding like the Alan Reed Fred would be a great thing.